Re: How to fund an open-source project?

On 20.12.2009 16:43, Rick DeNatale wrote:

> Although it might be the exception that a company employ someone to do
> open source full time, it's far from unheard of.

Absolutely.

> Much more common is
> to have a policy of setting some portion of employee's time aside for
> open source contributions.  This goes along with a common practice of
> letting employees have time to work on personal company projects, i.e.
> projects which the employee believes would benefit the company but
> don't have official status.  This has been done for a long time by
> many technical companies for the development of engineers and
> programmers, if nothing else.  There are a lot of companies which see
> benefit in this, and at the top of the pyramid we have examples of
> companies which either sponsor large open-source efforts themselves,
> or hire open-source luminaries (e.g. Linus Torvalds) to fund a highly
> visible open source project.

Indeed. Google merely gets the headlines with stuff that 3M, Toyota, and 
others are doing for years.

> The real problem in funding a DIY open source effort is that, even if
> there is benefit to the users of the effort, most are not willing to
> step up to the plate and pitch in funding.  Kent's jUnit Max clearly
> had value, but not many were willing to convert that to money.  In my
> case, I know that there are lots of projects which need a robust RFC
> 2445 compliant icalendar implementation for Ruby, but few seem willing
> to contribute financially.  My ability to support the project ebbs and
> flows with how much paying work I have.  Although I love to work on
> the project and other open source contributions, working on stuff
> which actually puts bread on the table has much higher priority.

Very true. It's a combination of NIH syndrome, as well as programmers, 
usually, being able to roll their own. Programmers are a tough market, 
but it is not impossible to sell them tools, either. FogBuzz is an 
example in the "tools" space.

I'd love to see iCal support for Ruby, especially since I could use it 
for a couple of ideas I have to make my own life easier, but paying 
money for the library is out of the question for a couple of reasons 
(which can change, of course).

> And in the case of a project like Eleanor's which is as I understand
> it an alternative Ruby implementation, it's tough.  Sellling language
> implementations, IDEs, and other programming tools for money is
> getting more and more difficult since most of these things are
> available for free or close to free these days:
> http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/2009/05/28/selling-shoes-to-the-shoemakers-children

Indeed. Even MS gives away free versions of Visual Studio. The idea is, 
of course, that users pay for the Profressional or Team System 
solutions, a deal made sweeter by the investment. If you know how the 
debugger works, where the compiler lives, and how to configure the IDE, 
the pain of buying a tool is less severe, than buying a largely unknown 
product.

In short: Generating customer lock-in is key.

However, that is not quite possible with an open source project 
(fortunately). However, OSS mostly generates income with fringe 
benefits: Tired support, selling install media, selling a printed manual.

It is, by no means, impossible to monetize an OSS project. But it's a 
long, long road, and can be a thin edge to walk, as well. OSS lives from 
contributors (the Bazaar model of Linux is much more prevalent than the 
Cathedral model of GNU), and alienating *them* is risky, yet easily done.


In conclusion: It is not impossible, at all, to generate *some* sort of 
income from an open source project. But it takes patience.

For the classic models of selling software, I can't yet see a revenue 
stream for RubyGoLightly.

A look at Java, and .NET, could be an idea, as well as Linux distros, to 
see how money comes in.

--
Phillip Gawlowski