[kwlug disc.] FLOSS Fund thoughts

[Bob Jonkman]

On 5 Aug 2008 at 8:32, Richard Weait wrote:

> To be clear, the problem described above was not a FLOSS Fund donation
> and was unrelated to any activities at KWLUG.


Oops!  I didn't intend to create confusion.  I was using the term 
"FLOSS Fund" generically, to mean a contribution to a Free/Libre 
Open Source Software project.  "FLOSS Fund" is such an appealing, 
attractive, alliterative term that it should get much wider use :-)



It seems the ScrewTurn project to which Jeff Atwood contributed does 
indeed advertise [1] that it accepts contributions, which makes me 
wonder: 1) If they don't need the money, why advertise? and 2) If 
they need the money, why haven't they used it?


On 5 Aug 2008 at 23:24, Andrew Cant wrote:

>  I would image that most small project mostly need time from
> developers/artists/documenters/testers/whoever. The amount of money
> probably can't buy them anything useful in this area. 

Following Andrew's thought, I would guess that small projects have 
greater need of developer time, and those developers are in it for 
love not money.  Medium projects start to have infrastructure costs 
beyond what a developer is willing or able to contribute, and so the 
money becomes more useful.  Really large projects may have 
commercial sponsorship, so our small contributions are merely a 
small drop in their bucket.


On an OSS podcast [2] I heard that most of the projects on 
Sourceforge are abandoned, dead, or just not being used.  The 
presenter said that many projects are started and abandonded because 
the cost of failure for FLOSS is so low.  And he said that's a good 
thing, because it allows far more potentially good projects to make 
a start which would not ordinarily happen in the Commercial software 
world.  

--Bob.


[1] http://www.screwturn.eu/Donate.ashx

[2] http://www.novell.com/feeds/openaudio/
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