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On Tuesday 29 November 2005 1:09 pm, Adrian Midgley wrote: > Improving methods of funding FLOSS development would be a benefit to the > Commons. This ties in as a nice corollary of the openrightsgroup post - one to fight the corner in digital rights, also raising the profile of the continued fight against software patents, and the other to stimulate free software development. We do need to do both - protect and nurture. So it's best to consider how we do this from two viewpoints: 1. Donations / funds for organisations like FFII, ORG etc. 2. Donations to projects and developers to encourage new code. > How shall we do it? > I have facilitated two (small, specific) open source-based projects by > declaring that I will give £100 to whoever produces something with > plausible promise provided that it is FLOSS etc etc, and suggesting that > some of my colleagues might likewise chip in ... That's a well tested model - Richard Stallman used this model for extensions to Emacs. It needs a clear target and a project that is not in the midst of already hectic development. e.g. there have been a couple of attempts at this with gnucash but with the work to get the gnome2 port released, the current developers haven't had time to take on extra work. (Not unless you start talking silly money where individual developers can afford to take (more) time off from their usual paid employment and still pay the mortgage!) So you need a clear picture of the goals and a development team "between major upgrades". This could be suitable for certain LUG members. > Pledgebank sorts of thing ... I like the idea of pledgebank - it encourages regular gifts which is a big bonus over random donations. Something like that for developers would also be useful. > Unrestricted grants for specific purposes... There'd have to be some kind of limit? You mean a grant of a fixed amount that can be used for a specific purpose but unrestricted in how the money is spent to achieve the purpose? A kinds of hands-off investment? > A fighting or slush fund from voluntary contributions through LUGs? A combination of all those - we have a few funds from raffles and things, theoretically put aside for meeting venue costs. The only tricky part with all this is the infrastructure - dealing with money can cost money, especially via credit cards. SourceForge have a no-cost system that can work well for a lot of projects, it operates through PayPal. Currently, you can donate directly to any project that has opted in. Some projects (like one of mine) then opt to divert any donations to other projects (like KDE, Gnome, SF itself) where it can be more useful. Such diversions are clearly indicated before you decide to donate. What this lacks is the regular element - something PayPal isn't really designed to achieve. Other projects have their own methods: http://www.pilot-link.org/ - uses PayPal. http://www.gnucash.org/en/donations.phtml - uses SF and PayPal. Then there are organisations: https://www.fsf.org/donate (FSF and GNU) http://www.affs.org.uk/support.html http://www.ffii.org/money/account/index.en.html - FFII (immensely important in the fight against software patents) Who do we want to support? Each to his own? Centralised DCGLUG contributions? subs at meetings? (Nothing traumatic, just a more formal version of the raffle and done at every meeting.) If anyone fancies collecting some links to donation pages on our Wiki, that would be a start. Keep the two types separate - those that protect and those that develop. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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