Crowdfunding

[slburson]

I think crowdfunding has great potential for OSS funding, and I'm surprised not to see it discussed more. But I also think the Kickstarter model is too simple to work well. Here are, I think, the key points:

• The vast majority of money spent on software goes to maintenance and continued development of existing software, not new development.
• Businesses using OSS have far more money to spend on it than individuals.
• Businesses need a business justification to spend money: they need reasonable assurance that they'll get value in return.

A few years ago, when I was thinking about this, it came to seem to me that it might be possible to get businesses to chip in for maintenance and continued development of OSS packages they're already using, for which they want bug fixes and new features. As OSS developers, though we normally don't sell our software itself, we do have one thing we can sell: influence over how we spend our future time. I had the idea that if a developer presented their users with a menu of tasks, the users might be willing to vote on them monetarily, such that the developer would collect the money after doing the task. To add accountability, I thought that the contributors would collectively vote on the acceptability of the result, their votes weighted by their respective contributions.

Thus, the pitch to the business would be: the more money you put in, (a) the more likely the developer will do what you want them to, and (b) the more say you get about whether the result is acceptable. Given that the amount that any one business would be putting in would be small, compared to what it would cost them to hire the developer outright, it seemed to me that a lot of businesses might be persuaded by that, if the results seemed likely to be of value to them.

Based on these considerations, I actually built a small, rather crude crowdfunding app to show how I thought the thing should work. I showed it to a few people and got about zero interest, so I dropped it. But it's never been clear to me whether the idea was fundamentally flawed -- and if so, why -- or whether I just didn't put enough effort into it to get it going.

Some problems with it are immediately apparent. It does require developers to think like businesspeople, which many are unaccustomed to doing. It also requires them to do some extra work to write up task proposals. And the early adopters would have to do this without an answer to the key question: how many people -- and especially, businesses -- will be willing to pledge actual money? What's more, can the developers ask their users for money without offending them? This would represent a shift in the social contract around OSS.

Also, even if such a system works in some cases, it's clearly not going to work for everyone. The ideal OSS project for such a system would already have a substantial user base, including lots of business users, yet would not be so mature that there wasn't a lot left to do on it.

All that said, I am unable to completely dismiss the idea. Once it got going, I could imagine a successful OSS developer, with popular software, making a very good living indeed. There's no limit to the total in contributions one could collect for a task -- it's just a function of how many users one can reach and how valuable the new feature would be to them.

Anyway, I put all this out here for discussion. Even if I'm on the wrong track in the details, I do think crowdfunding as a general strategy is one we should all keep in mind. I am interested to hear others' thoughts on this.

[wolftune]

@slburson there's nothing wrong with your idea about paying for influence given that you're not making it contingent. All the bounty type things where payment is contingent on doing precisely what the funders ask are really problematic. But the idea of donating and getting noticed as a patron and having extra influence for your requests is great. The only issue is that it's not enough on its own to be a substantial platform.

We have all along planned to incorporate your exact idea within Snowdrift.coop, it just isn't the core item so it isn't our MVP focus. We've been working hard on a lot of things lately to push through toward getting operational. We certainly welcome you and anyone else to participate in helping us get there and work out the very best designs including ideas like this. Cheers