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Comment by atomashpolskiy | Hacker News Reader

So this is only for projects with paying or willing to pay customers, right?

Say, I have a small, permissively licensed personal project (bittorrent implementation), that has some userbase, including for-profit companies.

There is a lot of shit code in there, and many features are missing. Let us assume for the sake of the argument that given sufficient time I would be able to turn it into a state-of-the-art reference library. But given the current state of my financials I'm finding it hard to justify putting any effort into it for free at the moment and end up purchasing other opportunities not related to OSS.

I'm pretty sure it is not a unique situation and wonder if there are any solutions for this (e.g. angels, incubators, something like that?)

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Yes, the way I understood this is that customers can contribute to projects more easily. If you don't have any customers / users willing to pay then you don't get any money.

As for your situation, put a notice up on your project that you are willing to fix bugs / code new features for a fee? If these companies use your library they might be interested in sponsoring your work.

If they are not however, then I don't think there is a way to fund your development.

As for incubators etc., they are probably not all that interested in a BitTorrent implementation, considering how many are already around? Unless of course the library provided some value nobody else does.

Yeah, right. So this is not what I had in mind -- a way for the society to invest into projects that might not have an obvious immediate business value. Like society invests in raising and educating kids, for example, hoping that some of these kids will bring positive value to the world when they grow up.

For such a small-scale project, I suggest you seek out the corporate users of your project and offer consulting / development contracts as a freelancer. This can be on a per-ticket basis on their side.

If it turns out that they have real use cases for your software they should be glad for the offering. Make sure to either request a high rate, as you are the leading developer and leading expert for the software. This high rate basically pays for further development (as a kind of training or investment into your offering).

If they don't have a use case, code quality might not be as important and you can thus justify to scale down your involvement until such use cases appear.

Did consulting, yes. Two concerns: 1) Some guys want IP on improvements to the original codebase 2) When I work on client's problems, I have less time to work on the original codebase, so the earned money is not exactly reinvested into the project, which is the primary point of donations.

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