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Comment by batgaijin | Hacker News Reader

I'm really surprised that nobody is doing a kickstarter thing for open source.

tiers 0 to n-1: creating product/features

tier n: release as open source (community votes for license) on day 1

I mean in all honesty if I saw a link to some awesome fucking shit and I saw that it was $500 away from being open source, I'd probably do it. It would probably happen yearly or less, but honestly there are a lot of developers making big bucks and we all know how much certain tools could make our lives so much easier.

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I actually paid a small amount to get this open source project off the ground. https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/snowball-getting-communi...

I ran a successful Kickstarter 2 years ago[1] for an open source[2] project which we've gone on to get funding for[3]. I've been full time on it the entire time and a co-founder joined me a year ago.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-phot...

[2] https://github.com/photo

[3] https://trovebox.com

Shameless plug: https://bountyoss.com/

It works differently from Kickstarter; for one thing, it emphasizes maintenance over new development. You really have to have an existing successful project to make use of it... which is probably why no one is using it yet :-(

This is a bit different - kickstarter style funding for existing open source projects. Developers remain 100% in control and put features up for funding.

https://www.catincan.com

This is one hell of an idea. Is there really nothing out there like this?

I got pointed to https://www.bountysource.com/ recently

I could see this also work for feature requests. Just let people fund bounties for particular features, therefore attracting more developers to more urgent problems.

Yet another website doing something similar to what you're describing: http://www.freedomsponsors.org/

You can use Crowdtilt for it :)

We'd love to help, and if it's for open source - use this promo code, and we'll waive the Crowdtilt fee: ctdevs123

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