How Kickstarter will kill Open Source

As someone who started an open source project on KickStarter 2 years ago I can attest it doesn't kill open source at all. As others have pointed out, FOSS is free as in freedom.

I see the OP's point. However, it already exists. Imagine you spend 15 hours a week on an open source project and someone comes along landing a paid position to work on the same project. As unfortunate as that may be it's the reality that has always existed.

Kickstarter allowed me to start something that I've spent 2 years full time on, raised $400k in total grants for, and fostered a community of devs in the hundreds. And all that work is open source on Github for anyone to do anything with.

Money is a very real and necessary part of open source. Kickstarter is making something that's very difficult a little bit easier. Everyone wins, including open source.

The way I see it, this is a net positive development rather than a negative. Will it have some effect on the margins where developers who would rather be paid might not contribute to open source projects anymore? Probably. But the idea of FOSS is that the works are free as in freedom, not free as in beer.

If people are willing to pay to ensure that an open source project continues to thrive, that makes the ecosystem more viable in the long term, not less. This Kickstarter only demonstrates the pent up demand for this sort of thing. Not everyone can contribute time or knowledge, so they might instead contribute money.

Besides, many of the most popular open source projects are already implicitly backed by paid developers (Linux, WebKit, etc.). Nobody seems to have a problem with that.

Joey Hess used[0] Kickstarter to fund work on a nice frontend[1] for git-annex. In general, I don’t see anything wrong with that: This feature would not have been implemented otherwise (or at least not as quickly) and by providing funds, the users were able to prioritise/introduce new ideas.

Maybe this is comparable to other situations where some developers are paid by their employers to work on software, whereas others contribute in their spare time. Surely it would be nicer if everybody had infinite resources and time, but given the constraints of the real world, I don’t see why a) developers should not request funding via Kickstarter, Flattr or you-name-it and b) users should not offer funding/employment in return for features they need.

If developers need certain large features themselves, they will still implement them, just as they did before, and if they don’t need them, they will have a hard time implementing them – apart from possibly ideological reasons (cf. FreedomBox[2], which is mostly about scratching someone else’s itches).

[0] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...

[1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/

[2] https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/

I think it's a good movement that people start to think that their work is worth something. (Hell, I even might consider contributing some non trivial features to open source projects if I get paid for it.)

People using crowd funding can ask for the funding they need, and then offer the surplus to the main project.

That allows people to show support for a new feature as well as support for the project.

It's not efficient because of the crowdfunding tax, where the site will charge a fee. But I guess volume of funders could overcome that.

Open source projects have always had funding for developers. A new source of funding doesn't mean death to open source. Open source is "Free as in freedom", not "free as in free coffee".

Nothing short of an asteroid hitting the earth is going to kill open source.