Ask HN: Would you fund Open Source projects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you fund Open Source projects?

8 pointsbontoJR5 comments

We have platforms to fund charity, creative projects, almost anything, but in most of these platforms, Open Source projects are not very welcomed, and in some others they will not gain the right momentum. So I started to think that maybe, a platform to support ONLY Open Source could be very useful. The platform's goal is to fund long development cycles, it's not meant to compete against bug-bounty programs, but to support design and implementation of long production cycles like from alpha to stable, new major version, big technology update or similar.

So the question is, would you or your company support Open Source projects that you use via a dedicated crowdfunding platform?

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I speak for myself. I find a bit against the Open Source culture.

Normally the Open Source projects start from a personal itch, meaning that nobody sits down and think I'll do this cool Open Source program that people will use. On my eyes, it starts the other way around, someone developed something that s/he needed on that moment, it gives him/her results and then decide to share it. If this project is really needed on large scale it will take off. (the Apache foundation got it right with the incubators).

In my case I will fund Open Source projects that gives me some benefit, so if I use any of them and I manage to get some income thanks to it, I'll like to give back some part of my benefit. But blindly fund an Open Source project if I don't see any usefulness it will be hard, but I wouldn't mind to join an organization that ask a fee and redistribute on Open Source projects.

I truly liked your point. Just one tiny detail: you don't really look to be against OS per se, but against the current movement that is basically pushing to open everything and do stuff that nobody really need.

I was thinking about funding projects (f.e.) like Grails, recently left alone by Pivotal and rescued by Apache. I am against funding blindly too, but my point is to fund projects that already have defined a list of features, milestones and delivery time.

Exactly, I'm in favor of open source, but I'm against of open sourcing something useless and drain funds that might be useful in somewhere else. The example I get in mind is the gnupg project, that guy almost got broke for such an important tool.

Your idea is nice, and I won't discourage to pursue, those projects might need some kind of air to survive until something/someone finds it back, and get them back to the spotlight.

An Open Source project can be a bold idea, or it can be an advance scam system, for the first possibility I'm not against as some good projects might come from a bold idea, who am I to close that, but the second one, the community has to protect itself.

Something I dislike from the current situation of the linux userland status is the amount of programs or libraries that you might need and for the next version, some parts of your code are incompatible, and no way to ask any fix as it is open source you can get the sources to fix it, but not the time to do it.

Company wouldn't: funding Open Source unlike charities doesn't buy you a good generic PR.

I wouldn't: hate registering in 1000 places, Kickstarter is good enough.

Yes, I'd even do so via an existing platform, like Patreon.

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