Re: [tlug] kickstarter for open source...

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 9:57 PM, Ulrike Schmidt <ulrike@example.com> wrote:
> Games and graphic novels need not neccessarily be proprietary. There are
> two questions: what types of projects are people interested in? Is a
> project open source or not?
>
> Kids might spend more of their pocket money on games, companies more on
> spam filters. All things being equal I think an open source project has
> good chances to win.


Don't mean to jump in here...but I couldn't resist.  :-)

While FLOSS is great, if you were to compare games, graphic novels,
and FLOSS software, I think it is safe to say that most people would
care about FLOSS the least.

Why?  I'm fairly certain that there are more people in the world that
play games or read graphic novels than read source code since more
"skill" is required for the latter.  Just a guess...no scientific
numbers to back this up.  :-D

(Of course, the other aspect of FLOSS is "free" ... as in money ...
and that might attract them more.  But there are probably a lot of
people that will feel indifferent about software being open
source...they just wouldn't know what to do with it.)

I know this probably isn't Stephen's point, but unless people who know
what FLOSS is owns a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth, I
think other projects might attract more attention.  :-)  I think
someone a few days ago drew an (IMHO, good) analogy between
Kickstarter and research funding; if that were to happen, then
projects about "curing cancer" might get a lot of funding and projects
with far more mundane titles might not.  Is that good?  Maybe...but
maybe not.  A lot of the newspaper headline research (i.e., "cure
cancer") builds on work with uninteresting titles...  So, there's a
kind of trickle effect.

Maybe a good thing that research funding is decided by peers on some
committee instead of the general population directly?

Sorry, this last part is irrelevant to your post.  Some random thought
that came up...

Ray