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

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Ulrike Schmidt writes:

 > The first time I put money into a crowd funding project was because I 
 > really liked this video project after I had seen the trailer and I 
 > wanted to support them and have the dvd. It was not because I had spare 
 > money.

In that sense, nobody has spare money.  Of course people "really like"
the projects.  Nevertheless, there are a *lot* of projects you will
hear about in your life, the rate of mention will increase over time,
and you will fund only a few of them.  The amount you actually fund is
the "spare money" I'm talking about.  It's somewhat elastic according
to your fondness for the projects, but not infinitely so.

 > I don't know about kickstarter. With some of the platforms I know
 > you can pick whether you need the whole amount of money before you
 > start or whether you take all the money you can get and start
 > anyway.

Sure, there are a variety of ways to run the financing.  I think that
many people (I believe the OP, Darren, is one) like the Kickstarter
idea because they only pay money if there's enough financial support
to ensure that the project can be completed.  In a "take what you can
get" model, if financial support is half-hearted, the lead may have to
go get a job at 7-11 rather than complete the project. :-/

 > Also there is feedback on financial results. Or are you
 > talking about general statistics accross all projects?

I'm talking about publication of how much money was actually delivered
to each project, for all projects.

 > I do not think it is a market that gets staturated, but an alternative 
 > way to fund product development/other projects.

The meaning of "saturation" is that the funding source is not infinite.

 > Are there any widgets besides donate buttons which you can easily 
 > include on your website where you can do your own little crowd funding? 
 > Like "who wants which feature and would pay how much"?

That's a trivial change to the form containing the "donate" button.
Just replicate it for each feature.  Have a "new feature" form to
automatically create new ones.  (Presumably this is more or less how
Kickstarter and friends work.)

 > And where one can see from outside how much money has already been
 > put on each feature?

Easy to implement on your website with any modern web framework.  Just
keep the record of amounts for each feature in the framework's database.

 > I understand that there might be disagreements on whether the
 > feature is correctly implemented or not. But then one could bind
 > payment to the passing of predefined tests.

Merely defining such tests is what is called "requirements planning"
or "design", and these activities are very expensive.  Auditing the
use of financing provided before properly doing requirements and
design is one important reason for the existence of venture
capitalists.  (Many people think VCs do a bad job, but good luck
trying to do a better one!)

 > Probabably it is easier use a crowd funding platform and link to
 > that.

Yes.

 > But are there any where you can negotiate about features?

"Negotiation" is expensive, implying a serious customer-vendor
relationship.  Far more expensive to the customer than a crowd-funding
donation.

If you simply mean a sort of "feature suggestion box", see above.

 > they died 10 years ago ... were the platforms themselves open source?

No.