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

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2013-06-06 18:06 +0900 (Thu), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>  Crowdfunding works because it's basically the same as leaving your
> pennies in the UNICEF box at the cash register at 7-11.

I've funded over 20 kickstarter projects with amounts ranging from $5 to
$1000. I'm guessing that my median funding amount is about $30, though
I don't have the data to back this up. (Kickstarter doesn't provide a
summary, and I'm too lazy to go through each project and total up the
amounts I've pledged.) I'm quite certain that in the majority of cases
the amount I pledge is considerably more than what I (and I think most
people) would consider "spare change."

That's just very limited anecdotal evidence, of course, but I think
we're definitely seeing changes in the video game industry because
of Kickstarter. It and related schemes have successfully funded a
non-trivial number of largish ($100k-$4M) software projects in that
field with pledges mostly falling in the $20-$30 range, and these are
projects that were unlikely to be funded in the tradtional publishing
model.

The jury's still out, of course, and will be for quite a few years yet.
But Kickstarter and similar systems seem to work quite well for certain
segments of the software market. These are not open source segments,
however, and I'm not seeing any real indication that it would stretch to
that.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch