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

[Edward Middleton <edward.middleton@example.com>]

On 06/13/2013 05:19 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Ulrike Schmidt writes:
>
>   > I would find arguments more convincing,
>
> No, you wouldn't.  I've presented arguments, but you've chosen to
> ignore them.  Here, have a few more:
>
>   > Why are proprietary games and graphic novels economically more
>   > attractive for crowdfunders than FLOSS projects?
>
> Because the crowdfunders can get the FLOSS for free if they wait a
> bit, rather than pay now.  They can't get the proprietary stuff at all
> unless they pay, now or later.  These factors will only increase in
> importance as the number of projects of both types increase.
>
>   > Are these really the same markets?
>
> As usual in social science analysis, the answer is yes and no.  Yes,
> in the sense that they are competing for some of the same
> contributions.  No, in the sense that some of the contributions that
> will go to games would never go to FLOSS and vice versa.
>
> As the number of projects increases, the number of conflicts will also
> increase, and in the end the number of crowdfunders who only ever give
> to FLOSS or only ever give to games will become insignificant.  So the
> more important answer in the long run is "yes".
>
>   > In which ways can some crowd funded projects return 1000%
>   > to their investors and others 50%?
>
> Project 1 (Stupid game for Android): investment: $50, profit $500.
>                                       rate of return 1000%.
> Project 2 (Spam filter for Mailman): investment: $1000, profit $500.
>                                       rate of return 50%.
>
> Since I'm pretty sure you'll complain about my intuition if I don't
> explain, here's an explanation: creating a stupid game using a game
> library may take only a few minutes (here I'm estimating an hour), but
> attract 500 downloads at $1 each.  Creating a good spam filter is hard
> work, requiring many hours (20 is surely an underestimate) of careful
> attention to detail.  But doing it for Mailman is not going to attract
> a lot of high price downloads because people who have spam problems
> big enough to spend money on it will concentrate on spam-filtering at
> the incoming MTA, not in Mailman.  Since Mailman is GPL, your product
> has to be GPL too.  So you'll be lucky if you get 500 contributions of
> $1 each; the people who will want to use this feature are almost all
> most interested in the price=0 side of "free software."

Maybe if it isn't worth your time and you can't find a couple of 
thousand people willing to spend $1 dollar to fix the problem, it 
doesn't matter enough to be worth fixing.

To be honest, what I see as being mostly ignored in all this is the 
effort involved in finding the couple of thousand people willing to 
spend a couple of dollars.

For your mailman example above, the question would be, how many people 
actually use mailman in a way where a better spam filter would be worth 
$1 in saved effort.  If this number is not a reasonable big multiple of 
the number of contributers required to successfully fund a campaign, its 
probably not going to work.

Edward