[LRUG] How to fund an open-source project?

[stephen.boisvert at gmail.com]

You could gage the amount of community support for your goal by trying
out a crowd sourced funding model.

Using kickstarter ( http://www.kickstarter.com/ ) you can set what you
think is the required amount of support to even considering starting
and people are only billed for their contribution if you reach the
total amount.   You will also have to hustle and do the marketing to
get donations.  They seem more arty than techie though so your project
may be outside of what they are interested in.

I'm pretty sure Pat Allan (thinking_sphinx) just got himself a month
worth of support to focus on thinking_sphinx.  You could ask him.



> Last weekend at Ruby Manor I talked about my newly launched RubyGoLightly project [0], currently a bit of non-compilable vapourware forked from Marc-Andre Cournoyer's TinyRb codebase. Whilst Google's public release of Go is directly responsible for my taking the plunge on this, the general idea is something I've discussed privately with a number of people in the community over the past couple of years.
>
> Part of the goal of this project is to get Ruby working in the Google Go environment as I believe the concurrency model it offers will allow implementation choices which are either unavailable or poorly supported in C or C++, and which would be unusual in Java. However my real interest - and this may or may not be feasible - is to help move Ruby into the real-time arena.
>
> It's potentially a big project and I'd like to be able to work on it full-time so as to make reasonable progress in the coming year but I'm completely clueless about how to raise sponsorship or even whether that's practical. Does anyone with greater experience of driving an OSS project have any advice they're willing to share on this or any related topics?
>