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

[Jocke Selin]

On 20 Dec 2009, at 01:59, Eleanor McHugh wrote:

> On 18 Dec 2009, at 10:29, Jocke Selin wrote:
>> On 17 Dec 2009, at 23:20, Eleanor McHugh wrote:
>>> 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?
>> 
>> One potential path is to make a business case and present it to a company. If there's profit to be made from using your "doohickey", then a company could be interested in sponsoring your work. I.e instead of a company developing RubyGoLightly or similar, on their own for their business projects, convince them it's better that you develop it independently, but with tight connections to the company in question.
>> You'll obviously need to find a company (one is enough ;) ), then put some numbers together for both the cost and the potential profits/benefits of the company.
>> 
>> Might work..?!?
> 
> Certainly sounds like an avenue worth investigating. Although if I were to get corporate sponsorship I'd want it to come from more than one source, both for tax efficiency and to stop the project becoming a hostage to fortune.


If you can get it, the more the merrier, but you might bump into companies seeing it as competition. Certainly worth trying as having several sponsors would, as you say, pretty much guarantee your work being independent and not angled towards one particular company's requirements.

Good luck!

/JS