On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 7:26 PM, Evan Schoenberg, M.D. <eva...@dreskin.net>wrote:
> > On Jul 28, 2011, at 10:36 AM, Colin Barrett wrote: > > > What, specifically, would the funds be used for? I think right now we > have a bunch of funds that are not being used for much of anything. > > > > Raising money is not a goal in and of itself and it's not a marketing > thing either. It is a means to accomplish an end. That is, what do we want > to accomplish that requires money? Once we can answer that question -- I > suspect the answer is "not a lot" -- we'll be better able to figure out how > we want to raise money. > > Ah, you mirrored the thoughts I expressed after you, in the other thread. > Precisely. > > I have all of this second hand from a coworker, so bear in mind that I only know what he's told me about the project he works on. I may also be misquoting, but I'm trying not to. Haiku OS has a 501 3 c organization where they accept donations. They accept donations on a subscription basis here: http://www.haiku-inc.org/donations.html More on Haiku Inc here: https://www.haiku-os.org/about/haiku_inc Essentially they collect donations from people monthly and have a pretty steady rate of donations. People who work at companies that match donations can get their donations matched by their company to provide Haiku Inc even more cashola. They didn't really use the funds until recently. They started paying some developers to work on stuff that nobody else wants to work on, effectively. They were collecting donations before with no real reason to collect them other than to collect them other than to collect them. However, the books there are open and you can take a look to see an example of how funds would be used for an oss project. Bear in mind that Haiku has something around 25-30 people working on it, so it's a tad different than how I think Adium would use funds, but it may still be worth looking at. I believe they have donated hosting and whatnot, but I could see being able to pay someone to work on Adium would be a cool thing to do. That's what we're going to do with Growl, or try to do at least. I'd like to see internships for working on OSS being a valid thing to think about. I don't know if these need to be paid internships, but that would of course be icing. That said, money changes things. Some people react differently around money than they would without it. All of the sudden they realize someone is getting paid more or less and they have different opinions. They won't do work without money, etc etc. Money makes the world go around so to speak, but it can also in theory stop things continuing. I think if someone wants to get funding/donations into Adium, then something similar to a "business plan" would be required before proceeding. I think Adium could probably benefit from funds in some way, such as a mini SoC style thing, but only if it's prepared and managed properly. Even a bounty system would be kind of neat, but you have to also weigh things like "hey that thing they paid out 1000 USD for, but this thing is 20 USD? That thing was so much easier to code!" when in all reality that 1000 dollar thing was also much more popular than the 20 dollar thing. I've rambled enough, hopefully this is beneficial. Chris > -Evan > > > > > -Colin > > > > On Jul 28, 2011, at 6:07 AM, Mike Houben wrote: > > > >> Hello fellow Adiumy's, > >> > >> We had also some discussion about a Kickstarter project for the AV in > Adium. It would be a grate Marketing thing and help us out. > >> > >> Mike > > > > > > >
