I had enough and its late. Hopefully some investors are interested in my project. But here's a brief reason why did not apply for grants. (Now this is my personal opinion, you guys might not have the same requirement as me)
1) SKMM (MCMC), E-content, any content related grant - Not really for software development. I personally know someone whose game project was rejected under e-content because game is considered software dev. 2) Preseed (MDEC) - They limit RM 1500 per developer per month. Rm 1500??? jual burger tepi jalan pun dapat banyak dari tu. Who wants to work for you for RM 1500?. Kalau ada pun, memang yang dah carik kerja merata tapi tak dapat (and malas pulak tu nak jual burger) . So keje la dapat Rm 1500. Code quality pon cam hampeh nyiok. Unit test pun tak tau buat. - Business plan. This is preseed for God sake. The proposal should be on 1 (read one... you know, satu) page. There should not be a business plan. Business plan is when you want to apply for seed funding. After all, technology moves so fast these days and so global, that your business plan would be relevant for only a few weeks at best. - 30+ freakin' pages to fill in. If this is a 2 million grant than that is probably ok, but this is preseed. Anything beyond 1 page is just fluff at best and total malicious lies at worst. - No funding for marketing or any sort of advertisement. - No continuation. What should you do once the fund has run out? Sell your software? wait a minute, you can't use your grant money for marketing... bummer :( . That's why many preseed companies are now stuck. 3) Cradle Investment Fund - Long winded web form to fill in (web form? gosh, the best tech. for forms is PDF. Here's a bunch of them... free of charge. See, Adobe's business plan out the window already. They probably didn't deserve preseed grants.[ http://www.cogniview.com/convert-pdf-to-excel/post/pdf-editing-creation-50-open-sourcefree-alternatives-to-adobe-acrobat/ ]) - Again you have to supply a business plan that will be obsolete once you finish writing them + Supply you with a mentor (a really good deal) * No mention of limit on developer salary * No mention of continuation 5) MGS, DAGS, Technofund For established companies only. 6) Iconity (MDEC) Still new, form pun cannot be downloaded yet but it looks just as bad (still this RM 1500 per developer per month deal ... why is MDeC is sooo fixated on that, I have no idea - on similar note, if that is how much MDeC values software developers then screw grants, we have a bigger problem at our hand) All and all, here's why I would say. Please MDeC, please don't let us jump through hoops and make us write long winded expired-in-2-weeks business plan anymore. This is preeseed. We are not asking millions. (Heck, most of us would gladly settle for a RM 50 k ). I think a simple proposal would do. Now MDeC would need a mechanism to filter out the bad from the good, here's my suggestion. Any proposal must finish a prototype in 3 months. Yes 3 months. Anyone asking more than that then ask them to create a long winded proposal, the usual drill, but give a green lane to anyone who is dedicated enough to do stuff in 3 months. You see, if a buddy and myself want to build, oh, say, a new CRM system, if we work everyday on it, 3 months is enough. Our salary oh, say RM 5000 each, that's RM 10k per month. Times 3 that is just RM 30,000. We use RM 10, 000 for to purchase dev machines. Maybe RM 5000 for hosting and another RM 5000 for small time marketing. We do not need an office. MDeC's lab (open source, jtrend and ntdc ... which is right now soooo under used) can be our temporary office. See, just RM 50k . Now if we fail, you lost RM 50 k. No biggie. If we succeed, then continuation grant, say RM 150 k , and RM 500 k after that should be guaranteed. Its late so if my rants are a bot inconsistent, maafkan saya Again, I'm just writing to express my personal gut wrenching feeling, not to belittle anyone. Certainly not MDeC or Cradle. Azrul On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 3:07 AM, Hasanuddin Abu Bakar <[email protected]>wrote: > Saya tak percaya kalau FOSS komuniti tak dapat dana macam orang ni dapat. > Sila rujuk link di bawah. > Sama-sama kita fikirkan. > > http://www.carigold.com/portal/forums/showthread.php?t=88333 > > > > Hasanuddin Abu Bakar > ------------------------------- > Ubuntu embedded developer/tester > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/bizkut > > Get FireGPG for your Firefox! http://getfiregpg.org > > PGP Public Key > http://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371/pks/lookup?search=0xD25748FC1754D52DAFA5EA8EC5A1B11965D43C5C&op=index > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Join Open Source Developers Club Malaysia http://www.osdc.my/ Facebook Fan page http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=98685301577 http://www.facebook.com/OSDC.my You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OSDC.my Mailing List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/osdcmy-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
