Hi Sukender, Thanks for putting together the poll. The amount of donation doesn't surprise me, and my guess is that it probably similar to the scale of donations that other open source projects of a similar nature to ours bring (looking at their public notifications of donations). I think this is related to the limits of this type of revenue stream, 1000 USD doesn't even cover the salary of a engineer for a week in the US or western Europe.
However, it's not the only revenue stream, consultancy, training, and bespoke development work on top of the OSG currently pays for a several engineers that work full-time on OSG related tasks. This is just for engineers I know, I do see other vis-sim companies on the net that advertise OSG related consultancy/dev services and I'm not even familiar with them so I don't know how wide this little market might be, but there is certainly several hundred thousand dollars per year in this micro sector. Quite of bit of this commissioned work becomes open source, and does the revenue also enables some of us to commit quite of bit of free time in to general unpaid open source tasks. Personally I prefer the paid for service model as I know it works over donations, as I know it works, and it doesn't rely on benevolence - there are good economic reasons that organisations pay for these services. There is actually quite a bit of good will in the contracts I do, but one can't sell this to a manager who has to sign the cheque, one has to have concrete return for the money put in. This is something that I see in open source contributions as well - one can justify making code contributions on purely selfish grounds - it helps you get your job done if your contributions are maintained, debugged and extended by others, and since sharing costs you very little there is a net gain to you the contributor. However, just because you can justify your contributions on self-centered grounds doesn't mean the actual process is self-centered, rather it promotes good-will in others and the feeling of good-will in oneself, people enjoy giving, it's a positive cycle. Being able to justify collaboration and sharing of selfish grounds is the bed-rock of open source development, it's the fallback position that enables you to caltivate a wide community over a long period. Whereas basing something entirely on benevolence is more fragile and less encompassing. Robert. On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 10:06 AM, Sukender <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > The poll "How much would you donate to OpenSceneGgraph if there was a call > for donations?" has ended. > http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pjqNRx7sg7XqtfbsKBomuKg&hl=en > I'll let the poll open a few days before deleting everything. > > The result is simply... hem... "far under expectations". > > Total answers: 16 > Donation expected once: 643 $USD > Donation expected yearly: 980 $USD > (Using currencies conversion rates on 2009-01-12) > > Collected comments: > > - What you should do is have a membership system... always have free access > (this is key to OSG success) but also have paid Academic/Professional Member > type system. Higher levels get to do things like vote on things, get > t-shirts, special email list, etc. If such a system existed I'd be happy to > pay $200 a year (and it would be tax deductable). > > - This should -never- be mandatory; that would only scare away newcomers. > I'm only considering donation because OSG could possibly contribute to the > success of my new company. > > - It would be nice to attach the donation to the selection of one from a > dynamic list of tasks, like my donation is for this task.... the tasks could > be ranked for amount of money collected. The insertion of a new task could be > subject to a minimum donation. > > - I feel I contribute directly to OSG with code and development, but I would > be willing to kick in some $$$ occasionally. > > - I love OpenSceneGraph and promise contributing everytime. > > > I'll post again if new answers are recorded before deletion. > > Cheers, > > Sukender > PVLE - Lightweight cross-platform game engine - http://pvle.sourceforge.net/ > _______________________________________________ > osg-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org > _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
