DoctorMo's Blog

Today I got a message from an artist on DeviantArt, he wanted to thank me for the translation of the Managa I posted yesterday. Along with his thanks, he offered to donate $50 to any FOSS project that I wished to support.

My response was, that I’m very thankful for the pledge, but I’d like to see more users with an investment mindset, instead of a charitable one. So I offered a few ways this money could be invested, a couple of artists who do commissions who could draw some wonderful art in the name of FOSS, or people I know who do deb packaging or bug fixing. Perhaps it could go towards getting some very tiny feature implemented.

The reason I think it’s so important? You have to tie the service of software development to normal none technical users if you want them to be involved in any meaningful way in the direction of software. Since users are in the most need, serving those needs will be difficult so long as they are held at arms length by FOSS communities.

The one big way that none technical users can make a difference is with funding. They have the money and we have the skills. Obviously no single user has enough money to get major features developed, but they could aggregate their investment with others and raise the required funding.

The problem is that there are no tools to do this kind of thing and what is worse, there is a lack of acceptance within the community that funding of this kind is useful or even possible. It’s accepted that only the big industry level titans can hire developers to work on FOSS projects and without their enterprise level charging for their enterprise level services, there wouldn’t be enough money to develop common FOSS projects at any great speed.

So I’m making a stand, I want to see Investment not Charity from FOSS projects. I want to see Donate via PayPal buttons turned into “Invest in New Features by PayPal” buttons with a list of features being developed that users can choose. I want to see special logos used to show support for the common man’s interest in his software needs.

Pro-active funding isn’t as popular as Retro-active purchasing, our whole lives are driven by the ideas of buying products off shelves. The enterprise don’t want to be involved in the difficulties; so they focus on big money, simple, easy, teletuby funding.

But that doesn’t serve the man on the ground, it doesn’t give them a real say, the little guys who just want to get their homework done, or play a nice computer game. Nor does it help any of the programmers who aren’t employed by the IBMs and RedHats of the world. Users may not have any good ideas, but perhaps they do recognise the hard work in a project and would like to see it continue.

See my FOSS visual guide for a general idea of what I was thinking.