What Do Small Open Source Projects Do With Money? Not Much.
What would your favorite small open source project do with a sudden influx of money? Imagine you donated $5000 to a project, where would the money go? Less scrupulous developers might spend the money on Mountain Dew and Twinkies, but more likely the money would just sit, doing nothing. Why? Because it takes time to spend money, and in the open source world time is in short supply.
In fact, it isn’t easy for small open source projects to spend money responsibly. If it was we wouldn’t have huge organizations like the Apache Foundation or the Django Foundation, which, among other things, are charge with distributing money where it’s needed.
But smaller projects are often caught off guard by money. The scenario posited above really happened. Developer Jeff Atwood donated some of the ad revenue from his blog to an open source project he liked. Atwood didn’t attach any strings, if the devs wanted to blow it on cocaine and whiskey they could, but the money is still sitting unused.
The lead developer responded to Atwood’s follow up e-mail saying:
The grant money is still untouched. It’s not easy to use it. Website hosting fees are fully covered by ads and donations, and there are no other direct expenses to cover. I thought it would be cool to launch a small contest with prizes for the best plugins and/or themes, but that is not easy because of some laws we have here in Italy that render the handling of a contest quite complex.
What would you suggest?
Atwood posted the question and kicked off a flurry of comments with suggestions ranging from hiring technical writers to improve documentation, to hiring graphic designers to work on the UI, to using the money to fly the developer to a conference of some kind.
Whatever ends up happening to the money, it raises an interesting point: smaller open source software projects are large built on donated time, not donated money. As Jon Galloway tells Atwood
Open source teams, and culture, have been developed such that they’re almost money-agnostic. Open source projects run on time, not money. So, the way to convert that currency is through bounties and funded internships. Unfortunately, setting those up takes time, and since that’s the element that’s in short supply, we’re back to square one.
Of course the other side of the story is that money can buy time. Indeed the vast majority of open source development is funded by corporations who have the resources to pay full-time employees to work on improving projects like the Linux kernel. But smaller projects, like the one in this case, don’t have many interested corporations and get by time and skill donated by individuals.
Short of starting a foundation to handle these sorts of tasks (which itself requires more money than most small projects have), what would you like your favorite open source project to do with a sudden windfall?
[Photo by luismi1985, Flickr]
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