Ask HN: Can donations sustain an open source software?

6 points by diegogcouto 13 years ago | 4 comments

When creating an open source software, do you think that it's better to finish the product and ask for donations or show the ideias and bet on crowdfunding?

tsurantino 13 years ago |

It's not donations that are meant to sustain open source software. The idea is that it is not the software itself that is meant to sustain itself (because information ought to be free) but rather things like support, maintenance and other tailored services are supposed to provide the funding for the project and for the people working on it.

This is why commercial Linux distributions can work and have worked.

Yes, granted this doesn't apply to all OSS, but in the cases that it doesn't, then it's definitely just for the benefit of the programmer to be able to freely work on, share and collaborate to complete something.

diegogcouto 13 years ago | |

I agree with you and it's a very interesting point, but I also think that there is another one.

Let's suppose that you're developing some tool that could solve problems of a lot of people. It's natural that you try to sell this to them (there isn't free lunch).

Getting paid only by services, in my opinion it's not that sustainable, because you'll have costs with this service and you already have other costs with development. To start making some profit, the price of the service has to be high.

clueless123 13 years ago |

IMHO you write software to scratch your own itch, then you release it into the world for others to benefit from your work.. with the nice side effect that sometimes you get feedback,improvements and patches on your code. money is not a must on the open source equation.

logn 13 years ago |

You could do both.

In my experience, unless you deliver something really indispensable or really, really awesome, no one is going to give you a dollar. Being simply a neat app won't cut it.