Thursday 22nd February 2007

Pledge to get FOSS applications developed?

I’ve been thinking that PledgeBank is a great site to get free software made. PledgeBank allows you to say something like “I will pledge $10 to get a FOSS webmail back-up application developed, only if 1,000 other people do.” Then if someone actually did it, they would be able to collect the $10,000 pledged. The problem obviously is what if multiple people create an app, and who decided which app gets the money, etc etc.

Maybe a deadline and a qualified judging committee could make it work. Someone already is doing this, actually, pledging to make a free 3D NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux, I think. I don’t know how it worked, or if it was a success, never went back and checked. [Edit] It was successful, and was actually donating to an existing project development team.

Webmail backup of course is not that great an application. But if you can think of a piece of software that really needs to be made, or maybe a project in development that needs funding, why not give PledgeBank a try? It might just be the best way to get FOSS projects done.

Comments:

  1. 1 On March 3rd, 2007, Dilantha said:

    Sounds like a good idea. Ya spreading the money among a team of open source developers might be messy. This is a good opportunity for a small business like in Sri Lanka to take up. That way they have the proper management and infrastructure is already setup and a few thousand dollars is a good starting point for a project.

Leave a Reply