finance experiments

[anatoly techtonik]

Trying to find some motivation to support python-patch, I decided to

experiment with money. There is a lot of evidence that donations don't

help - even popular open source projects with lots of contributors rarely

raise anything more than $20 a month. For the most this barely covers

hosting costs, let alone time spend on the project. If we take typical

commercial development rate for python-patch, it may estimate to

about $40,000 - https://www.ohloh.net/p/python-patch/estimated_cost

(which is about 4 times higher than my author's estimation).

Why experiment with money if it is still hopeless and doesn't worth the

time spent? The main reason is curiosity, the secondary is challenge,

and the third one is experience. No matter how big or small the flow is,

experience matters. If people can waste millions of dollars for nothing,

we can prove that we can do better by learning how to care for cents.

I will try fundraising for projects like python-patch with donation buttons

and other things and open source money flow as much as possible, so

that people can learn on my experience, me myself can recap and

change my vision towards money and financial side of hacking things.

I believe that placing donation buttons is harmful for project reputation,

because they look like begging and sad reminder that you can't make

money with open source. They also can discourage other people from

contributing, because the feeling that you work for free and somebody

does the same thing, but compensated, raises a rather high barrier of

negative emotions that make people feel distressed. But knowing the

truth that donations never saved anyone helps to regain the lost sense

of fun and collaboration.

On the other side python-patch never had a single release in a few

years even though it is quite popular compared to my other projects.

What can be worse than unmaintained project with a lot of patches?

Only unmaintained project with a lots of ads. Hopefully, there won't be

any ads there. =)

Goals of experiment is to see how funding works, to explore available

technologies and platforms for fund raising, crowd funding, donations

and hidden costs. Build completely transparent system that can be

used as a backed for public initiatives. Automate or simplify boring and

repeated processes. Save time, record best practices and have fun.