Financial independence from MS

[Daniel Cazzulino]

I think an important goal for the foundation would be to become financially independent from MS as soon as possible (as the major contributor anyways). This would clear some concerns on its alignment (or not) with MS.

One way to achieve this is to encourage and make it extremely easy for individuals to contribute, friction-free. A paypal account to send money to, as well as regular and frequent reminders to contribute (say, whenever a sponsored project makes a new release, etc.), would be good. (that's what Obama keeps doing to this day, not sure how effective it is, but it does remind you that the "mission" is not over)

/kzu

--
Daniel Cazzulino | Developer Lead | MS MVP | Clarius Consulting | +1 425.329.3471

[Ayende Rahien]

Forget it.
I have a donation button for Rhino Mocks, which is a tier 1 .NET OSS project.
I think I made something like 200 - 500$ from it in the last 5 years.
Donations don't work.

[Eric Hexter]

I agree, if this is going to work it will not be through the support of individuals... unless Bill G is one of the individuals.  For this to work it will most likely be a coalition of companies which have the same goals and can benefit from the Mission of the foundation.  Realistically, it is companies that are in business that can benefit from OSS.  I do not think that developers pitching in our own money because we passionately believe we can work better with these tools, are going to make any significant difference compared to what a few larger companies could in terms of financial resources.

 

Eric

[Scott Bellware]

eric....@gmail.com wrote:

> Realistically, it is companies that are in business that can
> benefit from OSS

How much money will Headspring donate in recognition of the open
source software and the practices that are the foundation of its
business?

Far more impact can be made when we stop looking to other companies
and large companies and rather look to ourselves to do the right thing
in terms of voluntary compensation of the volunteer efforts of others
that serve our personal gains.

Like the American economy, having many more smaller businesses in the
support network will be far more effective and stable than a few large
businesses. And this is only right, there are far more smaller
businesses benefitting from open source than larger businesses.

I'm not saying that larger businesses shouldn't give, but we need to
stop looking "out there", pick ourselves up by the bootstraps, and
just give back for what we have received.

best,
Scott

[Fabio Maulo]

I think many of us are looking too far about what CPF will do.

I don't understand which should be the motivations of a OSS prj to
come in CPF.
Legal support to who ? OSS prj or Business companies ?
Which are others resources available for OSS ?

Our experience, inside a corporation, was about restrictions without
any kind of additional value, we hoping it will be different with
CPF...
but we need a response to some pending questions.

[Louis DeJardin]

Yeah, it's sad to hear the donation figure on a such key project is so low. 

I pointed out Castle's call for donations a while ago to an exec, who was a really nice guy and really supported OSS, and he said, "I have a lot of forms for capital expenses, consulting, hiring, events... But we just don't have one to give money away."

Maybe you would have better results if you included an "Invoice my employer" button next to "Donate".

Or (to remain on-topic) maybe the foundation could act as a clearing house for corporations who would like a vehicle for accounting to make a one time itemized payment for the oss tools in their development stack. 

[Ayende Rahien]

Agreed.
And I don't think that we gain something from blind speculation is helping now.
There is a saying in Israel: Full gas in Neutral.
In many respects, that it what I am seeing in this list and in the general discussions about CPF.

[John Petersen]

Fabio said: but we need a response to some pending questions.

Agreed. We certainly run the risk of kicking the can too far down the road (in response to your comment that we may be looking too far). Nonetheless, the questions have to be raised...and I think they have been. I am pretty much commented out at this point. I have had some exchanges with Mark that so far, have not lead to many specific answers from the CPF. In the 90 days, the board of directors and advisory board has to turn over and a well defined mission has to be crafted. Not an easy undertaking under the best of circumstances. That said, whether reasonable or not, I remain optimistic that this endeavor will work.

JVP

[Fabio Maulo]

questions was raised in the correct place to the correct people, don't worry about that.

One of possible answer is "we don't know, please wait one more month"... and we will wait.

2009/9/20 John Petersen <johnvp...@gmail.com>

--
Fabio Maulo

[Daniel Cazzulino]

This isn't blind speculation.

It certainly seemed like that too when Obama started funding his campaign this way too.

As Bellware said, we need to start changing ourselves. We can't just keep hoping some big corp will give money away for free, with no bias and no strings attached. That's a bit of a naive dream.

If we want an independent CPF, we should also do something about it (and this also goes for OSS developers of successful projects who actually make good money from the reputation they've built thanks to them).

Someone has to start saying these things, and CPF seems like a good starting point for this too.

/kzu

--
Daniel Cazzulino | Developer Lead | XML MVP | Clarius Consulting | +1 425.329.3471

[Ayende Rahien]

Daniel,
I am not speculating, I am stating facts.
Let me put it this way, I am pretty sure that you have used TortoiseSVN in the past.
Would you agree that it is a fair estimate to say that several _hundreds of thousands_ are using it?

Have you donated any money to the project?
Statistics says that you didn't, just to give you an idea, here is their donators lists from 2008:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080212181745/http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/donate.html

Do the math about the percentage involved.

[Daniel Cazzulino]

I get your point. However, stating/proving that the current status quo sucks is no excuse for not attempting to change it.

/kzu

PS: I have donated to Testdriven.NET, everydns.net, and I use VisualSVN which I got a free license for working on Moq. I could do much more to give back, granted. However, that's hardly the point here ;)

--
Daniel Cazzulino | Developer Lead | XML MVP | Clarius Consulting | +1 425.329.3471

[Jeff Brown]

Sure, we should attempt to change the status quo, but we should not snub the funding that Microsoft is generously offering.

 

Instead I think we should try to diversify our funding sources and encourage other partners and individuals to contribute as Microsoft has done.

 

Jeff.

---

From: codeplex-...@googlegroups.com [mailto:codeplex-...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Daniel Cazzulino
Sent: Sunday, September 20, 2009 8:32 PM
To: codeplex-...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Financial independence from MS

[Daniel Cazzulino]

+1!

/kzu

--
Daniel Cazzulino | Developer Lead | XML MVP | Clarius Consulting | +1 425.329.3471

[John Petersen]

This is a very interesting story: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001158.html

JVP

[Ayende Rahien]

Snort,
He didn't know how to give the money.

Just to give you a good idea, 5,000$ would have allowed to release Castle 2 years ago.
http://hammett.castleproject.org/?p=167

[John Petersen]

Seriously... He didn't know how to give the money? Is that what you are saying? Sounds like he knew exactly how to give the money and the money, at that time, was sitting with the recipient, untouched.

In the link you provided, Hamilton himself stated that he would not feel comfortable taking donations. Since then however, there is a donation link. .

What exactly was your point? I think this is an important example to discuss because $5K is not an insignificant amount of money. If in fact, there was a need for the funds but no effective means to use the funds, then that supports the argument that in at least in this one case, the project would have benefited from a business model. I suspect that conclusion applies in other cases as well.

So....if the CPF could address that need, that could be a very good thing...

JVP

[Mark]

On Sep 20, 2:15 pm, Fabio Maulo <fabioma...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Our experience, inside a corporation, was about restrictions without
> any kind of additional value, we hoping it will be different with
> CPF...
> but we need a response to some pending questions.
>

Fabio, we certainly expect CPF will be able to help reduce
restrictions inside a corporation by offering some of the legal
framework and single point of contact that would make corporations
feel more comfortable about getting involved with open source.

What pending questions do you think most need to be answered?

Mark Stone
Deptuy Director
The CodePlex Foundation

[Mark]

On Sep 21, 12:26 am, "Jeff Brown" <jeff.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sure, we should attempt to change the status quo, but we should not snub the
> funding that Microsoft is generously offering.
>
> Instead I think we should try to diversify our funding sources and encourage
> other partners and individuals to contribute as Microsoft has done.
>

Thank you, Jeff, for making this point so directly. There are times in
this discussion when I feel like the mom in that cell phone
commercial:
Teen - "These are rollover minutes. I want new minutes."
Mom - "Rollover minutes are perfectly good!"

Here it's more like:
"These are Microsoft dollars. I want new dollars."
"Microsoft dollars are perfectly good!"

Seriously, one burden that CPF has is to put the money we have to good
use, demonstrating through specfic actions that we can make life
better both for open source projects and the software companies trying
to figure out how to relate to them. Once we do that, I think it will
be obvious why companies should sign up as sponsors. Microsoft's
continued financial support will be an important part of the story,
but it won't be the whole story.

Having said that, I do think it's an interesting question whether
small companies or large companies should be most interested in
sponsoring CPF. This has been a topic of some discussion by the Board.
Obviously given Microsoft's large presence and large initial donation,
the simplest way to balance that would be with other large
participants. My own personal view, however, is that CPF is most
likely to be of value to small and mid-sized software companies, and
that they ultimately will collectively be the largest contributors.
That's mainly hope and speculation at this point, though, not a
definite plan.

Mark Stone
Deputy Director
The CodePlex Foundation

[John Petersen]

Mark...

Could you elaborate on the legal framework aspects of your point?

JVP