

Ask HN: Can donations sustain an open source software?  - diegogcouto

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?
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tsurantino
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
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.

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clueless123
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.

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logn
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.

