Funding Open Source By Donations: Lighting the Path

New submitter BryanLunduke writes "One week ago I Open Sourced my — previously commercial — software (GPL) and comic books (creative commons). I am now documenting my journey to fully fund their continued development with the first week's results of funding via donations. I am publishing this information here to give others the facts they need to help decide if they can afford to do something similar."

Sooo....

[Anonymous Coward]

Nooo.. your publishing here in hopes of garnering further donations.. And the more that do similar the less profitable it is for the individual.

Has his own FreeDOS distribution

[Animats]

Now, at last you can contribute to something we've all wanted - a new FreeDOS distro. [lunduke.com] You can support his 20-line BBS [lunduke.com] via Telnet. Read his web comic. Play his text adventure game. And there's an "app creator" program.

Not sure whether this is cute or pathetic.

Re:step one

[kthreadd]

This doesn't make any sense. If it is HIS source code, then there's no such thing as "holding it hostage". He wants to make his software available under a free and open source license, yet he don't want to loose the income that he needs. Why is this offending? Why is it so wrong that someone else prefers to actually make a living rather than doing the hard work just for the good of it? What you are asking him is basically that he should donate his time and money to you, and hope that you might be generous enough to pay him back a little.

That's nice...

[darkfeline]

That's nice, but is this kind of blatant self-promotion allowed on /.? This is not your personal blog. Can't we abide by the secondary source rule that Wikipedia has, so that we can guarantee some degree of notability? If you've finished your study and it caught someone else's eye because it's well-written and interesting and they post it here, cool, but "Funding Open Source By Donations: Lighting the Path", really? You are not the first person to do this, sorry to burst your narcissistic bubble.

It's a great idea

[cshark]

except that it never happens.
Awhile back, I donated $15 to a fairly widely used open source program. I got the nicest thank you letter from the author. Turns out, that in the five years he had been soliciting donations on his website, that I had been the second person in the history of the project to donate anything to it. This program had over a million downloads, by the way. With this in mind, I made sure to donate small amounts to other open source projects I wanted to see keep going. Out of six of them, I received four letters stating basically the same thing. Maybe times have changed, and maybe oss software writers have become savvier when it comes to things like mailing lists and social media for soliciting. Crowd funding certainly has changed the way these things work as well. But in general, I suspect that things are probably the same as they've ever been. And that simply asking for donations just doesn't work.