Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 12:38 pm Post subject: Fundraising
Now that Neo/J is getting stable enough to consider releasing a Neo/J 1.1 RC, I have been making a list of the tasks that must be done for Neo/J to continue to be usable for the next two years. At a minimum, I believe that the following two tasks need to be done:
1. Eliminate Java 1.3.1 dependency - Mac OS X 10.4 will probably be released sometime this year and even if it ships with Java 1.3.1, I suspect that there it will be buggy and, without significant hacking, will make Neo/J unstable. This happened with Panther and several Panther updates and I literally spent at least 2 or 3 months of full time work to fix the Panther bugs. Instead of repeating this futile work, it would seem smarter to spend 3 or 4 months of work to eliminate the Java 1.3.1 dependency.
2. Upgrade Neo/J to the OOo 2.0 codebase - After task #1 is done, OOo 2.0 will probably be in fairly wide use on Windows and Linux. As a result, many people will find that they cannot use Neo/J 1.1 to open documents created in the OOo 2.0 format. This means that I will need to spend 3 or 4 months upgrading Neo/J to the OOo 2.0 codebase or else let Neo/J slowly become less and less usable.
The problem is that neither of these tasks will get done without sizable donations. My estimate is that these two items will require between US$100K and US$200K in donations. While the small donations help, they will most likely cover no more than 5% - 10% of the total cost.
So, I think that a more targeted fundraising campaign is needed to raise these funds.
I am no fundraising expert so I would like to know if anyone can help me come up with a fundraising approach. I know that many non-profit organizations like universities use Neo/J but I don't know how to tap such organizations for funding.
I have also been thinking about using a fundraising technique that many non-profits use: give large donors something. For Neo/J, this could be somthing like hosting a dinner with Ed and I at WWDC for all donors that give more than US$2500. Or, allowing companies to list themselves as a sponsor on the Neo/J download and forum pages if they give more than US$25000. However, I don't know a good way to get this message to potential donors.
so i've been thinking about this since you posted it, hoping a lightning bolt would strike.
then again, if i could raise $200,000....
anyway. i think that the corporation support is the way to go. additionally, perhaps government support. i'm not sure who uses macs extensively, but we should look into it for sure (maybe one of those school programs??)
as for what to do, a 'proud sponsers' page, or part of help (or both) is definatly a good thing. unless we got a motherload dumped in our laps, i'd say splash screen branding would be off the table.
and there is always the idea of the foundation again.
in the 'every bit helps' view, (and i shudder to suggest) we could sell ad space on the website. we do get a decent amount of traffic... though one of the nice things was always the LACK of ads.
or selling CD's of the programs, ala CDROM.com.
an idea i got while writing this... some of us (i.e. not ed or patrick) could write a 'using NeoOffice' book, and sell a PDF on the site... or something.
mainly i wanted you to know i was thinking about this. maybe i should just get off my ass and become a NYT bestselling author.
Of course I'm not imagining you're expecting one of us to pull a few hundred Gs out of our wallet, so the answer's gonna have to be corporate or government sponsorship of some kind. The Mozilla people probably know something about this. Is there a Foundation set up somewhere that earmarks $ for projects like this that are for the public good? Does anyone know about non-traditional organizations that might be interested?
As for a book-- I mean, I don't really know much about the book industry, but I guess the first thing would be find a publisher who's interested. Then maybe find someone to volunteeer as an editor, and get different people to volunteer writing different chapters?
The thing is-- how much would overlap with simple openoffice.org documentation? If there are any OO.O books, would it make more sense to see about (legally, obviously, and with permission/participation) appropriating/including content from one of those sources?
Screenshots would need to change probably. But wouldn't most of the content be the same? There'd need to be sections relating specifically to mac--fonts, menus, troubleshooting, etc. Portions of the wiki could be used as well (again, with permission of the authors)..
It's a fairly large undertaking now that I'm thinking about it. But then, NeoJ is pretty big too Are there enough NeoOffice/J users to warrent the effort for a full paper book?
The only fundraising I did in past was selling apple-pies oustside the church with young boy scouts. But to reach 200,000 $ I don't think this could be a good way.
To be honest 200,000$ is a high goal to reach, actually I got around 18,000$ for a year of work as office-worker, working every day, so I'm thinking this goal means more people will work on neooffice/j, or pluby need a new swimming pool
Except the jokes, I do not know if the interest in neooffice/j project could be so high to convince a company to invest in this project, or for what gain. Different from linux or solaris, macintosh has his microsoft office suite, the appleworks suite and the iworks suite. Sun have no interest spending money for a openoffice for macintosh and apple has less interest that sun.
But I do not know the american reality about fundraising, the things could be different from italy.
(Oblivious there is still the old way to commercialize neooffice/j, as a product, a hard way. Personally, I'll pay for a stable version of neooffice/j 2.0 , but as a product. I mean, if I have interest in a good openoffice porting for osx, I can give an help in betatesting, promoting, or giving my damn 25$, as I done. And if I found a bug in neooffice/j and pluby tell me that the bug is in Oo code, or in the different way Oo handles something, and he can not work on it, I understand. Pluby is not god, there is no place for me and someone else. But if I pay for a product, I really do not care where is the bug, I'm going to buy a working office suite, not the porting of the not-so-working office suite. I think this a big difference, and I don't know if the money coming from a "neooffice/j product" could be enought to give time to pluby, ed and other for work to the Oo code, make memory/speed optimization eccetera).
To be honest 200,000$ is a high goal to reach, actually I got around 18,000$ for a year of work as office-worker, working every day, so I'm thinking this goal means more people will work on neooffice/j, or pluby need a new swimming pool
Actually, in the San Francisco Bay Area, this is about what it costs for 2 full time software engineers for a year. Ed and I live in rediculously expensive areas (although prices in New York shock me) and we live in a country with no socialized programs so for people in other countries, this may sound like a lot of money, but it is not. It is just local price differences.
The point that I am trying to make is that developing Neo/J or any OOo release cannot be done as a hobby. It is a full time job for 2 people. Right now, I average about 60 hours a week working on Neo/J.
I love doing it, but I realize that I cannot do this for much longer. So, I think we are approaching a fork in the road. We can do either:
1. Stop at Neo/J 1.1 and use the donations that dribble in to maintain and fix bugs.
- or -
2. Raise enough money to employ I and maybe Ed so that we can work full time upgrading Neo/J to OOo 2.0, etc. instead of working full time in some other paying job.
Selling Neo/J as a product isn't realistic for two reasons:
1. We would need real testing staff to test the code before release. If we do a real product, I think many users would expect the code to be nearly perfect when released instead of the current mode which is the public are the testers. Employing testers would cost money which further complicate the problem that we already have.
2. Risk. Paying the cost of employing testers and living without any salary for at least a year to develop such a sellable product would be a significant amount of money with no guaranteed return. To be honest, I am not willing to throw my life savings and mortgage my future for OOo. The risk if losing money just seems too high.
Well, I lived in Berkeley, so I can sympathise with your housing costs and the cost of living in general. Especially if you have a family to support.
As for the rest, I don't know if there are any places that grant software money. All I know is environmental fundraising. Such private donations are often limited to one or two thousand euros and won't help you much in the grand scheme of things. I did once raise about 20 grand, but that was for a national programme.
I checked the funding site for the European Commission (they recently adopted OpenDocument as a recommended format) but they don't seem to have anything right now (I did a quick check, you can always dig for this or something else at http://www.europa.eu.int/grants/topics/topics_en.htm.
Other than that I will have to look for something more substantial (and I have to find myself a job as well).
As for the angles:
Mac has 5% of desktops worldwide.
Macs are often used in eduation, science and in media.
MS Office is limited in the number of languages.
MS Office is expensive.
OpenOffice based stuff is EU-recommend, free and cross platform.
One way is to looking for development aid sources and point to the free office alternatives in education, science and media, which critical sectors for human development, with native languages.
Another is to go to funds for innovation or infrastructure and point to the benefits in science infrastructure for universities and both regular and independent media to have a free, multi-lingual office suite (all of these organisations spend massive $$ for current Office licenses).
As an extension to the last, look at the Apple Hot News pages and send a letter to all the institutions handing out iBooks to their students and ask them for funds. Chances are they are spending serious cash for MS Office licenses and wouldn't mind losing them. The science labs and commercial places like broadcasters will probably demand rock-solid code so they'll be hesitant, but students are more tolerant. Science and commercial can come once you have somewhat stable test code and can pretty much guarantee reasonable stability.
This is, of course, contingent on OpenOffice 2.0 getting a good reception in the IT media. As long as OOo 2 is universally acknowledged as a good alternative to M$, you can make the case that a 'real' Mac version is a Good Thing and beneficial to many people and organisation that can start using it in particular.
For this you'll need a nice leaflet setting out the benefits of NeoOffice 2.0 and a letter you can customize for organisation using Macs.
For the grants, someone'll need to look into funding sources. EU might still be an option, as are a few of the organisations that have funded OO translations. Someone could try Bank, UNDP, UNESCO and other big guys, but this will take a lot of paperwork. I don't know any smaller places in this field.
In addition, what they call branche-organisaties in Dutch, or business associations in a given field (such an interest group for publishing businesses) might be able to point you to a proper source or have some cash (most are loaded and, in NL at least, often coordinate software development for applications that all of their members can use and can serve as a standard platform).
It would help if someone knows of specific countries or sectors that use a lot of Macs and find organisations active in there.
Let me know if this sparks any ideas with anyone.
best wishes,
Oscar
P.S. This reminds me: Can either Patrick or Ed reply to the overtures made weeks ago on the dev@porting list about licensing?There's willing people out there and giving them a decent reply seems like the decent thing to do. In particular, the question is floating is an LGPL license for Neo/J would be acceptable. If so, there's a real chance everyone could become one happy family again. _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
I don't know what the legalities are of selling neooffice (no really, I don't know), but I'll assume since it was discussed, that licenses or whatnot are not an issue.
I would definitely recommend taking another look at selling it. Say in the $50 range. And I wouldn't worry so much about beta testing and stability. It is VERY solid right now, imho. If you guys aren't getting working somewhere else right now, you're already bleeding money. Might as well scrounge up some cash, set up an LLC, buy some advertising, and get the (neo)Word out there. You've already put in most of your cost, so most of the $50 is basically good to use, say you lose 5% to payments systems, you're still getting $45 per copy. You need to recoup your investment in advertising and setup, but after that, you can pay your salaries while you work on 2.0.
I've used, I believe, every office app for the mac there is, including iWork, Office, etc etc.. This is a very valid office app that does stuff apple's offerings just don't. And if it's significantly cheaper than MS Office, I think that's pretty attractive. It's derfinitely more compatible than iWork or Appleworks.
I don't think there's any way you're going to raise $200k in fund raising. So if you're serious about continuing development at your normal 60 hr/week, you have to think about getting serious about selling something.
Unless you can convince apple to throw some money your way, but ah... who knows.
I checked the funding site for the European Commission (they recently adopted OpenDocument as a recommended format) but they don't seem to have anything right now (I did a quick check, you can always dig for this or something else at http://www.europa.eu.int/grants/topics/topics_en.htm.
I guess you can get some european subsidies, but you would at least need to live in Europe However, you may get contracts from Europe. The Kontact guys were financed by a German entity which in turn adopted the program.
I would definitely recommend taking another look at selling it. Say in the $50 range. And I wouldn't worry so much about beta testing and stability. It is VERY solid right now, imho. If you guys aren't getting working somewhere else right now, you're already bleeding money. Might as well scrounge up some cash, set up an LLC, buy some advertising, and get the (neo)Word out there. You've already put in most of your cost, so most of the $50 is basically good to use, say you lose 5% to payments systems, you're still getting $45 per copy. You need to recoup your investment in advertising and setup, but after that, you can pay your salaries while you work on 2.0.
I already have an S corporation (Planamesa, Inc.) that all Neo/J donations and expenses are run through. I have thought of selling Neo/J, but I concluded that turning Neo/J from a non-profit project into a commercial product may actually be more costly than what we are doing now. Here's why:
1. Almost all of Neo/J's testing, support, and website translations are done by volunteers and I suspect that some or all of this free labor would disappear if Neo/J was positioned as a commercial product. This would have to be replaced with hired staff since Ed and I don't have the available time to take this on.
2. Donations are non-taxable gifts whereas for sales are taxable (in the U.S., gifts are taxable on the giver, not the receiver). This means that each $50 sale will increase our tax bill. This effectively makes a $50 sale about equal to an $80 donation.
Given the above, however, maybe I can leverage some of the tactics that for-profit products use to increase the number of small donations. After all, it only takes 20 $50 donations to generate $1000.
Surprisingly, in "Patch-7" I made a very simple change. I reenabled the OOo register dialog when you first run Neo/J. When you click "register now" in the dialog, it displays the Neo/J donation page.
By adding this simple feature, Neo/J has received nearly $1000 a significant jump in donations over the last week. This will likely settle down in a week or two, but I think if I supplement the passive approach that I current use for donations with some active approaches, we might see a sizeable portion of the funding goal filled. The idea here is that Neo/J does not need $200K all at once as Ed and I can only spend so much time each week. In fact, if $50K is raised every six months, it will probably do the trick.
Some simple active approaches that I can think of that wouldn't require a huge amount of labor are:
1. Give away stuff depending on the donation size e.g. $100 gets you a Neo/J T-Shirt or CD, etc. and advertise this stuff on the donation page.
2. Send out regular press releases (anyone know how to issue press releases that sites will see?) to keep Neo/J in the news. This expands the user base and the pool of potential small donors.
3. Make the Neo/J donation page suggest a bottom amount. I haven't figured out how to configure PayPal's input page to allow an editable amount, but this might increase the average donation size. Surprisingly, Neo/J receives a lot of $1 - $5 donations.
4. Make Neo/J nag a little more if you haven't donated. Right now, getting the donation page to pop up is not automatic. Instead, a couple of things must happen before the donation page appears.
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 8:20 am Post subject:
Quote:
2. Send out regular press releases (anyone know how to issue press releases that sites will see?) to keep Neo/J in the news. This expands the user base and the pool of potential small donors.
Speaking generally:
One (free) way to keep yourself on the Mac users radar is to post your updates on Versiontracker/Macupdate far more often than you currently do. Perhaps it would be worthwhile announcing the patches on those sites as well as the less frequent .1 updates. Obviously, provisos would be necessary (e.g. they are true patch releases and are for testing purposes only, etc) but it could help lead to more people downloading the more official beta release(s) even if they initially bypass the patches. Another would be to make more frequent announcements on the trinity home page and somehow have those get featured on www.macsurfer.com whenever they occur.
Also, aim to have at least one major new feature per release (such as the addition of drag and drop or the use of native menus were for prior releases) that the Apple press and e.g. Slashdot can focus upon.
I try and do it myself, but making official announcements for each of the new patches on Mac forums would also help draw traffic to the project. I'm thinking along the lines of what Moki (Andrew Welch) from Ambrosia software does for their new software releases at MacNN.
In addition think about using the deployment of NOJ in the Scouts head office(?) by whoever it was here (sorry, forgotten their name) as a piece of positive PR that can be released to the Apple press (akin to the Apple website's hot news stories). Evidently that would need the Scouts permission, but that is a good bit of press for both organisations. Edit: It was rays (e.g. here or here) _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 9:21 am Post subject: Re: Fundraising
pluby wrote:
This means that I will need to spend 3 or 4 months upgrading Neo/J to the OOo 2.0 codebase or else let Neo/J slowly become less and less usable.
That's bad.
I fear a could pissibly start a flame war, but you askes for ideas, so here's mine: KOffice.
AFAIK Benjamin Reed (Ranger Rick) is currently donig all Mac work allone and because of Qt he's quite successful (an alpha quality port in a few weeks). IIRC his biggest problem with the current Qt3 based programs are, that there are a lot dependencies with X11 (these can be replaced with Qt functions). But as he writes in his blog: "Some discussion has been going on about making stable versions of the Win32 and Qt/Mac ports of KDE a goal for KDE 4.0"
To me, it sounds like less X11 and more Qt dependencies. This would be also benificial for a Mac version.
OK, KOffice may not have the functinality of OpenOffice, but in the long run, it may be easier to do for Mac porters. Beginnig with KOffice 1.4 it will share the file format with OO2. From what I've read, KOffice will gain a lot of functionality just by upgrading to the upcoming Qt4.
So what do you think? Is maintaining Neo/J for a while an then move to a Qt4 based KOffice an option?
apart from raising funds I guess there is another way of getting things done, i.e., getting someone else do it. As far as I know this project is currently resting on the sholders of two people. How about trying to involve more people who would donate their skill and time rather than money?
apart from raising funds I guess there is another way of getting things done, i.e., getting someone else do it. As far as I know this project is currently resting on the sholders of two people. How about trying to involve more people who would donate their skill and time rather than money?
Sun and Collab.net have spent much money and time trying to recruit developers to OOo on the Mac over the last 4 years and the result has been the same: only one or two developers have the time, money, and interest to devote to working on this.
Many people like using OOo and Neo/J on the Mac, but almost no developer wants to work on it. It is not fun or cool development work. Because of this, most developers who trying building OOo or Neo/J lose interest very quickly when they find that they cannot make a noticable impact within a day or two.
Many people like using OOo and Neo/J on the Mac, but almost no developer wants to work on it. It is not fun or cool development work. Because of this, most developers who trying building OOo or Neo/J lose interest very quickly when they find that they cannot make a noticable impact within a day or two.
Patrick
I'm very sorry to read this and I wish I had the skills required. I'm only sorry that more, perhaps younger, developers do not seem to realise the far-reaching impact they could be contributing to through a project like NeoOffice/J. Such work could have more global impact and deliver real daily benefits to users more than many of the flashy, here-today, gone-tomorrow "cool development work" they seek.
At the same time, I remain disappointed (tho' not yet entirely disillusioned) that Steve Jobs, who vaunted how the advent of 'his' Mac OS X with its roots firmly in Unix-out-of-NeXT, would herald a new era for the Mac, has shied away from ensuring that the open source community is provided with access to the resources required to more easily bring an aquafied version of OOo to us loyal Mac users. (I've read the comments on the difficulties of preparing for Tiger too.) If Steve thinks that a combination of Mac-specific Pages, Keynote 2 and ????? (if it exists) applications with import/export capabilities to/from M$ Office could possibly substitute for an open-source, cross-platform integrated business application like OOo, he needs to wake up and smell the coffee. NeoOffice/J flavoured!
and realise that by ensuring that Mac OS X on PowerPC (and Cell, in the future?) is up to the job of hosting open source solutions for all, he can contribute far more than his mate Bill can ever hope to donate through his foundation.
It is that void that you and Ed are filling. I only hope that other developers might read this and reconsider their approach and attitude to contributing to this project and consider what that would mean for end Mac-users.
Elsewhere in these forums, I have read suggestions that you and Ed should considering charging for copies of NeoOffice/J. Sadly, while it might doubtlessly be justified economically, it may only add to the widely held view that "Macs are more expensive" since OpenOffice is available for free on other main platforms.
I also read somewhere (I think) that the installed base of NeoOffice/J might be greater than the installed base of OOo on Linux? Did I really read that? Certainly something about there being more Macs out ther than Intels running Linux. But that being the case, a developer's contribution to NeoOffice/J could be valued as of potentially greater global impact than might currently be appreciated.
Enough of these ramblings! Bring on the flamers...
Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2005 1:38 am Post subject: not overly novel but..
Have you considered writing Larry Ellison?
He as far as I recall really truly and passionately hates Gates. Having a stable, robust, and FREE OpenOffice for the Mac will eat into MS sales and hurt Billy boy.
It might not get you all the way to the 200k but it sure would not hurt.
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Are there enough NeoOffice/J users to warrent the effort for a full paper book?
However, you may get contracts from Europe. The