i am serious about the foundation idea. what i'll do is write up a white sheet (or whatever the hell they are called these days) about the idea and post it. maybe start on the non-profit paperwork.
the main points would be funding programmers, hopefully the foundation itself. webspace, bandwidth, a PT cruser so i can be cool like ed, things like that.
then we'd have a way to get much bigger donations for projects. but that's where my knowledge fallls short. how do we get donations?
(please sir, can i have some more?)
as for the proprietary thing, if you can think of things to do, part of me says go for it... but still, i am inclined to say stay with the across the board free version.
though there is another possiblity. something we can do now. something like CDNow where we charge, say $10-25 bucks for a CD of files. i know there are bandwidth deprived people still out there (me!)
though for the cd's we should go by the name luxorusity. (that was a joke)
Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 11:48 am Post subject: My contribution
I am eager for this foundation / whatever thing to be sorted out so that I can put my money where my mouth is and contribute. Right now, I'm thinking that a 25$ US or the equivalent in euros contribution might be a good "recommended" amount. I'm following this thread to know when and where to make this donation.
I believe that we will need to find a way to list the requested features and the needed work, to see how much money was "raised" for each requested feature, and to attach an evaluation of the developper's work that will be required to implement them so that priorities can be decided upon. At this point, I don't know what would be the best way to achieve this, but I know that some open source projects simply use a wiki page to do so (here's an example from the xfce folks). Anyways, I hope some people have better ideas.
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 11:49 am Post subject:
This is my (somewhat feeble) contribution to the topic - in addition to what has already been said, it might help to have a page here at Trinity that documents the history of and aims for the project and also provides a bit of biography to the people who are involved in doing the actual work (and what that work actually is). I realise that there has been a partial effort at doing that already, but it is very disparate, lacking focus and too hard to find (as what info there already is about this is on three or four different sites).
The reason I suggest this is because it would emphasise two important things that are not going to be immediately apparent to casual visitors to Trinity - just how much hard work you folks have already done (and still have to do to reach the holy grail), and just how few of you there are that are actually doing all the hard work.
I don't think it is at all apparent from the various sites linked to the NeoOffice project (Trinity, the NeoOffice and NeoOffice/J home pages), that there are basically just two or three people involved in the actual coding process. Hell, I've been posting here for a fair old time now, and even I still don't know who exactly does any or what coding... I know it is primarily Patrick and Ed but who else, if anyone does anything? It would also probably be very helpful to disclose in greater detail exactly what it is that distinguishes NeoOffice from OpenOffice.org and why.
I think if people realised that it was essentially two people doing all this in their spare time, you would be much more likely to get people donating funds to help out.
With that said, do you think there is anything to be learnt from the Firefox phenomenon wrt their ability to raise a quarter of a mil for an advert in just a few days? I think some sort of proselytising group could be very beneficial if they could achieve even a fraction of that success for you. A quick search of Slashdot for "NeoOffice" indicates that there have been no articles about the project at that site - even in the Apple dedicated section, which I find a little surprising. If you want to emulate some of that Firefox effect, then surely some form of "advertising" is going to be required at sites such as /. where you are more likely to find people who would willingly support your work. Self evidently, spreading the word is going to require you to be in a position where you think NO/J is "good enough" (i.e. of Firefox 1.0 quality) for it to deserve the added attention - I don't know if you feel that way yet, or whether Mac-end users would feel that way either (owing to the "if it doesn't have blue buttons, it isn't a Mac app" effect), but it is something to consider. In a way, perhaps you are in a chicken-and-egg situation. Are you ready to get a big increase in attention and publicity, and if not, without that big increase in attention (and, therefore, potential funding), can you afford to carry on?
P.S. Patrick - I've looked everywhere for the Paypal link on your planamesa pages but couldn't find it. Do you have a direct link yet? _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 12:21 pm Post subject: Re: My contribution
Boukman wrote:
I am eager for this foundation / whatever thing to be sorted out so that I can put my money where my mouth is and contribute. Right now, I'm thinking that a 25$ US or the equivalent in euros contribution might be a good "recommended" amount. I'm following this thread to know when and where to make this donation.
I believe that we will need to find a way to list the requested features and the needed work, to see how much money was "raised" for each requested feature, and to attach an evaluation of the developper's work that will be required to implement them so that priorities can be decided upon. At this point, I don't know what would be the best way to achieve this, but I know that some open source projects simply use a wiki page to do so (here's an example from the xfce folks). Anyways, I hope some people have better ideas.
One possibility might be for the foundation to charge $25 or something as an annual membership fee and the membership fee entitles each member to vote on any proposed disbursements of the foundation's funds. With this approach, those that contribute to the foundation get a say in where the money goes. This, I think, would be an important issue if the foundation's goal is to fund many different Mac-related projects.
This is my (somewhat feeble) contribution to the topic - in addition to what has already been said, it might help to have a page here at Trinity that documents the history of and aims for the project and also provides a bit of biography to the people who are involved in doing the actual work (and what that work actually is). I realise that there has been a partial effort at doing that already, but it is very disparate, lacking focus and too hard to find (as what info there already is about this is on three or four different sites).
The reason I suggest this is because it would emphasise two important things that are not going to be immediately apparent to casual visitors to Trinity - just how much hard work you folks have already done (and still have to do to reach the holy grail), and just how few of you there are that are actually doing all the hard work.
I don't think it is at all apparent from the various sites linked to the NeoOffice project (Trinity, the NeoOffice and NeoOffice/J home pages), that there are basically just two or three people involved in the actual coding process. Hell, I've been posting here for a fair old time now, and even I still don't know who exactly does any or what coding... I know it is primarily Patrick and Ed but who else, if anyone does anything? It would also probably be very helpful to disclose in greater detail exactly what it is that distinguishes NeoOffice from OpenOffice.org and why.
I think if people realised that it was essentially two people doing all this in their spare time, you would be much more likely to get people donating funds to help out.
I agree that this info would be really helpful. Would anyone be willing to take a stab at it? I find editing and fact-checking really easy but I find that actually writing to be a slow, painful process. I get overwhelmed by the "blank page" syndrome.
JKT wrote:
With that said, do you think there is anything to be learnt from the Firefox phenomenon wrt their ability to raise a quarter of a mil for an advert in just a few days? I think some sort of proselytising group could be very beneficial if they could achieve even a fraction of that success for you. A quick search of Slashdot for "NeoOffice" indicates that there have been no articles about the project at that site - even in the Apple dedicated section, which I find a little surprising. If you want to emulate some of that Firefox effect, then surely some form of "advertising" is going to be required at sites such as /. where you are more likely to find people who would willingly support your work. Self evidently, spreading the word is going to require you to be in a position where you think NO/J is "good enough" (i.e. of Firefox 1.0 quality) for it to deserve the added attention - I don't know if you feel that way yet, or whether Mac-end users would feel that way either (owing to the "if it doesn't have blue buttons, it isn't a Mac app" effect), but it is something to consider. In a way, perhaps you are in a chicken-and-egg situation. Are you ready to get a big increase in attention and publicity, and if not, without that big increase in attention (and, therefore, potential funding), can you afford to carry on?
I don't think Neo/J is quite ready for /. yet. I think that it is getting very close. Maybe when I get Beta out. My gut says that raising such a large amount of cash is a bit unrealistic. Why? Because many companies (e.g. Sun, RedHat, etc.) are very dependent on Mozilla.org's continued existence so, most likely, such companies are significant contributors to Mozilla.org. This situation also exists for Apache Tomcat. In Neo/J's case, I only really see Apple as filling this role and, frankly, Apple doesn't seem to be terribly interested in Neo/J. Maybe that will change in the future, but I don't think it is likely until Neo/J is fully Aquafied.
JKT wrote:
P.S. Patrick - I've looked everywhere for the Paypal link on your planamesa pages but couldn't find it. Do you have a direct link yet?
I haven't posted a link yet for two reasons:
1. I wanted to see the feedback from this topic first.
2. I could really use some help to create an HTML image map for the donation button. I tend to put Neo/J bug fixes first so website enhancements tend to fall to bottom of my "todo" list.
Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 12:45 pm Post subject: Re: My contribution
pluby wrote:
One possibility might be for the foundation to charge $25 or something as an annual membership fee and the membership fee entitles each member to vote on any proposed disbursements of the foundation's funds. With this approach, those that contribute to the foundation get a say in where the money goes. This, I think, would be an important issue if the foundation's goal is to fund many different Mac-related projects.
Patrick
I don't have anything against the idea of a fee to be member of a foundation, but I believe that people generally like to pay for a product, period. I think this is a "marketing" aspect that should be considered.
Now, the other problem is: how do you raise money for an open-source project, while making sure that this money is spent wisely. I'm just throwing ideas here, but maybe, without being members per say, every contributor would receive a number of "votes" that they could use anytime they want? Or maybe the simplest solution would be that the contribution would make you an automatic member of the foundation? Any other ideas?
Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 3:23 pm Post subject: Re: My contribution
Boukman wrote:
Now, the other problem is: how do you raise money for an open-source project, while making sure that this money is spent wisely. I'm just throwing ideas here, but maybe, without being members per say, every contributor would receive a number of "votes" that they could use anytime they want? Or maybe the simplest solution would be that the contribution would make you an automatic member of the foundation? Any other ideas?
Yes, but if it comes down to having votes proportional to the money you put in, everyone would just as well contribute to projects individually.
This is the "guest" poster again. (I'll sign up for an account one of these days, really.)
A few thoughts.
#1. I could possibly write a simple PHP page that tracks donations associated with any bug in phpBugTracker (why is it called bugzilla btw?) and lists them in a hierarchical order by donation amount, although until there is a way to track donations, I'm not sure how the information would be collected....unless it's done through the form, but then you have all kinds of other things to deal with. If paypal mails you something when a donation is made, you could parse that email and use it to feed the dbase... dunno.
#2. I could also write a short "history of the project" thing, but I'm not sure what information would go there... If you want to write a rough version I can clean it up.
#3. I like the idea of a foundation with $25/year membership fees to get a vote to decide where the $ is going to go. Of course, then there is overhead of tracking the votes, contacting membes, and other business. I don't know anything about how foundations work exactly, but who would run it?
#4. i'm seriously wondering if it's time for the "/J" to go. It sounds all technical-ly.
#5. This is probably getting ahead of ourselves, but lets say one of the bugs with a bounty on it is called "update to OO.o 2.0" and there are numerous checkins by several people-- some more substantial than others. Who determines how the $ is divided?
pluby wrote:
JKT wrote:
This is my (somewhat feeble) contribution to the topic - in addition to what has already been said, it might help to have a page here at Trinity that documents the history of and aims for the project and also provides a bit of biography to the people who are involved in doing the actual work (and what that work actually is). I realise that there has been a partial effort at doing that already, but it is very disparate, lacking focus and too hard to find (as what info there already is about this is on three or four different sites).
The reason I suggest this is because it would emphasise two important things that are not going to be immediately apparent to casual visitors to Trinity - just how much hard work you folks have already done (and still have to do to reach the holy grail), and just how few of you there are that are actually doing all the hard work.
I don't think it is at all apparent from the various sites linked to the NeoOffice project (Trinity, the NeoOffice and NeoOffice/J home pages), that there are basically just two or three people involved in the actual coding process. Hell, I've been posting here for a fair old time now, and even I still don't know who exactly does any or what coding... I know it is primarily Patrick and Ed but who else, if anyone does anything? It would also probably be very helpful to disclose in greater detail exactly what it is that distinguishes NeoOffice from OpenOffice.org and why.
I think if people realised that it was essentially two people doing all this in their spare time, you would be much more likely to get people donating funds to help out.
I agree that this info would be really helpful. Would anyone be willing to take a stab at it? I find editing and fact-checking really easy but I find that actually writing to be a slow, painful process. I get overwhelmed by the "blank page" syndrome.
JKT wrote:
With that said, do you think there is anything to be learnt from the Firefox phenomenon wrt their ability to raise a quarter of a mil for an advert in just a few days? I think some sort of proselytising group could be very beneficial if they could achieve even a fraction of that success for you. A quick search of Slashdot for "NeoOffice" indicates that there have been no articles about the project at that site - even in the Apple dedicated section, which I find a little surprising. If you want to emulate some of that Firefox effect, then surely some form of "advertising" is going to be required at sites such as /. where you are more likely to find people who would willingly support your work. Self evidently, spreading the word is going to require you to be in a position where you think NO/J is "good enough" (i.e. of Firefox 1.0 quality) for it to deserve the added attention - I don't know if you feel that way yet, or whether Mac-end users would feel that way either (owing to the "if it doesn't have blue buttons, it isn't a Mac app" effect), but it is something to consider. In a way, perhaps you are in a chicken-and-egg situation. Are you ready to get a big increase in attention and publicity, and if not, without that big increase in attention (and, therefore, potential funding), can you afford to carry on?
I don't think Neo/J is quite ready for /. yet. I think that it is getting very close. Maybe when I get Beta out. My gut says that raising such a large amount of cash is a bit unrealistic. Why? Because many companies (e.g. Sun, RedHat, etc.) are very dependent on Mozilla.org's continued existence so, most likely, such companies are significant contributors to Mozilla.org. This situation also exists for Apache Tomcat. In Neo/J's case, I only really see Apple as filling this role and, frankly, Apple doesn't seem to be terribly interested in Neo/J. Maybe that will change in the future, but I don't think it is likely until Neo/J is fully Aquafied.
JKT wrote:
P.S. Patrick - I've looked everywhere for the Paypal link on your planamesa pages but couldn't find it. Do you have a direct link yet?
I haven't posted a link yet for two reasons:
1. I wanted to see the feedback from this topic first.
2. I could really use some help to create an HTML image map for the donation button. I tend to put Neo/J bug fixes first so website enhancements tend to fall to bottom of my "todo" list.
#5. This is probably getting ahead of ourselves, but lets say one of the bugs with a bounty on it is called "update to OO.o 2.0" and there are numerous checkins by several people-- some more substantial than others. Who determines how the $ is divided?
I don't really think that this is something that we need to worry about. Over the last 4 years, the OOo X11 committers has, for the most part, consisted of 4 people: I, Ed, Dan, an Kevin Hendricks. As for Neo/J, only I and Ed have committed any code. This isn't because developers don't want an OOo version for Mac OS X, it is primarily because of the following:
1. There are no paid staff working on OOo X11 or Neo/J - Most of development work done on large open source projects that I have been involved with (e.g. OOo and Apache Tomcat) has a core group of paid developers. OOo has several dozen engineers paid by Sun and both Sun and JBoss have several full-time engineers working of Apache Tomcat. These paid engineers are what keep a project up-to-date and who keep fixing bugs. For OOo X11, there is no such staff to fall back on and all development work must be done by volunteers.
2. It takes a huge time commitment just to get the latest OOo code to build on Mac OS X - each year, some combination of the above 4 people have spent several hundred hours to just get OOo X11 to compile and be reasonably stable. Since most developers have to make a living, they don't have the minimum amount of time available to spend on this largely thankless task.
3. Developers must be very experience doing item #2 before they can work on the sexy code - OOo gets lots of queries from developers who want to jump in and write a bunch of sexy Aqua buttons. However, 99% of them are never heard from again when they run into their first build error.
Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 2:13 am Post subject: Re: Non-profit foundation
jakeOSX wrote:
patrick,
i am serious about the foundation idea. what i'll do is write up a white sheet (or whatever the hell they are called these days) about the idea and post it. maybe start on the non-profit paperwork.
the main points would be funding programmers, hopefully the foundation itself. webspace, bandwidth, a PT cruser so i can be cool like ed, things like that.
While I didn't do the paperwork, I have had experience with a non-profit organization for Macintosh developers.
Some of you may know/remember TopSoft, Inc. - formed before "open source" was called "open source". Its primary product is/was FilterTop.
"TopSoft is an Internet-based Macintosh Programming group. Its mission is to develop innovative high-quality free or minimal cost software. TopSoft is a non-profit organization and membership is open to anyone interested in participating in Internet-based cooperative projects."
Right now the TopSoft web site is down, and we are considering moving the FilterTop project to SourceForge, where we hope to attract new developers.
TopSoft was set up as a non-profit in the state of Utah. TopSoft was also an official Apple User Group.
Being a non-profit in Utah required a certain amount of administrative overhead - company officers and election of same, a physical address, various legal and financial responsibilities.
Requirements in other states may be different.
Just wanted to make you aware that it might not be a simple file and forget. Lawyers may be involved
If you are interested further, I can try to put up a mirror site for the TopSoft site, and make available the various documents pertaining to the non-profit. I can also try to get some involvement from the TopSoft member who got all the non-profit paperwork done. The still active members of TopSoft are aware of my involvement in OpenOffice.org (and I have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to get them further involved in OOo).
I wanted to jump in and post something yesterday (er, Sunday), but I decided to sleep on it instead, and I'm glad I let my thoughts simmer.
I think we kind-of have two topics in this thread now, a "what should Patrick do" topic and a "what should we do (foundation)" topic. Of course, they're connected, but I think the foundation could be better served with its own thread. There are a lot of complexities to hammer out (which was part of the reason I wasn't so gung-ho for the user group earlier). Thanks to Jake for agreeing to look into the details and really get it "rolling." Both the state of Mac OOo and Patrick's disclosure of hours has got me more strongly in the camp (it's like 62 straight weeks of 8x5 in two years, and a year has only 52 weeks!). It'll take some time to get things all sorted out, but I think it's an important medium-to-long-term step.
That having been said, I want to return to the "what should Patrick do" part, briefly, since that can (should ) be implemented fairly immediately.
• Option 1, the PayPal thing, absolutely. Lots of users may not care about a foundation; as someone said, they just want to "pay for" their software, and this does it very easily for lots of folks.
Personally, since I'm in the US, I'd prefer to send a check so that Planamesa gets every cent of my donation, cutting out PayPal's cut, assuming a direct check doesn't cause extra paperwork/hassle. There are also people that seem to vehemently dislike PayPal for whatever reason. So, assuming that US checks are no hassle, an address, or a note to "email if you'd like to send a check" line along with the PayPal button would be nice. Probably repeat the note from the other thread about contacting before sending large donations, too!
• As for Option 2, the "nagware" thing, I think the latest idea of simply opening the patch page (with the donation button) when there's a new patch is superb.
I don't mind nagware if it lets me try the program a decent number of times so I can get a feel for it and see if it is useful before starting to nag me. I tend to try once, maybe twice, and not really get a feel for a program if it nags me on first (and successive) startup. On the other hand, I think just about every shareware app I've registered gave me 30 days or 30 startups first (or no nagging at all, in some cases).
So I think Patrick has made the right call on this one in spending the time coding functionality (patch update checking/notification) rather than nagging, and hopefully the user base with follow-through with the button.
• Not much to say about Option 3. People will complain about licensing issues, it will probably rile up the greater OOo community (despite the fact that, IMO, vocal segments of it seem to be 1) profoundly ignorant and 2) acting like complete jerks towards the Neo effort and the Mac end-user), etc. While by its very nature of not being the Mac OOo (and by the state of OOo) NeoJ creates a tiny "division" within the Mac OOo community, the division is not one I'd like to see exacerbated, because the entire Mac OOo community is getting the short straw from (parts of) the larger OOo world as it is. Option 3 is just BAD, no matter what angle you try to use to look at it (well, aside from possible income, of course ).
So, that's just a long-winded (so much for "briefly"!) way of saying I think we/Patrick have made the right calls IMO.
The issue of getting the scope and history of the project(s) onto the website in a better way has come up before in the time I've been here (since Feb), and it would be nice to see it happen. I've got too much going on right now to help, unfortunately And /. once NeoJ hits Beta sounds about right to me, too. Ideally with the website improvements up
Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 7:10 am Post subject: Foundation
I agree with Smokey that the foundation need its own thread right now. There are lots of things to discuss about it. I propose that someone create a thread in the "Random Whatnot" part of the General section for the time being. It could be moved later or another subsection could be created to cather to this topic alone if there is need for it.
Different things I'd like to see in this new thread:
- The basic structure and organization of the foundation, voting rights, members, board, etc.
- The goal of the foundation (I propose: To promote the development and usage of open-source software for the Macintosh platform). Both long-term and short-term goals should be listed.
- The span of the foundation, that is what kind of sotware it will focuss on, what kind of control over this software will it require if it is to fund its development (eg: Does it require the copyright of funded sotware to be transferred to the foundation?)
- The "marketing" aspect of the foundation.
- Anything else that's related to the foundation.
As you can see, I could envision this foundation as becoming in time more than just a way to finance NeoOffice development.
I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.
Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 11:19 am Post subject: Re: Foundation
Boukman wrote:
- The goal of the foundation (I propose: To promote the development and usage of open-source software for the Macintosh platform).
funny enough, that is almost the exact wording in my white page.
i have lots of thoughts about this, but for now i am going to hold off, post the white paper soon (i hope) and my thoughts for the foundation, or whatever.
and Terry, you are right, it is going to be work, so we all have to keep that in mind as we go.
Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 3:59 pm Post subject: Re: Foundation
So to summarize the discussion so far:
-Paypal account is set up.
-$25 is the standard contribution (pretty cheap compared to $150-$400 for MS Office).
-The patch page is going to include the Paypal link as a fat hint (add one to the non-patch download page and the Help|About menu as well).
-There will be developer bios and NeoOffice history to show what has been done (and therefore what is been paid for) on Trinity.
-A foundation/international user group for funding NeoOffice in particular and Mac OSX open source software in general will be set up. This will be discussed further in another thread in the Random Whatnot section.
One question:
-What to is do about making the bug fixing seem more urgent and dynamic and sexy?
I suggest putting the bugs with the highest priority on the patch page below the paypal button (as upcoming fixes you will be contributing to). Maybe also the bugs with high priority that were fixed in the last release (all of this can be extracted from bugzilla).
Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2004 12:55 pm Post subject: Re: Foundation
ovvldc wrote:
So to summarize the discussion so far:
Hey, I now I was slightly tipsy when I wrote that message, but please don't stop writing here....
I'm thinking to send a message to the dev@porting list to ask about other contributers to OO.org X11. Just to make the credits list complete. I saw there are actually other bug owners than just Dan, Ed and Patrick and there are also a number of other builders and serious testers.
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) be implemented fairly immediately.