[Openfontlibrary] HOWTO Fund Free Culture Development

[Dave Crossland]

Hi,

Here is a recipe for any user to kickstart the development of any
free software project with no initial funding, including font projects.

I'd like to see the ccHost provide this kind of functionality as an
integrated part in the very long term. Pledgebank is Affero GPL
though, soon to be AGPLv3 I expect, so I hope ccHost will upgrade to
this "web app" license too :-)

Its Tiemann's original business plan for Cygnus, as told by David
Harding [1] and combined with the newer pledgebank concept.

[1]: http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfd-2007/sfd-2007.ogg

1. Estimate the cost of the initial development of the project, "£A"

2. Estimate the number of people who want that development work done
   and are willing to pay for it, "B"

3. Divide £A by B to get £C.

4. Set up a pledgebank for your project for 2B people at £C cost.
   (more people pledge than pay, but if more than B pay, you make
    profit - which made Tiemann a millionaire)
    (www.pledgebank.com is a hosted service and the webapp is
    Affero GPL'd and available for integration into other apps at
    https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/dir?d=mysociety/pb

5. Publicise your pledgebank until enough people sign it.

6. Collect their money - perhaps using the SFLC Conservancy or your
   own USA 501c3(?) non-profit organisation to make payments tax
   deductible in the USA and encourage corporate donations.
   Paypal and SFLC conservancy can carry most the water for you, I
   think - http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org :-)

7. Post a job ad on job sites like gnuherds.org and
    https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/linuxjobs
    (gnuherds source is at
    http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnuherds-app.git and
    integreating it into ccHost would also be great :-)

8. Pay the interested type designers in Google Summer of Code
    style installments.

(I contacted the gnuherds developers and they added "pledgebank" to
their feature request list already, btw)

--
Regards,
Dave