[Openfontlibrary] HOWTO Fund Free Culture Development

[Jon Phillips]

On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 02:09 +0100, Dave Crossland wrote:
> 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 :-)

Dave, could you argue for our sake why ccHost should be under
AGPLv3...VS and others in CC have been debating it and GPLv3.


The plan below is interesting...how are you thinking to apply this to
openfontlibrary?

Jon

> 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
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> Openfontlibrary at lists.freedesktop.org
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Jon Phillips
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