Re: Funding GPL projects or funding the GPL?

[Keith Adamson]

On Sat, 2002-07-27 at 13:46, Roger Larsson wrote:
> On Saturday 27 July 2002 18.22, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 27, 2002 at 01:06:56PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > Actually, that's an interesting topic.  Other applications could use
> > the BK model of "free if you're out in the open" and pay otherwise.
> > It's pretty effective.  However, it doesn't work very well when the
> > community beats you to hell for not being GPLed.  I had a thick enough
> > skin to deal with it, I doubt others would, they'd give up.  It also
> > doesn't work when people refuse to obey the license because they 
> > don't agree with it (we had plenty of that).
> 
> Trolltech does the same. And have taken the same amount of heat.
> (Probably A LOT more... since their Qt is the base for KDE)
> 
> /RogerL
The problem with the present type of donation systems is knowing your
donation is not going to be abused.

I though a model that may work is a United Way type of model ... have a
central non-profit act as a clearing house for donations to specific
open source projects.  The non-profit would do the proper account
reporting of receipts, overhead, and funding to the various open source
projects (an effort to keep donation abuse down and allow open non-bias
account reporting).  Allowing either a general donation or target
donation from the public to a particular project.  Then a specific
project would register with the non-profit to receive funding help.  In
order to qualify you would need to provide certain technical/financial
reporting of your project to the non-profit to demonstrate you need the
financial help and you are working on a needed project.

The real problem is getting something like this started.