Re: [tlug] kickstarter for open source...

[Edward Middleton <edward.middleton@example.com>]

On 06/15/2013 11:48 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Edward Middleton writes:

>   > My impression is that they are about providing minimal assurances that
>   > the project is not a complete scam and that it is likely to succeed.
>   > Not all projects are accepted by Kickstarter.
>
> My impression is that Kickstarter doesn't check for scamminess (how
> can they? is it that hard to write a plausible proposal for a creative
> project?), and that according to their site most rejected projects
> violated their content guidelines.  Likelihood of success clearly is
> important to them, they explicitly mention sufficient funding to
> complete the project as a rationale for returning pledges if the goal
> isn't reached.

I don't see there model as sustainable if they cant minimize scams, so I 
would presume they put some effort into minimizing the likelihood that a 
project is a scam.

>   > I think this finite amount of money assumption comes from you assuming
>   > contributers see it as charity.
>
> No, that's not my assumption.  Eventually you do run into a resource
> constraint.  My precise assumption is that project requirements will
> increase much faster than available funding as people become aware of
> this funding source.

Who's requirements?

>   > If as a developer you use it as a barometer to gauge whether a
>   > project has sufficient interest (is worth doing), and more
>   > importantly are prepared to walk away or invest time in other
>   > things, then their is no longer an assurance that non contributers
>   > will get something for free if they wait.
>
> A valid point.  There are two contervailing factors, though.  First,
> this is somewhat inconsistent with developers putting a lot of effort
> into promoting their projects.  Second, at least on Kickstarter, you
> can only post one project at a time, so using it as a barometer is
> inefficient.  On the other hand, use of multiple crowd-funding sites
> wouldn't be very reassuring to your potential backers I suspect.

I guess I could put it another way.  If all your potential contributers 
are convinced you will carry out the project with or without funding 
your contributers will view it as charity.  If they view it as a pitch 
that will get refined or changed until it gets funding then there is a 
risk they won't get what they want if they don't fund it.

I think crowd funding is still in its infancy but it does look to me 
like it could have significant potential to fund the development of 
certain types of opens source software.

>   > If the mailman developers plotted out a good way to make SPAM
>   > filtering easier to setup with mailman,
>
> I don't understand where you're going with this.  Doing it in Mailman
> is bad in principle for several reasons, and I don't see any way that
> calculation is going to change.  This is the MTA's responsibility.
> Our users generally understand that, and that's figured into the
> funding side but ignored on the project side[1] in the ROI
> calculation.

I was just extrapolating from what you said, i.e. what is the root cause 
of the problem that people would be trying to solve by improving SPAM 
filtering in mailman.

Edward