I've long thought crowdfunding could be an important source of funding for open source developers. I even built a website designed for the purpose [0], but no one has used it, and (as you'll see if you look) I've let it stagnate for a while. I haven't really tried to publicize it, admittedly, though I post here about it occasionally and hardly anyone ever responds.
Despite this discouraging experience, it still seems to me that the open-source world needs crowdfunding, and Kickstarter-style crowdfunding isn't ideal. Certainly, no significant fraction of open-source development is being crowdfunded yet.
My site isn't the only one trying to get a piece of this market, of course; there are others, and we all have different systems. But the question I'd love to see some discussion of here on HN is, why aren't any of these sites catching on? Why is open source not as good a fit for crowdfunding as a few of us think it should be?
When people type "[port|yum|apt-get|R CMD] install blah" it's not obvious that often unpaid people have spent significant time and effort making, enhancing, and porting the software that magically shows up. I'm old enough to remember when netscape cost $60 and eudora cost $90 or so for an email client, and you where even supposed to pay for winsock to connect to tcp networks. People now seems to assume that software should be fully featured, included, and free.
I do know that I think open source often fails to produce good software for this reason; when unpaid efforts compete with job, consulting, SO, kids, sports, recreation, etc for time it's inevitable they will often be a lower priority; I wish I knew some way to help people get paid and change that.
Despite this discouraging experience, it still seems to me that the open-source world needs crowdfunding, and Kickstarter-style crowdfunding isn't ideal. Certainly, no significant fraction of open-source development is being crowdfunded yet.
My site isn't the only one trying to get a piece of this market, of course; there are others, and we all have different systems. But the question I'd love to see some discussion of here on HN is, why aren't any of these sites catching on? Why is open source not as good a fit for crowdfunding as a few of us think it should be?
[0] https://bountyoss.com/