Yesterday was an auspicious day here at Yorba: Shotwell is four years old. It’s hard to believe that from that rather meager first commit grew the photo manager we have today!
Well, today is another auspicious day here at Yorba. Some of you may remember that last year at GUADEC 2012, Adam Dingle and I gave a keynote discussing how the open source community could attempt to find sustainability via crowdfunding. I’m thrilled to share that we’re ready to put some weight behind that idea: Yorba plans in the near future to begin such a campaign for our newest application, Geary, a lightweight modern email client for the GNOME desktop. Our hope is that a successful crowdfunding campaign could bring in sufficient revenue to make Geary a world-class email application.
We hope that a successful campaign will demonstrate that crowdfunding is a sustainable model for other projects to follow. Many of those projects have historically relied upon corporate sponsorship. Crowdfunding brings with it an independence that these other revenue models lack. It allows us to continue to operate independently and build the features you, the community, really want to see.
One key element to all crowdfunding campaigns is a short video that describes the vision of the project. We plan on producing exactly that kind of video. We would love it if we could include testimonials from our users about the software experience Yorba has provided in the past. Please consider making a short video of yourself (under two minutes) describing your experience with Geary and/or Shotwell: what you like about them, why you use them, and more importantly, one or two of your top Geary wishlist items — features that would make it the perfect email client.
To submit your videos, email geary-love@yorba.org with a link to your video — FTP, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. — along with your name, your work or other affiliation (optional) and your location. We plan on starting this campaign soon, so we need your video testimonials by next Friday, March 15.
Wish us luck, and let us know your thoughts in the comments! We’d love to hear from you.