Tag Archives: lwn.net

Yorba and crowdfunding at LWN.net

Nathan Willis at LWN.net has written a great article summarizing the keynote Adam Dingle and I gave at GUADEC, “Crowdfunding GNOME Application Development” (PDF slides are here).  For those of you who missed the talk, Nathan’s précis gives a nice overview of our presentation and the questions afterwards.  He also offers a concise explanation of today’s problems with funding open source development:

All open source software faces the same challenges when it comes to raising the money to keep developers at the keyboard. In recent years, Linux distributors have underwritten the development of desktop software through the sale of enterprise services and support contracts of various forms. Users have grown accustomed to that situation, and there is certainly nothing wrong with it, but Dingle and his colleagues at Yorba have shown that no one needs to accept that as the only viable funding model.

Read the whole thing here.