[Axiom-developer] Funding open source

[TimDaly]

I had an interesting discussion with a finance professor from
the Univ. of Pittsburgh. We were discussing the issue of
funding open source software.

The suggestion came up of approaching sourceforge or their
parent company to set up an organization to handle money.

The funding would not cover pay but would cover funding for
group travel to a common location.

The idea is that this parent organization (SF has 165k projects,
and 1.7M registered developers) would get block grants from
various sources (NSF, IBM, RedHat, etc). The individual projects
could submit grant requests to cover funding for travel to a
common location, for meetings or sprint days. The parent
organization handles the paperwork of reimbursements for
travel, lodging, and other covered expenses by creating and
managing sub-grants.

This has the advantage that there is a financial accounting
organization handling the funding so the NSF can deal with
them. Overhead for running the organization would come from
the block grants (ala the Provost-style money grab at any
University).

This model of funding seems to answer the fundamental
question of how does money from places like the NSF get
to individual projects.

Additional funding tasks might involve packaging, advertising,
travel to conferences with accepted papers, and "top 10 awards"
for projects that are most used within a given timeframe.

Comments?

Tim