Re: [Fsfe-uk] RFC: Free software project grants

[ian]

On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 15:05, PFJ wrote:

> 
> Ian's simpler version while it's a lot better (in terms of number of
> questions and clarity), still won't make much sense to developers for
> three of the four questions (the exception is the current position). In
> the case of Scribus, we could answer (in order)
> 
> Why is it important : it gives Linux a DTP application on a parr or
> better than commercial offerings
> 
> Current position : two lead developers, one documentor. Software is at
> version 1.1.1 (1.1.2 release may not happen but go directly to 1.1.5).
> Progress is very rapid.
> 
> (we need a question for what the objectives are, the next question has
> been altered)

I had assumed that this was part and parcel of why the project is
important. Its importance is directly related to the objective of doing
it. Scribus is important because there is no other development product
in its category for Linux so a key objective is to provide a quality DTP
package for Linux

> If you were to be self employed, what would the yearly cost in wages be
> for development of your application?

If you were self-employed, the wages would equate to what you could get
for your work after deducting all the costs. Self-employed people tend
to have a different mindset to ones in regular work and don't think in
terms of annual salaries, more in terms of do I enjoy this and if so can
I keep a roof over my head at the same time ;-). I know I can go out and
get a regular job on 60K+ - I did it once a few years back, went through
the interviews etc and managed to extricate myself honourably after 6
months. Why? I hate bureaucracy and I would rather pay myself the
minimum wage and dividends with all the uncertainty and no pension than
work in a large bureaucracy being coerced into things I don't really
want to do. I only have one life so why spend most of it miserable for
money I don't really need personally? Ok, I run a couple of companies,
it doesn't mean I'm any better off financially than if I had stayed in
teaching. There is a lot of folklore about being in business :-)

>  Estimate around 42,000 UKP for the
> developers and possibly 14,000 for the documentation. These would need
> to be converted to the respective currencies and adjusted for taxation
> requirements

Thing is you are assuming that this would work without taking into
account the risk. You would have to get someone to put a lot of money up
front for marketing and risk losing it all. That is a real benefit of
the open source model, it reduces some of the need for this because it
gets propagated virally.

> What's involved and why would funding be good? 

What would you spend the money on? If you simply say we'll do a years
work and that will cost us £56k, please give us £56k and someone else
says give us 10k and we'll provide an application that can do X,Y,Z you
might find that from the funder's point of view the latter is more
attractive because it is based on outcome not process.In business all
that matters is the outcome. If I am buying product or service X all I'm
interested in is what this will do for me. I'm not really interested how
many man-hours it took to achieve. This might sound harsh, but if we
have a lot of people competing for smallish amounts of money the
criteria for funding will be based on the cost-benefit of the outcome to
furthering free software and very little else.

So maybe "what's involved" is bad drafting. Should have said what will
the outcome be. 

> Not actually sure what this means as it's rather vague
> 
> As you can see, the wording has to be clear enough so that it takes not
> much more than 30 minutes to fill in. It would actually be useful for
> someone from FSFE or AFFS to help fill them in as well.

We could designate someone who then has no say in the decision making on
who gets the funding. I could do that sort of thing - I'm doing it all
the time professionally. I have no say in who gets the money but I
advise people about presenting the best case. Obviously depends on the
demand though - I haven't got unlimited time myself. Could also be that
many projects get *some* funding. Also we could say its an advantage if
the project shows how it has achieved part funding from other sources or
proposes to use this funding to trigger additional funding from other
sources etc.

-- 
ian <address@hidden>