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 _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
