On Tue, 06 Jul 2004 22:18:35 -0500 "Curtis L. Olson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ampere K. Hardraade wrote: >> >> After some thoughts, I think what FlightGear needs the most right now >> is not money; rather, it should be publicity. Without publicity, it >> will be naive to hope that some kind souls will happened to stumbled >> upon FlightGear. > >
> I believe FlightGear is in a place where it could really benefit from a
> full time project manager and a full time developer (or two (or
> three.))
Or even part-time. I would bet that for many people it'd be easier to
somehow make time to work on the project if at least *some* money was
coming for it.
> We could really move quickly to the next level if we had some
> full time funded people. I don't know how that would happen, and I'm
> not sure we could sustain ourselves economically like that, but it
> certainly would be a huge boost to the project to have one or more full
> time people.
[ snip ]
> Anyway, the point is that we could really benefit from figuring out some
>
> way to get a couple of our core developers going full time for
> FlightGear ... but it will probably take someone with more business
> sense than me to figure out how to pull that off.
Which comes back to $. And yeah, that kind of $ isn't going to come from
donations on Sourceforge or through PayPal.
Idea #1: Linux distributions redistribute FlightGear. Some of them are
commercial. Perhaps some of them are willing to kick some money this way.
It probably wouldn't be a lot, if anything, because there are arguably
many more deserving projects (in the sense of the distro depending on
them more, like e.g. GNOME/KDE/X.org/Apache/etc.) than they can fund.
But there's no harm in looking into it. You could imagine some sort of
formal sponsorship from Mandrake or Novell or IBM or whatever.
Idea #2: This probably wouldn't work, and doesn't fully address the
need for a full-timer; but it'd be a start.
I've seen various posts here from people using FlightGear for a variety
of projects, some of which are educational in nature. Clearly, there's
some benefit to having a free, realistic, easily accessible flight
simulation base out there beyond just entertainment value. So what
about applying for foundation grants? There are zillions of
organizations and corporations who grant money to nonprofits. Some of
these are companies in the aircraft/airline biz; some are organizations
interested in promoting science and engineering education. This is
something I have a small amount of experience with: I helped a nonprofit
emergency services organization I used to be involved with get five
figures for equipment from a foundation grant.
It would take some preparatory work, e.g. the creation of a formal
organization and its obtaining IRS 501(c)(3) status to solicit grants
in the U.S. And the use to which money would be put would have to be
fairly concrete (if it were to go to hire someone, it'd have to be
clear what that person would accomplish -- in fact, what they'd
accomplish would be the actual proposal, with hiring a person to
implement it being described as simply the means).
Just some thoughts.
-c
--
Chris Metzler [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(remove "snip-me." to email)
"As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I
have become civilized." - Chief Luther Standing Bear
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