How about a $10 tax on top-posters.
A little more seriously, you might get some professional help from a
university or charity "development officer". These people raise money
for a living. Ask some for some advice.
One of the issues will be: financial statements for the organization.
It's not really transparent about what revenue OBSD gets or where it
goes. Obviously, there are some privacy issues. (Who feeds Theo and
what does he eat?) Is the $20k per year electrical bill a big or small
part of the overall costs? (Actually I don't expect an answer to this,
not here anyway. Be aware that big $$ comes with big questions.)
The request was made for funding by a corp.
I'm just a lurker with some small corporate experience. Here are some
opinions: OBSD doesn't fit into some corps because it is not 1)
auditable, in that commercial products do not measure it for defects,
compliance, or anything really. This renders it unusable: in Canada,
for NI 51-xxx compliance, or PCI compliance, or in US DoD environments
for STIG. 2) not visible, in that it is complete off the radar of "IT
weekly" or suchlike websites. If you don't see it, you wont try it.
3) not valued for the contribution that OBSD makes to upstream and
competitive products. This is already well explained. Corps are not
going to part with money (just) for this reason.
So, if the corps wont pay, and the market is, aside from some astute
ISPs, not really corporate driven, how can OBSD expect to gain some
revenue from a big corp? My suggestion is we need to have lots of corps
interested in order to get 5% of them to pay your way.
Yes, this is prescriptive. Yes I'm aware I can expect a big pushback for
telling developers you "are supposed to do the extra work". Don't.
Instead, tell me if this prescription is correct and/or wrong, or what
is a bigger opportunity to gain corp support.
--J
