wxWindows Software Foundation Funding Ideas

Although it's tempting to think that wxWidgets has grown up entirely without funding, a lot of real money has gone into wxWidgets from the start. This includes companies giving employees time to work on wxWidgets, and specific contracts aimed at improving particular parts of wxWidgets.

We have to keep up this momentum, which at the time of writing (early 2004) has slowed down a bit as core developers find it hard to provide unpaid time. We don't have enough volunteers to do essential work, which includes fixing bugs and making sure the ports are up-to-date (for example, proper GTK+2 support). We need to attract funding so that we can make real progress and not let down the many many people who rely on wxWidgets and wxPython.

Here are some ideas for raising money; please let me know if you have another others, or whether you have industry contacts that may be useful.

Products | Other

Products

wxWindows Software Foundation Code Collection
A collection of samples, snippets, classes and articles donated by users and developers. The price differs according to student, personal or corporate status.

Merchandise
The usual mugs, shirts and so on. Hopefully we could also find some more classy items to offer.

Calendar
With contributed artwork, or maybe interesting photographs of locations associated with developers.

Software, books
For example, commission from links to Amazon.

Other

Grants
EU, Foundations...

Raffles
And competitions...

Advertising
Ask wxWidgets users to carry advertising for wxSF products on their web sites.

Consultancy
A proven method, but often difficult to come by.

Employment by sympathetic company
In the Linus Torvalds style, a company could hire a wxWidgets developer and allow him to continue with work on wxWidgets.

Donations
Simple requests for donations. Make a better effort to contact companies such as IBM to plug the benefits of a healthily-funded wxWidgets. Maybe find industry figures who are keen on open source and may wish to donate.

Voluntary levy
Ask users to give a small percentage of their product profit to wxSF. This is the way churches are funded, after all :-)

Optional product price
Developers offering free wxWidgets-based products could offer an optional price. Products that already cost money could have a second wxSF-donation price.

Credit card
A credit card (as used by charities, also known as an affinity card) with a small percentage donated to wxSF.

Exchange
A code-for-licence programme. Vendors of wxWidgets-based tools offer licences for their applications in exchange for (for example) a certain number of bug fixes, or the coding of a much-needed class, such as a native GTK+ 2 tree widget. An extension of this would be to use a complementary currency whereby work would earn 'open source dollars' to be spent at participating companies (for example in this idealised world, one could do a certain amount of work on wxWidgets and then go and redeem the 'money' earned on, say, a laptop from IBM).

Students
Liase with universities and encourage students to work on specific wxWidgets areas. Even if they choose an esoteric project, it may involve some wxWidgets bug fix work.

Free Publicity
Persuade magazines to include free advertisements for wxSF products. Write articles for magazines to promote wxWidgets generally.

Sharez
Offer a collectible token, as in Funding Free Software with Sharez.

Links