richard... you miss a key nuance/point to the msg. her idea/thought was twofold. 1) whether companies would have ideas/projects that they would be interested in partially funding, and 2) if there would be a 'talented' pool of developers who would be interested in working on the initial apps. there are a lot of ideas within companies that don't ever make it to full blown products. the basic idea would be to setup a structure and to find companies that have these projects. the project could be a possible add on to round out the biz offerings, it might be a test for a new direction/product, it might be a project that you fund for competitive reasons, etc... the intent would not be to secure complete funding to fully create/market/sell the product/project code (that's what the vc is for!!) rather, the goal of the structure would be to 'jump start'/test apps in a relatively fast/efficient manner. the structure would be set up to get the projects, manage the projects, distribute the initial funding, based on the project goals... the question was whether there are talented developers who'd want to participate in this kind of function/structure. there are already a great deal of conusulting companies who look to businesses for consulting/development/design work. this kind of model would simply be an offshoot of that kind of approach. -bruce -----Original Message----- From: Richard Lynch [mailto:ceo@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 7:29 PM To: bedouglas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: php-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: to the freelancers!! On Thu, November 3, 2005 7:15 pm, bruce wrote: > Just a quick question. Had a conversation with a person who works for > a > non-profit, and she was describing some of her dealings with obtaining > grants for the development of 'open source' apps.Got me to thinking. > If a > company sponsored the initial development of an 'open source' kind of > app > (the exact licensing would need to be fleshed out) what do yout think > would > be the response of people to work on the apps.. > > I started to wnoder if there would be a pool of talented people who > would be > interested in working on projects that are initially funded. The > funding > would go to pay the resources, set up the project, do initial grass > roots > marketing, etc... The idea would be to focus in on the > projects/technologies/apps that a given business would agree to > initially > support/fund. > > Thoughts/comments/etc... > > -bruce > bedouglas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > > ps. I'm not talking about a freshmeat.net/sourceforge kind of > environment. > The obvious goal of this kind of process would be to turn small > applications/projects into profitable applications. My curiousity is > whether > you could then create applications/services that could be built along > the > same model as nagios/mysql/etc.. where you have a free/open version, > as well > as a fee based application/service. I think there was a Penguin MasterCard/Visa company set up for something very much like this... Though that was to just fund the projects, not to build companies around them. LinuxCard, was it? Also, in a loose sort of way, your description matches something commonly referred to as the "dot boom"... and the "dot bomb" for that mattter. :-) There were a ZILLION start-ups with cool ideas, no friggin' idea whatsoever of how to make revenue from it, and zillions of dollars blown on pinball machines and beanbag chairs for the developers. Ah, the glory days. :-) I think the trick would be to find the right project, sponsors, and people, rather than to just express the general idea as you have above... Sort of like this post: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7614 -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
