FreeGameDev

A few (or a lot) of you might have heard of all the kickstarter game campaign craze going on at the moment, but if you would prefer funding FOSS related projects (or are looking for music/video creation software), these projects may be of interest to you:

Open Octave Studio
Free music software
Goal: $50,000
Tue May 15 at 11:59PM PT

Kdenlive Refactoring
Video editor
Goal: $4,000 (reached)
Mon Apr 30 at 11:59PM PT

http://debian-handbook.info/liberation/
Debian handbook liberation
Goal: 25000 Euros (90% reached)
No time limit

http://mango.blender.org/
Latest Blender movie project
Goal: -
Release date: August/September 2012

http://freegamer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04 ... l-cup.html
http://lpc.opengameart.org/
Liberated Pixel Cup: Free culture/software game competition
Goal: 10000$
Donation deadline: June/July?

There is also a crowdfunding platform focused on free software called Elveos, but they are quitting, if they can't find someone to run the communication.

Other:
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Non-FOSS:
CraftStudio
Real-time collaborative game-making
Goal: $16,000
Fri Apr 27 at 11:59PM PT

"Too late":
The Blender Video Editor
Goal: $8,000
Thursday Apr 5, 6:24pm EDT.

Info sources:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1946197
http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/04/help ... -open.html

The following may also be of interest:
Open source games that accept donations

Just a little update: The Debian administrators handbook liberation operation reached its goal!
http://debian-handbook.info/2012/libera ... few-weeks/

I was considering creating a new topic, but I'll update this one instead for now.

I discovered a new crowdfunding site today via a LanPower article:
http://funding.openinitiative.com/
They only seem to have one project at the moment: funding a port of multiinstall.

Should we add a list of FOSS crowdfunding sites to the wiki?

Apart from that user Buovjaga has kept updating the list of FOSS crowdfunding campaigns. Please have a look.

The OpenOctave campaign was way too ambitious.

The kdenlive campaign was a great example on how to do it; target one specific feature at an attainable cost.

Unless you have some kind of "brand" recognition (think: famous game designers making reboots of old classics) or a disruptive new technology (Ouya etc) then you are limited to your users and what they can afford. Don't ask for too much.

charlie {l Wrote}:Unless you have some kind of "brand" recognition (think: famous game designers making reboots of old classics) or a disruptive new technology (Ouya etc) then you are limited to your users and what they can afford. Don't ask for too much.

If I may add to that, your product usually has to be commercial for it succeed. You can get OpenOctave at the price of precisely zero. But for the Ouya for instance or one of the games raking in millions on the likes of Kickstarter, you also get a copy of the game which will eventually be sold.

I think if they're aren't any real, tangible goals relating to the product itself, people are far less likely to pay because the product is free as in price.

Also, I think the campaign is weakened by the fact it's on Indiegogo. Since it's a flexible funding campaign, the three thousand dollars or so that have been raised will go to the developers, but I doubt this will entice them to quit their job so they can work on OpenOctave for 2 months. I'd suggest Kickstarter instead, which is a much more popular platform and that's what crowdfunding is all about.

Honestly, by the way, I hadn't heard of OpenOctave before (and I've looked into that space a bit - Ardour and Qtractor come to mind) and when I read the name, I thought it was an IDE for the GNU Octave mathematical programming language! So yeah, add one more thing to my lengthy addendum - make sure your project is very popular.