gEDA-dev: gedaconsulting.com

[Karel Kulhavy]

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 07:58:20PM -0500, al davis wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 December 2006 09:10, Karel Kulhavy wrote:
> > To rub my ego and personal preferences I would suggest here
> > the system of making money on free technology which I
> > designed myself. Develop something, publish details how cool
> > it is and then collect donations until people pay the
> > development and then release it under GPL/GFDL.  It's not
> > theoretical, it practically works on Ronja.
> 
> That looks like a very commercial business model.  Develop a 
> product using your resources or investor's resources.  Then 
> sell it.  It is just a slightly different kind of sale.
> 
> Like commercial, it requires up-front investment on speculation.

Well on Links it also sometimes happened that someone said
"we want Handling of keyboard events in javascript and we'll pay 900 EUR
for it, or "I need a fast gamma correction for my embedded system, I can
pay $65 for it", etc. - our other project, Twibright Links:
http://links.twibright.com/development.php

Sometimes you can negotiatie the price like you say "to cover my costs I need
xxx $/hour, I estimate it to be 20+/-5 hours but of course it can easily run
out of that interval, the other one agrees to pay and there it goes." If he
doesn't pay, no problem - you offer that for the public donations. You don't
even have to make any contract at all - all that happens within the framework I
described previously.

Even it once happened that someone wanted to pay, but he mistyped the bank account
and because other people sent donations, it was paid from that. Then he was pissed
but I don't understand why because he didn't actually have to pay in the end :)

The advantage is that donations are exempt from tax or have a very low tax
rate.  Of course you need to read the local tax law and figure out how the
donation is precisely defined, it may depend on details what is still
considered a donation and what already not (where you have to pay a higher
tax).  But for example in Switzerland it's very liberal - I read the law and
from Ronja donations I don't have to pay any tax at all. In CZ it was like 1%
tax.

CL<

> 
> Also, you leave it open to some entitity that might pay to NOT 
> have it released.  There are some companies in the EDA business 
> that have a track record of doing that.
> 
> What is needed is a way to fund during development.
> 
> 
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