Peer Production - Funding

How to find funds for peer production projects?

Discussion

Report: Government funding for OS projects

A report at http://www.cepr.net/publications/windows_2005_10.pdf

This report argues that it makes sense to strengthen government funding for FLOSS projects.

"Economist Dean Baker outlines alternative funding mechanisms for software development in a new report called "Opening Doors and Smashing Windows", available at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. One proposal is to create a US government-funded Software Development Corps of public software corporations, which compete and produce only free and open source software. Baker estimates that through the resulting lower prices in software and computers, the government would recoup its annual $2 billion appropriation to the program and US consumers would save $80-120 billion each year -- all while 20,000 software developers are supported to work specifically on open source projects."(Slashdot)

It is worth your while to read the discussion in Slashdot, which shows the libertarian bent of many software developers, opposed to government intervention, at http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/05/223250

More Information

See the special issue of P/I (P2P News), #103, dedicated to Funding for Peer Production, and available via http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p, at 103 - http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2p103

Another take on funding for public goods, by Jamie Love and Tim Hubbard, at http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/hr417/lovehubbard-code.pdf . It's a chapter of the book: Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy. Edited by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005.

The idea of a Patronage Economy, citing the work of Paul David, is discussed by John Willinsky in an article for First Monday, at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/willinsky//index.html