rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

UPDATE and NOTE: This is a year old post, so its not up-to-date…oops…clearing the queue…The original post is here.

I’ve been trying to come up with unconventional ways to raise money for the small non-profit. Yesterday, someone decided to auction off their old web domain and give 90% of the money to Creative Commons. So, I started to think about all the code that is sitting on developers’ shelves, old domains, etc. I wonder if other developers would consider auctioning off domain names, old code, etc, and or just outright donating old code, domain names, etc. to Creative Commons. This code would get licensed so that it would be Open Source and I would even take the time to make a place for it that would be visible and accessible.

Does anyone have any code, failed or sleeping dot.com projects, and/or domain names they would like to donate to CC? CC could then decide what to do with these (auction, put online, developer further, etc). From the likes of the domain name auctions on Ebay, this is a great way to raise funds. However, I’m quite surprised that not more people are trying to sell their code on-line on ebay.

Also, I just now started to wonder about how to apply the similar logic of fundraising of naming certain properties after people, for the web. Like, how much of a donation would it take to get certain tools, sections of a website, or campaigns named after donors?

Maybe I should try this for my site. I could name my next open source tool after someone, for a donation of $1000 USD. Hmmm…maybe I should rename an old project if anyone is interested in this Ideally, also, the name would just be a name and the code would all stay as open source.

What other unconventional tactics can other people think of that would help CC or any nonprofit in the world, raise money to stay in operation? What new possibilities are there? So much time and money is spent on adapting and revolutionizing business, but what about simple nonprofit operations like fundraising?

So, I just read Harold Welte’s blog post about the delays on OpenMoko and how it is basically a cultural issue. Their team has basically 4-5 Open Source hackers and a team of about 50-60 (I’m guessing slightly). Thus, most of these workers I’m assuming are in Taiwan and China and have rarely touched Open Source, nor have come into contact with the culture of Open Source development. Harold notes:

In the end (up to now) I have been doing tons of more things. I’ve been doing hardware related debugging, hot-fixing and consulting, providing lots of support for our internal development team, doing all the system administration, configuration and maintenance of our four physical and about 15 virtual machines (wiki, lists, gforge, svn, build server, etc.). Today I even spent a lot of time on web related issues [hey, I haven't done much web stuff since HTML4 and CSS1 came out], since we have committed to go public with our web sites public at some point.

We’ve had to teach people how to use request tracker, bugzilla, subversion, mailing lists, IRC. Those basic means of communication, natural for everyone ever involved in a FOSS project are all things that we had to bootstrap here.

Many of the things that are a complete given for me (and even us, the rest of the core team consisting of Sean, Werner, Mickey and myself) are not at all known, valued and/or respected [yet] by the various people and entities we had to relate in this project.

This problem is so very familiar to when I worked for Gopets in Korea. While my friends and colleagues there are some of my best friends, the economics and culture of Open Source had not struck. Thus, I spent so much of my time just helping people get up to speed on what is Subversion (how you need to check-in often), bugtracker (which no one used), and other forms of communication. It took much energy, but I slowly helped to convert a few people.

So, when I read Harold’s post about these issues, I immediately started to think about how to get more people into Open Source in Asia, particularly Mainland China and Taiwan.

First of all, nothing can stand-in for pure experience. But, for crash course cultural learning for developers and others, I think it should be mandatory learning to read Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software book. Oh, and guess what, the book is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 1.0 license. So, not only is it available, all the sources are available. Thus, anyone could help translate this book.

So, my question out into the ethos is, do translations of this book exist? And, if not, would anyone out there in Taiwan and China be interested in helping to translate this book? I’m really serious, this endeavour would be of huge benefit to the world of Chinese and Taiwanese companies breaking into Open Source and for companies that have some form of outsourcing. Please comment on this post if you know of a translation and/or would like help translate this book. The sources are online, so we could submit a patch to Karl Fogel.

I just emailed Karl to see if he is into these things, as you can see:

Hi Karl, first of all, your book is a classic. I have a book that I’m putting out that deals with the issues you bring out so clearly, with relation to social sciences.

However, the reason I’m emailing you is to both say hi, from Creative Commons, as I see that you book is CC BY-SA licensed. I am the community developer/open souce developer/bizdev guy for them…so so happy to see your book is under cc license.

Also, I’m interested in translations of your book, particularly into Complex and Simplified Chinese? I want to help teach some people in China about Open Source, and your book is a must read.

Do translations exist, and if not, I’m advocating this. If translations get made, would you consider linking to them and or accepting them as patches to your SVN module?

This would be amazing for outsourcing companies, etc.

You are great.

Oh, on Open Source side I’m a core developer on Inkscape and Open Clip Art Library…

Cheers!

Jon

So, first off, looks like Democrats are taking control of the House and Senate hopefully repealing and changing the current bad state of the United States. Then Rumsfeld resigns his post! What a great day!

I’m also feeling optimistic about the Microsoft/Novell deal now as well, as the complexities of it unfold.

Then, come to find out, one of my areas of major interest, Open Source Cellphones received a major boost with the announcement of the OpenMoko phone and Harold Welte’s involvment. This is great because I will be speaking at a conference in Taiwan in January, so hopefully can connect them up with Creative Commons Taiwan so we can get some properly licensed content onto these phones.

Oh, and to top it all off, tonite is the 10th Creative Commons Salon in San Francisco where the Homebrew Mobile Club, featuring Matthew Hamrick (who works for ACCESS, used to be palmsource) will be presenting about the “Complete Open Phone.”

UPDATE: The good news doesn’t end now that I see this post that Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt is calling for making data EXPORT a key strategy and encouraging others to do so, similar to something I wrote in the past. This is so great. I want to work with Google more!