Heh you all talk about investing, yet none of you suggest to invest it
in the one thing that you all hope for the most :P
Business investors are looking to put money into a company or project in
the hopes that that project will then offer them a much better return
further down the track. Forget about earning a paltry 5%-15% from the
money market, even worse if it requires people to divert their attention
away from the project (lost opportunity cost).
Invest directly into OBOS - buy specs, buy hardware for
development/testing, buy licences to portions of code that cut
development time - no point in wasting any money on promotion or
advertising yet. By all means set up a paypal donation box, maybe one
per team or developer - this way the donator decides who gets the money.
Set up a foundation, trust organisation, whatever.. just make sure that
you dont piss talented people off and cause them to leave the project at
such an early stage (again the opportunity cost of them leaving far
outweighs any cash being offered up).
Alternatively this is where the beginnings of distro companies could be
formed (ala mandrake,redhat etc) who can decide who to give money to as
part of a business investment (in the hopes of making a return when they
have a distro to sell). Their decisions would hopefully be based on
investing in the people that are most likely to produce a product sooner
rather than later. But to be perfectly honest, i dont see this route
happening any time soon - at least not in a substantial manner that
could even free up one developer fulltime from their dayjob.
Regards, Nik
