Jeff Atwood recently wrote a great article about how he gave a small open source project $5000 with no strings attached. To his surprise 4 months later the money hadn’t been touched. To me this is a great example of how open source is often about the love and not about the money.
The comments section was of course filled with numerous suggestions of how the developers should have spent the money. One theme that stood out to me was to spend the money on hiring a graphic designer to come in and update the look of their site or perhaps a marketing firm to help them get the word out.
This really resonated with me as I have been contemplating why so few designers donate their time and energy to free products. It is intriguing that so many great developers are willing to give up their free time to create amazing products while there appears to be a dramatic shortage of designers, marketers, technical writing, and other “support”(for lack of better term) personnel willing to donate their time.
Is it because only developers are using the products? This certainly isn’t the case considering some of the greatest applications out there are open source. Perhaps instead it is because the products these professionals are currently using are not opens source.
Perhaps more important than dwelling on why there is a shortage we should be looking for a solution. I have on many occasions made comments to friends and colleagues about perhaps supporting an open source product by creating a comp, or giving them usability advice.
With that in mind I am guilty of not contributing as much as I should. Most of my digital exsitence is now dependent on open source products and as of late I have not been contributing.
