COfundOS: a great opportunity for the OSS community

Some days ago I found this great initiative on the net, COfundOS. I would like to share its existence with you, in case you didn’t know, and I’d like to spend some words about this great initiative too.

Some days ago I found this great initiative on the net, COfundOS. I would like to share its existence with you, in case you didn’t know, and I’d like to spend some words about this great initiative too.

 

What’s so great about Cofundos, you may ask?

Well, very simply, in this days the Open Source and free software international scene is not as wide as it should be. Our free community is missing a great number of programs and tools for our free systems or for any other platform. Talking about Linux, for example, there are good hopes for the future about painting softwares thanks to Krita, and we can use ArtRage or Deep Paint for Windows with Wine under Linux but not much more than that. What abut the CAD scene? Absolutely nothing usable available for our free system. And Autocad runs really badly with wine, and only version 2000 works a little. On some systems it works great, on some others it works really buggysh…

 

Where does cofundus comes in this talk? Well, let’s see what it is exactly and you’ll understand everything by yourself. From the cofundos site:

 

Cofundos helps to realize bright ideas, by providing a platform for their discussion & enrichment and by establishing a process for organizing contributions and interests of different stakeholders.

 

So that’s what cofundos does. Anyone can create there a new project, for free. This project has to be an open source idea of some kind, not necessairly an already created project. No code basis is needed for the project to get started, so, simple brainstorming is great too. You can simply create a project with an idea you have in your mind for a new software you’d like to be created by someone else. Or you can also create a project for a simple plugin or extra implementation for an already existing project! For example, you could create a project with the idea for a Gimp plugin, the possibilities are just limited by your imagination.

 

After you create that project, and I suggest you to link an external page with screenshots of mockups or other schemes, sketches and the likes of the project you have in mind, you can add requirements. Things you’d need to be done for the project to be completed. You can add as many requirements as you like.

 

At this point, the project becomes visible and public, anyone can see your idea and consider its possibilities. But not only that, ion this simple way it would be hard for the idea to be actually engaged by some real coder. So what? There’s this great bidding system of course 🙂

You can bid as much money as you wish for a certain task to be accomplished. It works like this: “I’ll pay xx $ / € if this requirement gets accomplished!”. Like a reverse ebay system 😉

You can, for example, bid for 20$ if a certain project is really created. In that way, very soon, the project collects a certain number of bids. If a coder looks at the description and offers himself to create the software / implementation in general, he can contact the author of the project and if the coder really accomplishes to the task of creating the software, he gets the money. Nothing easier than this.

 

Now, we know that this bad world is all about money, there’s nothing to do about it. It’s just reality. With cofundos a lot of free software ideas can have a chance to be actually created for real! And that’s because if a great number of people decides that they actually desire the creation of that software, they can bid for it and soon the total amount of money bidded becomes interesting for any programmer to engage the real project and create it 🙂

 

Isn’t that wonderfull? I’ll surely create a pair of projects, one for Geubuntu and one for some ideas I’ve got in my mind right now.

By the way, if someone offers himself to create your project / software, why not considering InTiLinuX Projects to have all of the perfect instruments ready to go for your work to start? Svn, bzr and much more all at your fingertips! Try it now! It’s free 🙂