Here's a hare-brained idea that's been in my head for a few months, so I thought I'd go public with it.
I've got no development skills, but I've got capital. I am desperate for a Wiki module, but one that has the rich features of the PHP-based Mediawiki (which runs the Wikipedia at www.wikipedia.org). With volunteers this could be another year or two away.
Now suppose I used my capital to hire developers (through www.rentacoder.com) who could develop the module to these specs. (I've used rent-a-coder before with great success). I tested the water on this idea (Mediawiki for DNN) a few months back and estimate it would set me back US$2000 or so (accept $2000 for the argument's sake). One nice aspect of Rent-a-coder is that the buyer retains 100% of all IP (this is explicit in the contracts).
However I don't want to start my own DNN module business, and I'd prefer to see the source in the hands of the DNN community. So I'd donate it. But... I don't want to be out the entire $2000 either (I'm only charitable to a point).
So I thought, if I could recoup some of my money, I'd be more than happy to hand it all over. So follow this train of thought:
- I hand the source (and associated rights) over to Perpetual Motion/SBWalker, along with solid proof of my out-of-pocket.
- Upon assessing the quality of the source and verifying my out-of-pocket expenses, etc, Perpetual has a funds drive to raise say $1900 to reimburse me. That's less than $2 each from 1000 people.
- Net result - a new module, professionally developed in a short time frame, which belongs to the DNN community. I'm out an acceptable sum and I get the warm fuzzy feeling of having added to the project, despite the fact that I can't write code.
It's a crazy idea, and dangerously straddles the line between user-pay and voluntary. But I've seen Wikipedia raise over $100 000 in a few weeks to buy new servers, and that was just voluntary donations.
Can any part of this idea work?