Spare time projects and the "donate now" syndrome · 2006-11-07 04:46 by Wladimir Palant

I guess many of you have seen this development of a project already, maybe even more than once. Some developer has an idea he works on in his spare time. He shares his work with others without asking anything in return and the feedback allows him to improve it to a point where this project gains some popularity. Great features are being added, there are lots of plans for the future — until suddenly the project stalls. That’s usually the point where the developer explains that he needs money that would allow him to spend more time on the project. Spare time projects usually don’t require money to run (or at least not more money than the project maintainer could easily spend) so that this is often the first time money is discussed at all. A “donate now” button on the homepage is a common solution — and there are always enough people willing to help. Yet it doesn’t help.

The internet is a graveyard of abandoned projects many of which have gone through a similar development. What happened there? Since one of the projects on this graveyard is mine I think I can explain.

In 2001 I happened to be a co-administrator of a website that was desperately looking for a good chat system. I decided to develop my own which became my first web development project. With my English being a little underdeveloped at the time it wasn’t exactly a great hit in the USA but it became moderately popular in Germany. And then the web site the chat was developed for ceased to exist. It didn’t kill the project immediately but eventually I noticed that there are more interesting things to do than developing a program you don’t need yourself.

That’s when I made a common mistake of believing that money can fix it. I made a halfhearted attempt at commercializing the project which predictably failed. There is an article from Joel Spolsky called The Econ 101 Management Method which talks about how it is bad to replace intrinsic motivation (urge to create something) with extrinsic motivation (money) — and that’s exactly what happened here, only that it wasn’t some stupid manager who has done this to me but me myself.

Even though I got some money out of the project it didn’t help me continue developing. Without intrinsic motivation money didn’t help. During the last three years I made several attempts at reviving the project and implementing all the great things I imagined for it, yet I never came around to implement more than a proof of concept — after proving to myself that I could do it there was no more gain for me there. Now this project has been released into public domain — without making sure that there is really somebody to work on it this is only another way of declaring it dead.

That’s why I don’t want donations for Adblock Plus. I know that many people would love to help the project in this way but my experience shows that giving a spare time project more money than necessary to keep the servers running never really helps. There are many other options to contribute however.

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