smugmug couldn’t exist without open-source software. Lots of blood, sweat, & tears mixed liberally with open-sourced software (and a bookshelf full of O’Reilly books) = smugmug.

Now that we’re successful, though, it’s been weighing on my mind: How do we give back? We have support contracts for some of the components we use, which is nice, and we’re sponsoring OSCON 2005, which is also nice, but it’s really not enough. Some of the key components don’t have a service & support arm. And while sponsoring a conference about open-source is a nice gesture, it doesn’t put money right into developers pockets, which is really where it belongs.

We’re not successful enough (yet!) to simply hire open-source developers and pay them to continue doing what they were doing. I can’t wait until we’re at that stage, but we’re just not there yet.

So what do we do in the meantime? Simply donate cash to the projects in question? Offer to host their websites and development efforts? Maybe give them some stock in smugmug?

I’d love to hear any suggestions. And if you’re at the con and want to discuss it, look for the guy in the red smugmug hat.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005 at 7:55 am and is filed under personal, smugmug. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.