Category Archives: Kickstarter platform

Diaspora

Diaspora promised itself to be the ultimate free software Facebook-killer, and in the process became a blockbuster – the second biggest Kickstarter project ever, at the time. Four university students were inspired to spend their summer building privacy-focused social networking software that gave the user control, after listening to a speech by Eben Moglen.

While software has been produced, after the runaway success of the initial campaign and subsequent pressure to produce a result, the project has struggled to gain traction with a critical mass of users.

Summary

  • Campaign: Kickstarter
  • Campaign date: 2010-06
  • Campaign status: successful
  • Campaign backers: 6479
  • Campaign raised: US$200641 of 10000
  • Project type: new
  • Project license: AGPL

Outcomes

The campaign was in June 2010. The first “pre-alpha” release of the software was September 2010, although that was marred by security problems. In June 2011, Google launched Google Plus, with many commentators noting the similarity of Google Plus concepts to those in Diaspora. In November 2011 one of the original founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, committed suicide. In August 2012, the founders announced that they were handing Diaspora over to the community.

Commentary

Much has been written about Diaspora! Here is a selection. For more check out the Diaspora wiki.

git-annex assistant

“Like DropBox, but with your own cloud” promised this campaign, and it was funded in a single day. git-annex is a plugin for the popular version control system git, which has the potential to be used to sychronise one’s files across multiple machines – a la Dropbox. The campaign was to fund further development on this plugin as well as a graphical interface to it to make it accessible and usable by non-developers.

The initial fundraiser was for three months’ work (one might suspect rather optimistically budgeted); the eventual wild success of the campaign meant Joey Hess, the original author of git-annex, was able to work on these projects for a full year.

From the website –

git-annex allows managing files with git, without checking the file contents into git. While that may seem paradoxical, it is useful when dealing with files larger than git can currently easily handle, whether due to limitations in memory, time, or disk space.

git-annex is designed for git users who love the command line. For everyone else, the git-annex assistant turns git-annex into an easy to use folder synchroniser.

Hess is currently running a second campaign to fund another year of development.

Summary

  • Campaign: Kickstarter
  • Campaign date: 2012-06
  • Campaign status: successful
  • Campaign backers: 951
  • Campaign raised: US$24786 of 3000
  • Project type: existing
  • Project license: GPL

Outcomes

Hess has kept a daily development blog to keep “the Internet” updated as to his progress. He summarised the twelve months’ work and has given several talks at technical conferences about the projects.

Commentary

Schema migrations for Django

Django is the go-to Python web framework, with South a plugin for Schema migration. This campaign was to put the next generation of schema migrations directly in Django core, essentially a rewrite of South. It was funded within a matter of hours. The campaigner is a Django core committer, and the original author and principal maintainer of South.

Summary

  • Campaign: Kickstarter
  • Campaign date: 2013-05
  • Campaign status: successful
  • Campaign backers: 507
  • Campaign raised: £17952 of goal 2500
  • Project type: existing
  • Project license: BSD

Outcomes

TBC

Commentary

By the campaign author: