Tag Archives: 2012

Cobbler

A small-scale campaign to purchase hardware for a project cut loose by Red Hat.

From the campaign, by James Cammarata, the new project lead:

Created in 2007 by Michael DeHaan, Cobbler is a Linux installation server that allows for rapid setup of network installation environments. It glues together and automates many associated Linux tasks […] Cobbler was originally a Fedora/Red Hat sponsored project, and is currently a key part of the Red Hat Satellite/Spacewalk project. Since March of 2012, the project leadership has changed and it is no longer receiving direct support from Red Hat in terms of money or development contributions.

Summary

  • Campaign: Indiegogo
  • Campaign date: 2012-12
  • Campaign status: successful
  • Campaign backers: 27
  • Campaign raised: US$5776 of 4000
  • Project type: existing
  • Project license: GPL

Outcomes

Seems like hardware was purchased, so this can probably be counted as a success.

Commentary

  • Shoes for the Cobbler’s kids – blog post from a VP at Eucalyptus Systems, announcing they would match donations dollar for dollar during the Indiegogo campaign.

Mediagoblin

MediaGoblin is a “free software media publishing platform”, a free alternative to many popular sites: YouTube (video), Flickr (photos), SoundCloud (audio) and the like. It aims to support truly decentralized publishing and sharing. It was borne from a Free Software Foundation meeting in 2008, recognising the lack of response in the free software space to popular commercial web-based media hosting and sharing sites. Minor releases were made up until October 2012 when the crowdfunding campaign began. There was a stated aim to reach v1.0 by the end of the campaign-funded development period.

The campaign reached over 70% of its goal amount, but as the campaign did not follow the “threshold pledge” model of Kickstarter, it has still enabled significant work to be completed. Chris Webber, the main developer, chose to work on MediaGoblin full time for a year (as was the aim of the original target). Webber previously worked as a software engineer at Creative Commons.

Summary

  • Campaign: Independent (FSF)
  • Campaign date: 2012-11
  • Campaign status: partially successful
  • Campaign backers: ?
  • Campaign raised: US$45198 of 60000
  • Project type: existing
  • Project license: AGPL

Outcomes

Since the fundraiser ended, as of January 2014,  5 major versions of the software have been released. Code is hosted at Gitorious. Releases have added support for 3D models, documents, specifying media file licenses, media file gelocation, and improved plugin architecture. Development of an Android app has also begun. The project hosted several interns as part of Google Summer of Code / GNOME Outreach Program for Women in the middle of 2013.

Commentary

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