Open Source Weblog

First came the OSDL's Technology Advisory Board, followed by Red Hat mulling over plans to expose its internal test framework as an open source project while investing in new open source developer tools.

Then came the first move from the OSDL's TAB - asking for money. The OSDL has responded with the Fellowship Fund, which will help fund key open source software projects, providing financial support to software developers working on Linux and open source projects that don't have immediate access to financial resources or support.

It's a fine idea, and an interesting move from the OSDL, which has previously been more vendor-focused, having been set up in 2000 by the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, CA, Intel, and NEC to promote the use of Linux.

Despite employing Linux creator Linus Torvalds, kernel maintainer Andrew Morton, and Samba creator Andrew Tridgell as OSDL Fellows the OSDL has previously not had the greatest of relationships with the developer community, and the creation of the Fellowship Fund is a good way of proving that it isn't just interested in vendor-led projects.

There might be some question as to who will benefit from the fund. Surely if a project is good enough it will already have picked up some kind of sponsorship, either in the form of vendor support, or vendor employment for the core developers?

That might be true for projects once they get on to the mainstream radar, but there are plenty of early stage projects out there that could easily slip under the radar, particularly as some of the best ideas don't actually prove their worth until years after they are first thought of, as technological maturity and lowering prices bring them to the masses.

There's also the likes of Nagios creator Ethan Galstad to consider. "Its true that joining with a company to commercialise Nagios *could* be beneficial to future development, but I'd be willing to bet that in 99% of all such scenarios there would be more problems than anything created by such a move," he wrote recently.

"Don't get me wrong - I do believe that OSS projects need financial backing to succeed in the long term. However, you don't need to commercialise your OSS project or adopt one of the popular Open Source business models to succeed in generating funding," he added. "I'm talking about generating enough income to sustain the OSS project and its ideals, so that it can continue to flourish, unencumbered from potential conflicts of interest."

Generating that level of sustaining income is a challenge in itself, and it sounds like that's just the sort of problem that the OSDL Fellowship Fund could help developers overcome.