The FSF is, primarily, an advocacy organization not a fundraising organization.
On Wednesday, September 11, 2013, Germán Arias wrote:
On 2013-09-11 10:58:53 -0600 Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> I wanted to share that the kickstarter will most likely fail to get funding
> at this point, but all isn't lost.
>
> There were a number of fundamental things that I learned from doing this:
>
> 1) Marketing ourselves correctly is extremely important... attracting
> people to help us make the project better is key to making GNUstep better
> for everyone
>
> 2) I should have been more realistic in my goals on the kickstarter. We
> are, honestly around 10.3 in some APIs, 10.4 in others and 10.7 in others.
> An honest assessment of our states on a class by class, method by method
> level is what's really needed.
>
> 3) The period of the kickstarter should have been longer and the goal
> should probably have been around 20K instead of 50K.
>
> The benefits of the campaign have been:
>
> 1) It has raised awareness of the project
>
> 2) It has let everyone know that we are still alive and that we are
> following cocoa and we are both a development environment and an
> environment which will allow porting.
>
> 3) It has brought us potential contributors whom I will contact ASAP.
>
> So, in any case, I am certain that doing the kickstarter was the right
> thing to do. As I said at it's beginning, whether it's successful or not
> it's effects in the first couple of days made it very clear that the net
> effect was a positive one.
>
> I will need the help of the team to decide what the next campaign should be
> aimed at and how best to go about that. I will send another email later
> to follow up on this. In the interim, if anyone has any ideas about how we
> could make it better, please reply here. :)
I still think that request a fundraising campaign at FSF, is a good idea.
Currently Replicant has its campaign, see:
https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-launches-fundraising-program-for-replicant-the-fully-free-android-based-mobile-os
Some months ago GNU MediaGoblin raises more than 60,000 dollars.
I don't saying that GNUstep can attempt this amount. But, could help.
Germán.
>
> Thanks everyone for all of the input, I've learned a great deal and it will
> help us be more successful in our next attempt.
>
> Yours,
>