To kick off WordCamp NYC this year, CUNY Academic Commons lead developer Boone Gorges  gave the keynote “Free Software, Free Labor, and the Freelancer: The Economics of Contributing.”  We will post a video of his presentation when it is available.  In the meantime, here is a taste of what he had to say:

Free software patronage works … Here’s an example. I wrote a plugin called BuddyPress Docs for a project at the City University of New York called the CUNY Academic Commons. They wanted a way for users to edit documents collaboratively, a sort of hybrid of Google Docs and a wiki, from within BuddyPress. It was clear from the beginning that this was a tool that lots of other BuddyPress installations could use too. I was very fortunate to be working with Matt Gold at CUNY, who has a deep understanding of the broader benefits of free software. So we agreed early on that the plugin would be made available on the wordpress.org plugin repository, and that the CUNY Academic Commons would pay me for at least some of the necessary upkeep on the public plugin. In exchange, the CUNY Academic Commons gets some good publicity. They’re listed as a plugin author. The plugin has been downloaded some 78,000 times, which sounds good when they are writing reports to their funders. And since the plugin was originally written for CUNY in 2011, I’ve parlayed it into a number of other patronage arrangements, with the University of Missouri and the University of Florida each requesting custom functionality which we arranged to have rolled into the publicly available plugin

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But it’s hard to get patronage right. First and foremost, you have to find the right client. They’ve gotta be open-minded – and, ideally, excited – about the prospect of giving away a product that they’re paying for. And in most cases, that product is going to cost them more than it would cost them if it were not intended for general use – as any plugin or theme developer knows, creating something meant to be distributed is a good deal more complex and abstract than something meant for a single client site. Certain types of clients will be more naturally amenable to this sort of thing than others. I work primarily with public universities, where it’s pretty easy to sell the idea of using public funds for work that will benefit a broader public. Your mileage may vary.

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