Munwar takes note of a new article by Raven Zachary in Enterprise Open Source Journal titled "The Prince and the Golden Egg."  You can read a "digital magazine" version at ESOJ, and Munwar's got a more manageable PDF version.

It's a worthwhile read not only because it tells the Goldegg story and shines a bright light on the maturity, diversity, and capability of the Plone community, but because it also encapsulates other open-source fundraising stories, including this summer's Drupal development server fundraiser, DadaMail feature fundraising via Fundable.org, the SpreadFirefox effort, and others.

Zachary concludes:

When open source project team members are sacrificing their time and resources to advance a project, and for-profit organizations benefiting from their work are not participating in the support of the project, something is out of alignment. It’s in the best interest of a user—whether an individual or an organization—to support open source projects they are dependent upon. Goldegg was an example of fund-raising in the form of a community/customer partnership.

I believe we will see more such examples of partnerships in the future. We need to look at the issue of open source project fund-raising as a key aspect of supporting open source projects, in their various states of maturity. And we need to turn to both the large community of individual donors and the for-profit organizations that directly benefit from the use of open source software.

More succinctly, I think the larger question is: how do open source software communities develop efficient, effective processes for aggregating the needs of our users, and developing the resources to fund efforts for which the demand is diffuse  -- i.e., where there is no single customer who can afford to pay the full cost of the project?