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Has crowdfunded development ever worked?
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Posted by Paul Korm
Dec 13, 2017 at 04:59 PM
I saw today a release notice for MailMate 1.10 and was reminded of the crowdfunding campaign in 2013 or so, for MailMate 2.0 development, that never seemed to actually deliver a product—though MailMate is still around. Or the crowdfunding for Butler (v5 I think was the promise) that never delivered. Butler is still around, but hasn’t had an update for years. Or the money raised by the NovaMind crew for new development, before it went bust. The fellow promised apportioned refunds, wrote us funders several long and mysterious emails, over the course of a couple of years—explaining his banking problems, and then disappeared early this year. Novamind is now under new ownership and a subscription model.
I paid into all those schemes. Since none of them has paid off, I got to wondering if crowdfunded development has ever paid off.
Posted by Hugh
Dec 13, 2017 at 05:04 PM
I don’t know of any, Paul. I had a similar experience to you with Novamind. I don’t plan to repeat the experience - once bitten, etc etc.
Posted by Jon Polish
Dec 13, 2017 at 05:30 PM
A long time ago there was all sorts of activity to resuscitate Ecco Pro. As I recall, some included purchasing the code, fund a developer to create a modern Ecco, etc. All came to nothing. Ironically (and happily) IQ was developed without going the crowd funding route. Pierre is a perfectionist, but from my standpoint IQ is virtually complete, fully functional and very stable. Also ironically, a programmer named Slang developed an extension for Ecco which significantly added to its feature set. This was also provided to the Ecco community gratis.
Jon
Posted by washere
Dec 13, 2017 at 05:34 PM
Yes a lot of people revived money on crowdfunding platforms. Many if not most went bankrupt, ehem: got a lot of money via publicity etc etc. And went on to other money making schemes.
Crowdfunding latforms being clever commission based businesses themselves, no lose operations, like mafia bookies, making billions in profits and evaluations in last few years alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySxHud7abko
Posted by washere
Dec 13, 2017 at 05:40 PM
Phone browser posted my last post early, instead of paste a link. Here it is anyway, South Park explains crowdfunding well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxjQgP3ikZM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXOywGjYuIk
Thank you to all those numerous people who made others rich without delivering anything.
Thank you, come again! Next?