The "open-sourcing the sciter" post [0] has gained almost no traction, news coverage [1] etc. This hn thread is the first time I heard of this kickstarter myself.
I think with a bit of marketing, the goal is absolutely reachable. Also there are plenty of grants and foundations that support open source projects. It's likely that with the right application they'll donate the needed amount, but usually they work quite slowly. Likely won't happen in the remaining 53 hours.
1. It's a GPL release.
2. None of the rewards are happening in some far-future date. It's all in October (of which there is 15 days left).
Essentially, the proposition is that we the community pay and they will relicense it to GPL. If we pay more then they licence to BSD.
Using Kickstarter to pay for essentially finished goods isn't really the point of the system, and won't really work without a marketing campaign. Now, if grassroots were behind this, then a paid marketing campaign wouldn't be necessary... but the actual customers of ScriterJS, are commercial companies already paying for a licence and won't benefit from a GPL release.
Elsewhere in this thread, people talk about the goodwill the companies will gain if they pay for this project to be open sourced. However open source goodwill is only generated by popular projects, who market their sponsors. The lack of marketing around the kickstarter, would make companies think that their sponsorship won't receive much PR as well.
Lastly, one must ask why the company behind ScriterJS doesn't simply open source it themselves for goodwill and let a community grow organically to support it (via donations or code)? While no one can guarantee on-going support indefinitely, the way this projects release is being positioned makes me think its going to be an abandoned code-dump.
All said, it looks like a commercial company wants to dump their product. If they can get enough money, they'll open source it. If not, they'll just let long-tail revenue trickle in for the next few years to get the same sum of money.
a) It's $100k for GPL. $200k for MIT. I expect the latter is much more interesting to most people but there's no way to pledge for only that.
b) It's still web based. I think the large file size of Electron apps is only part of most people here's objection to them. There's also the general slowness, jankyness, lack of coherence, bugginess etc.
Still, I would have expected more interest than this.
I'm absolutely the target market for this (I've even downloaded Sciter and tried it out before now)... and I had no idea this Kickstarter had been made.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I wouldn't assume there's no interest out there!
It's really sad because this is the first time I heard about this campaign. Had I known earlier I would have pledged sooner and spread the word around.
It's a bit bleak indeed.
The "open-sourcing the sciter" post [0] has gained almost no traction, news coverage [1] etc. This hn thread is the first time I heard of this kickstarter myself.
I think with a bit of marketing, the goal is absolutely reachable. Also there are plenty of grants and foundations that support open source projects. It's likely that with the right application they'll donate the needed amount, but usually they work quite slowly. Likely won't happen in the remaining 53 hours.
[0]: https://terrainformatica.com/2020/09/07/open-sourcing-the-sc...
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=sciter+open+source&tbm=nws&s...