How to fund an open source project? [closed] - android

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As a thesis for my graduation I'm going to start an open source project: My idea is to port a complete set of mathematical libraries to Android, to perform numeric and symbolic operations, in the form of a programmable calculator like matlab or sage.
I want to release this project under GPL, because I believe that ideas need to be free to work, but I also know that i will spend a lot of money to buy multiple device to do debug and fine tuning.
I thought about selling the prepacked app on the market for 0.99, while giving the source to compile on the site for free. It would be like a small tax on laziness.
What do you think? How do you think I could fund this project?
Note: Feel free to correct my poor grammar and remove this note.

Making money out of open source projects is not an easy task, but it is possible. Clojure's creator Rich Hickey made a wonderful post covering ways to do it. Good luck.

check out Pledgie. There are thousands of open source projects on there, which are getting funded.
http://pledgie.com/categories/open-source

Probably you are already done with your master thesis' , but still though I love the question. I think that open source projects that have more or less an link to academia, there is another opportunity to fund it. National funds are often financing projects, often these are PhD projects but I would assume that there are also possibilities for master thesis' projects.
Another possibility is to try to find a commercial sponsor. As long as you do not need to make a living out of it, it should be comparatively easy to find a company to pay a couple of devices (maybe even HTC, Samsung, Google or any other droid phone manufacturer).

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Multilingual Android Sdk Documentation [closed]

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We have a social responsibility project aiming encourage young people to learn mobile application development. The main problem we face mostly is language. Most of the young people in our country don't have sufficient english knowledge to be able to search or learn something in english. That's why our one of the biggest difference from the world wide tutorial/learning sites is being in native language.
As a supporter of the project in the technical side, we answer questions, write blog posts and try to help people learn mobile application development in their native language. One of the problems i face with while helping people is the inability of providing official references(in native language) about the responses we gave. This problem pushed me thinking about translating whole android sdk documentation to our native language :) I know it's a huge job, we may try to crowd-sourcing it i dont know but the thing i want to ask here is just suggestions about implementation of such a project.
What kind of technology would you use, how would it be possible to stay synch with the recent versions of the sdk. Do you think the current android sdk documentation pages auto-generated completely? Is it just java-doc? How to support multi-languages with java-doc? Or with any other way?
I hope questions will not be closed being unrelated, it is a completely technical question.
Thanks everyone
Interesting question!
I guess not only do you want the Java documentation, but also the tutorials and everything that is provided by developers.android.com.
I think you should ask Googe / the developers of Android directly for support, e.g. here. I'm pretty sure they like the idea and support you with that by giving you access to some feed that keeps the tutorials up-to-date.
An independent solution would be to implement a crawler for developers.android.com and track the changes yourself. Yet I don't know how much effort you can/want to spend on that.
For the crowdsourcing: I did a project once for crowdsourced writing error correction, where we used Amazon Mechanical Turk. It is used for translation too. It is quite easy to build your custom tasks for the crowd and to automate the whole process. They provide a Java API, for example. It costs some money, but is quite cheap in comparison to professional translators.
Just some suggestions...

Learn about android internals(dive deep into the system) [closed]

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Ok, guys, I think that's the right place to ask a question, because it's all about development(if I'm wrong or it's duplicate question, please tell me).
So, I want to dive deep in Android, understand how system works down to the kernel(and also learn what's behind rooting and other hacking stuff).
Where should I go from here? Linux book? VM architecture?
Just downloading the source code didn't help as I don't understand how all that works.
Where should I go from here?
There are two books on Android internals that I am aware of:
One, XDA Developers' Android Hacker's Toolkit, is getting lousy reviews, but that may be because it does not cover much ground beyond what's found on XDA itself. However, if you're not super-familiar with the subject, it may still be worthwhile.
The other, Embedded Android: Porting, Extending, and Customizing, was supposed to be out in July, but it looks like the publication date got pushed out to August. I think that there is an early-access edition on the O'Reilly site for purchase.
Marakana's TechTV series includes a number of videos (e.g., conference presentations) on firmware mods. They, and a couple of other firms, also offer training on the subject.
You are certainly welcome to poke around XDA and its forum posts on firmware mods, but it's definitely more of a community site than a reference guide to the subject.
Beyond that, learning how the Linux OS works (kernel, drivers, etc.) would certainly help, as Android is based on that stuff.
And there's a new book out as of January 2015: At http://newandroidbook.com - Volume 1 of 2, however, with one more scheduled to discuss "deeper" internals
Nice introduction to Android internals is for example in slides for opersys course (http://www.opersys.com/training/embedded-android / courseware tab) - the slides are not fully self-explaining are they are may be a good starting point for next studium..

Where can I find willing open source Android contributers [closed]

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I am writing an application which I hope to build a client for in Android.
However, I am fairly inexperienced in Android development and am looking for droid devs who would be willing to contribute to my open source client.
Where can I find such people? I dont care where they are, just as long as they have a strong grasp on the english language.
*edit: to clarify - I am not trying to recruit people through stackoverflow, merely where such people would register as willing contributors looking for a project, so I can look through their profiles and get in contact with them.
I would post you project on an open source repository website like GitHub or Google Code. And start making commits and post information on the app. Most open source projects start with a few devs and the community kicks in once you have a decent user base. I feel like the best way to recruit people to to put your project out there and show people that it has potential. Then people will want to contribute to it.
Maybe you are looking for Android contributors group.

College group project, brainstorming ideas [closed]

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Two parts to this question
1) I am working with a group of six others in a computer science class and will be creating an Android application over the next 3 or 4 months. I am looking for suggestions as to how we can come up with an idea that is not only practical but also possible to complete in the time given. I am the only one in the group that has experience with the SDK but the whole group is proficient in Java.
My main concern is taking on too much and taking too long to decide.
Summary: How should we go about deciding what we want to do?
2) Any one have any ideas? Is there anything anyone would like to see implemented on Android? I find projects like this are way easier to get motivated for when it isn't just for the class so if anyone has any ideas I am all ears.
How about an android app to do distributed brainstorm sessions. Code up a Google App site as a shared info distributing point and collect the ideas. After collection analyze them and add a scoring system.
Should be fun and doable and you can use it for selecting your next project.
your best bet is to look around for "pain". is there something about your school that drives everyone nuts? can you think of a way to solve it or at least make it a little more bearable in some way? If you solve peoples problems, they will beat a path to your door.
alternatively, you could take something that everyone loves and make it better. these kinds of ideas are useful, but i think you get more bang for your buck if you improve a horrible process rather than incremental improving an already good thing.
You'll have a lot of motivation and can get the support of your friends if you make something you and your friends will realy want to use.
An interesting app might be one for your university. Some universities have official apps, but most don't. This could be interesting because you might be able to integrate your project with resources from the administration (involves talking to other people and working with a foreign interface) or use RSS feeds and XML data from your college's website. You could add features like weather on campus, course lists, an integrated map of the campus, latest school news, and the like. It's a manageable project but can be expanded and improved in many sorts of ways.
Here is a Forum that people have announced a ton of ideas they thought about. If you find one you like then I would look at the market or at AppBrain to make sure it doesn't exist. I thought an app for Parental SMS Watch App would be cool. A parent could flag words that would them alerts when there kids got a message when a word like "sex" comes across. Hope this helps. I have been in the college scene just recently. Good luck with your design project!

Open-sourcing a mobile app [closed]

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I'm considering making an existing mobile app into an open-source project. It has an Android and iPhone version.
While I have used open-source projects and submitted feature requests and bug reports, I have never created an open-source project nor contributed with a patch to an existing one.
What are the top things that I should take into account before opening the source of my project? What specific steps do you recommend taking for open-sourcing a mobile app?
You are lucky as when I started to run open source projects I did not realize this great book exists,
http://producingoss.com/
It provides general tips in almost all aspects of running an open source project, and you can add your own for mobile world.
You can publish you code on googleCode, SourceForge or Github, use all the power of theses websites (documentation, notes etc..) will help contributors.
And don't forget to comment your code ;-)
GoogleCode is a good place to upload your project.
There you will have an issue tracker and a wiki to write about it.
For a truely awesome OSS application I would suggest that you use git. Free hosting for git is provided by github. A good starting point for using git is http://learn.github.com/
As far as FOSS development is concerned, its not very different from usual development. But here you will have to don different roles like product manager, developer and tester too.
Other things that you need to take care of.
Since you are the initiator of it, you need to take control of its development.
Your code should be easy to be understood by others. Documentation is of utmost importance for other developers to start off.
Dont be offended if someone creates a fork of your project. Know to protect yourself by putting appropriate license, like, GPLV3 or any other that you find appropriate.

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