How to fund an open source project? [closed]

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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 ne开发者_JS百科ed 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.

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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.

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check out Pledgie. There are thousands of open source projects on there, which are getting funded.

http://pledgie.com/categories/open-source

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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).