Great funding model: Adopt a line of code

I think this is a great example on innovation.<p>"When you adopt, you'll get: an official adoption page, a cute image of your line of code (watch it grow over the year), badges for your blog or website, and your name will be listed in the 'about' box in every copy of Miro (more than 5 million a year and growing)."<p>I also want a t-shirt with my line of code please :)

They add a special message below the fold for people in Europe:<p>"Hello there! It looks like you are visiting from Europe.<p>Did you know that there are more Miro users in Europe than in the United States, but more than 99% of our financial support comes from American donations and philanthropies? Europe loves open-source, right? Help us make something great!"

What if your line of code gets deleted during refactoring?

The Tamagotchi funding model... neat. I like the idea, very clever. Though I wonder what happens to your line of code if it gets deprecated...

Christ, $4 a month is a bit steep isn't it?!

It's not a 'great funding model' - frankly, few nonprofits spring to mind that have found one; my main criticism of this lies in long term interest - the success of this is buzz-based, and like million dollar homepage, that's going to pass, maybe sooner than they expect; but it <i>is</i> a nice implementation of an innovative way to get donations and build attachment to something so obscure and (to the end user) abstract as the code running software. Miro will garner a lot of goodwill with this offbeat stunt, that's bound to be a good thing.<p>now, who's going to start selling 'adoption' of modules/objects/libs that get incorporated into lots of other projects? "Hi Daddy, here's where I've made myself useful this month (links to projects where the snippet is found on google code/sourceforge/github/etc). By the way, my biological father/mother has another kid up for adoption!"

That is an incomprehensibly gorgeous page.

i = i + 1 # this line sponsored by Ethel Moskowitz in honor of her grandmother

silly question: if this is successful, won't it lead to an incentive for the developers to add unnecessary extra lines of code, sort of an anti-refactoring - "how can I express this in more lines..." - in order to increase the number of adoptable lines?

i'd rather see people adopting very small modules. possibly people could bid on them based on the module elegance and usefulness and extensibility, etc. lines of code can get removed, whereas concepts tend to stick around, plus motivating well designed modules is better than motivating greater number of loc.<p>every month that goes by without a bug, the module slightly increases in value, or the donator gets paid a dividend.

does it cost less to buy a closing brace?

Not fair, the ruby people are going to get the least funding!