This comment makes me wonder why he suddenly needs money for it now. Many huge projects started without kickstarter, even if they receive lots of contributions and donations nowadays, they never used to need it.
Hmm, and I remember some post on HN a few months ago about why open source projects should not ask for money/donations in the first place. The crux of it was that they basically become a company then: they work for money. People will expect something for that money, and A) features might be made simply because the developer feels he needs to do something in return for they money he's getting and B) people who donate a lot (i.e. have a lot of money) get a huge say in the project even if their ideas turn out to be horrible in practice.
The TC post includes this quote from Xiki's author. "If this campaign succeeds, the money will let me dedicate the time needed to bring this next, drastically improved, version of Xiki to the world."
Apparently he's looking for about one year's worth of money to work full time on Xiki. Why he didn't do that before, I don't know and it doesn't matter much. But using Kickstarter he's able to be very specific about what one should expect to get as a reward. Example: 35 $ buy a t-shirt and 10 votes for vim or sublime support, no specific features. 2k $ buy a command for your company. He writes "See the Twilio command in the video for an example". So it's true that if you donate a lot you get more. If only companies from a specific domain fund Xiki it could turn out to be a very domain specific shell. However being strong on a vertical market could be a nice strategy. Unfortunately it's out of Xiki's control.
Hmm, and I remember some post on HN a few months ago about why open source projects should not ask for money/donations in the first place. The crux of it was that they basically become a company then: they work for money. People will expect something for that money, and A) features might be made simply because the developer feels he needs to do something in return for they money he's getting and B) people who donate a lot (i.e. have a lot of money) get a huge say in the project even if their ideas turn out to be horrible in practice.