How to fund an open source project?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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

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

Answer 2

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.