From: Sven Neumann <sven@xxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 08:37:31 +0100 On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 18:12 +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote: > But I still can't see why it would be a bad thing to allow donors to > donate money to specific features and what legal problems that would > then arise. What would be the advantage if we allowed it? I can only see disadvantages if we allow people to use their money to influence our decisions on the future of GIMP. And I also expect that it will have a negative effect on the overall motivation of developers to work on the code for free. Another thing to keep in mind: nothing prevents individuals from establishing bounties (or hiring consultants) and other individuals from implementing the desired features and either creating their own forks or convincing the GIMP team to accept the feature after it's implemented. But I absolutely agree with Sven: for the project to accept bounties like this is likely to be very disruptive. > The administrative overhead would fall on me to the extent > possible, and as long as patches are GPL and taxes etc are > handled, what legal problems would there be? Maybe these problems > are bigger than I currently see I am sure there are many that you and me can't even imagine. But I don't see the point in discussing the legal and admininstrative problems unless we first come to the conclusion that we consider bounties and feature-bound donations a good idea. And so far the consensus on this list and on GIMP developer meetings has been that it isn't. One very obvious problem is if the feature doesn't get implemented but the money somehow gets used for some other purpose, which could happen very easily if a project doesn't have really good processes for handling this kind of thing -- which would take up resources better used for advancing the project in general. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@xxxxxxxxxxxx Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
