On Sun, 7 Dec 2003 02:07 am, Mark Knecht wrote: > Over a year ago I floated the idea that to get (friendly) support from > these lists you really should pay some money. Just a very small amount > like $1/month or $10/year. If you contribute a bit of cash, and ONLY at > whatever level you're comfortable with, you'd get your name on a web > site of program supporters, and you don't get cajoled when you ask for > help. None of us would have to know what anyone else paid. If you pay a > penny you're covered. > ... > Anyway, thought I'd just share the idea again as I think that there are > better ways to get money into the developers hands on a long term and > sustaining basis. Great intent but I suspect the honest and fair management of this kind of thing is why it doesn't happen. There's all sorts of possible variations on the general theme, encourage developers to put PayPal accounts on their web pages etc, but even if 600 people donated $10/yr, each, sure it would help, but only a little depending on local currency. For a western developer it might be some useful pocket money compared to weeks worth of wages for developers from undeveloped countries. I'm not saying anything that's not already obvious but one way to go would be to emulate what Mark Shuttleworth is doing aimed at the Mozilla project where he has a certain ($3m I think) budget for open source (again, I think) and offers "bounties" whereby developers for projects can apply for funding and if it's approved they get it. In other words I suspect if a more central fund base could be set up where developers apply for more-than-insignificant funding then it could end up being more useful in the long term in that some developers could find themselves employed/engaged full time for many months at a time. It could also allow (the lucky few perhaps) to be more responsive and dedicated towards what they love doing instead of just in their spare time or when time permits. I think there have been, or are right now, systems to do this but the egg/chicken situation exists that a funds base needs to be built up before it can be usefully dispersed and that fund base needs to be trusted before folks will commit real dollars to it. This is a very worthwhile thread so I hope others show some interest in seeing the basic idea evolve and perhaps one model could be an approach to Mark Shuttleworth asking him if he wouldn't mind helping us to expand on the base he already has established, if suitable for our needs, and perhaps he could seriously help kick it off... This is really a general open source issues and not just an ALSA thing so maybe a wider solution could be looked at. Regardless, I'd certainly be willing to contribute if a) it was easy to do so and b) I felt comfortable the donations got to where they are genuinely useful and not unduly siphoned off or frivilously frittered away. I'm not suggesting this is an ideal system or anything but at least it's an example of something that is actually happening as opposed to being just a good and honourable idea... http://markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html --markc
