On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 09:54:14AM +0200, Dave Neary wrote: > > With commercial software the "I'm paying money for this software" > argument carries some (but not much, in my experience) weight with the > maintainers, which it obviously doesn't with Free Software. At least in theory, this can work with Free Software as well; there are various "bounty systems" that are around, which allow some number of people to get together and offer money to someone who will add some particular desired feature. In the case where N==1, it's the way most classical music was written (i.e., a patron sponsoring a composer's work), but the advantage of the Internet is that it is possible to more easily aggregate a large number of people getting together over the internet to pay for a particular feature, which is then available for everyone to use given that it is Open Source. This has been used to pay for an author to write a book that two publishers considered not economically viable (The Big Meow, at http://www.the-big-meow.com). As another example, Codeweavers (www.codeweavers.com) have a bounty system allow users of make CrossOver office, their commercially supported version of WINE, an open source program which allows people to run Windows executables on Linux, support various proprietary programs which aren't supported on Crossover Office and/or WINE. Programs that have enough bounty money pledged get worked on first, and the improvements show up first in Crossover Office, and eventually make their way back to the open source version of WINE. Attempts to try to do this on a more general scale have failed (www.openculture.org is gone, www.bountysource.com has a website which is still up, but the folks running it are planning to shut it down due to lack of time on their part), but I suspect that if someone were to set it some kind of aggregation/escrow service as a non-profit organization, there's no reason why it couldn't work; the hard part is getting enough the patrons and the programmers and/or artists to embrace it so it can achieve critical mass. This is getting a bit far afield from the original thread, or this mailing list for that matter, though... - Ted _______________________________________________ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@xxxxxxxxx https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
