Changes and complaints
Changes and complaints
Posted Feb 23, 2012 9:46 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643)In reply to: Changes and complaints by naptastic
Parent article: Changes and complaints
The Kickstarter model is interesting - while that's to fund large-ish projects for new films/products etc, the same model of pledging $X to a feature could be used to raise enough cash to fund a developer - or at least to give them some income to help out, even if not covering the full cost.
I'm not saying cash should be the only driver, and developers would still work on what they want to mostly, but if users want something and it's a reasonable feature/fix, why not allow users to contribute directly to that feature rather than a general donations pool?
Posted Feb 23, 2012 10:48 UTC (Thu)
by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
[Link] (3 responses)
If everyone who complained about Gnome3 handed over $10 or so it would probably be a fair sized kitty to keep Gnome 2 running well... or something.
Of course the "or something" is a difficult bit and making a system that is transparent and reliable would be a real challenge. But I think there is a real need here.
I think people are willing to pay, and other people are willing to do all sort of things if they were free from having to earn a living. But getting the middle-ware working is still an unsolved problem.
Posted Feb 23, 2012 12:56 UTC (Thu)
by dan_a (guest, #5325)
[Link]
For small changes to existing projects this should be something an individual user could fund. For bigger changes a group of users could get together to raise the funds. It would then be up to you to decide whether you wanted to try and get the changes committed to the main codebase or maintain them as your own private patch.
Posted Feb 23, 2012 21:06 UTC (Thu)
by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
[Link] (1 responses)
It is worse. They explicitly designed GNOME3 to not interoperate with GNOME2, you can't have both installed at the same time. And pretty soon every major distribution will be shipping 3 and not 2. So you would have to fund the creation of what would at minumum be a major fork of one or more distros. And commit to endless backporting as every major app defaults to building against gtk3 and the rest of GNOME3 plus all the *kit and *manager plumbing being wired ever deeper into everything.
That is the kind of attitude problem that really horks off us lowly users. We get the choice of launch a major fork, something we by definition are ill equiped to deal with, or accept whatever upstream decides to feed us today. Since the upstream on too many open projects don't care a whit about 'end users' we are in many ways worse off than a Microserf. At least Microsoft cares about really ticking off the userbase. Sure they care most about their own bottom line and second about the OEMs (their actual customers) and third about "developers, developers, developers!" but the users are at least on their list of concerns... just a bit down the list.
Posted Feb 23, 2012 21:30 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
The fork already exist. It's not a problem. Gtk2 and Gtk3 can coexist. It may be even possible to port MATE to Gtk3 eventually. Actually users affect bottom line quite directly thus they are pretty high on the list. Especially big spenders like MS Office users.
Posted Feb 23, 2012 22:56 UTC (Thu)
by brettle (guest, #34988)
[Link]
Consider using Elveos to crowdfund your favorite features. It's specifically for funding free software projects and is free software itself.
One thing that I think is holding the Elveos funding model back is the need to prepay for all the features you are sponsoring. That's why I sponsored a feature to allow contributors to contribute the same money to multiple features.
Changes and complaints
We know we can "vote with our feet", and leave one project for another.
We know we can "vote with our effort" and contribute to a project to make it suit us better.
But some time we want to "vote with our wallet" and contribute cash. That isn't so easy.
Paying for open source software
Changes and complaints
> it would probably be a fair sized kitty to keep Gnome 2 running
> well... or something.
Changes and complaints
So you would have to fund the creation of what would at minumum be a major fork of one or more distros.
And commit to endless backporting as every major app defaults to building against gtk3 and the rest of GNOME3 plus all the *kit and *manager plumbing being wired ever deeper into everything.
Sure they care most about their own bottom line and second about the OEMs (their actual customers) and third about "developers, developers, developers!" but the users are at least on their list of concerns... just a bit down the list.
Changes and complaints