> How about something along the lines of the following:
>
> List active developers on the website for OI along w/ what they are working
> on.
>
> If you want to fund that person's work, you sign up to provide a certain
> amount which is divided into equal allotments for each month remaining in the
> calendar year. Your choice of how much.
>
> The amounts currently committed for the calendar year per developer are shown
> so that people can make intelligent choices of where to commit funds. Beyond
> a certain point more money to one developer will not make the work go faster.
> It effectively "crowdsources" hiring and pay raises.
>
> For a sensible person to work full time on OI they need some sense of
> stability and predictability. Martin's doing wonderful stuff, but I don't
> think he's being sensible. But sometimes being sensible conflicts w/ major
> achievement.
>
> There needs to be a way to keep the transaction costs down. The Paypal skim
> gets pretty hefty for a small monthly payment. If Paypal would be willing to
> take a single payment and split it into multiple equal payments with only a
> single transaction charge it would be pretty easy to set this up. Does
> anyone deal w/ Paypal enough to know if they'd do this?
>
> The idea being to make it possible for an individual to work on OI as they
> would a regular contract job. There's staggeringly high unemployment
> worldwide and in Europe especially. That ought to get us some good talent at
> bargain rates if we can just work out a viable payment model.
>
> Have Fun!
> Reg
That sounds a pretty reasonable approach, although there's 2 things I'd add:
- The possibility to add bounties for requested features.
- As Jonathan mentions - having a common pot (eg. 20% of
donations go to that). Not just for tickets/marketing etc., but perhaps there
needs to be a mechanism to distribute that across all developers (I'm thinking
of a way to avoid the situation where, for example, a neat ZFS project gets
loads of funding, but really critical (but maybe more boring) security projects
don't get enough?
James
_______________________________________________
OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
