faq
flatforty
contribute
subscribe
configure
search
rdf
main
parent
thread
|
Re: Distro support
by superstoned on Sunday 17/Oct/2004, @11:18
|
this might indeed help. a lot corporate users approach OSS the same as they do proprietary software - they don't understand the value of having/being able to modify the source.
they test the OSS application, and would say - yes, its almost as good as the proprietary one, but not good enough. I'll wait. but if they should realize they could for one time put the money they pay for the proprietary piece of software every year into the OSS application, and it would be good enough (and free for ever) to use! which, in the long run, would be much cheaper for them.
this should be made more clear, and such a bug/feature bounty system might work.
lets say, you want a feature. you go to a site, and say you want the feature, and are willing to pay lets say 150 bucks. then others come, and say "we are willing to pay some too". until a developer steps up and says, hey, I am willing to build this feature, for this amount of money. so everyone donates, the website owners tell the coder to get going, and until he's (almost) ready he wont recieve funds. when the final product passed the tests, and those that did a donation agree on paying, the money is paid, and the product gpl'ed. |
|
|
The Fine Print: The following comments
are owned by whomever posted them.
( Reply )
|
Re: Distro support
by Eric Laffoon on Sunday 17/Oct/2004, @13:00
|
Idealistically this sounds good. In practice it has real potential for problems. I've hashed this over with several people a lot.
1) All project contributions have to go through a maintainer since they have authority over their project. You don't want something somebody else is working on or something that will be rejected because it will have to be rewritten when something else changes. So any system like this has to involve the maintainer. As a side note this can become an administrative black hole on a project our size. :-/
2) Addressing things on a per feature basis may be motivational for users but it is not cost efficient. Take a look at the Quanta codebase. It takes a few months to really get efficient at coding in there. I worked on a patch to the parser for hours and couldn't find one thing. Andras went ahead and modified my patch and committed. It was only a few lines of code.
3) Sometimes the most expensive things are not features you want until you try them out. Not only that, some of the most critical work on software is not really seen as a feature. A lot of our early work on the 3x series was architectural foundations to make features easier to add. For some time we did not produce many new features because of this work. A totally feature driven sponsorship could put good design factors at risk.
Outside of all that this is interesting, but there are other ideas I'm working on that I think have more potential to generate revenue in a way that is more organically beneficial to the process and gets users a better value.
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Distro support
by superstoned on Sunday 17/Oct/2004, @13:15
|
well, of course, a lot thought has to be put in this ;-) and obviously, you do so. I hope you can find a viable solutin, I think a good solution to this can lead to an enormous gain for the OSS community.
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Distro support
by Eric Laffoon on Sunday 17/Oct/2004, @15:08
|
All I want to say until I have something to present is that I'm working on several ideas that I hope will prove successful. It wouldn't be prudent to discuss them until they are closer to a tangible state, but I have been pondering and planning this for the last four years. When I have something to present I will post it here first, don't worry. So don't bother asking for specifics yet. ;-)
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
|
The Fine Print: The previous
comments are owned by whomever posted them.
( Reply )
|
|
![[KDE Dot News]](http://www.kde.org/dot/Images/kdedotnews.gif)
