Donations and sponsored development are important

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Donations and sponsored development are important
by Koko on Thursday 28/Feb/2008, @01:54

Pleas don't be stupid and don't say that "But an open source project like KDE doesn't base its development model on begging in order to pay for developers time."

Good software needs doing also not so interesting parts of development. You can't always code new fun features for free. Sometimes you have to code boring things. And here sponsored development can help and boost motivation.

Look here:

http://dot.kde.org/1204168154/
"In the next talk, Bart Coppens started to show us some cool and less cool things about KOffice 2. Starting with the bad, he told us how, due to the developers having less time to work on KOffice, the current state of several applications was disappointing. The developers therefore recently decided to restrict their release goals, focusing on the applications they can make stable for KOffice 2.0. Those applications will most likely be KPresenter, KChart, KSpread and Karbon. Yes, KWord and Krita both might not make it for the first KOffice 2.0 release! This is an very unfortunate state of events for the one of the most innovative office suites, and there has been talk of hiring someone to get KWord into a usable state for the release."
sad world, sponsored development is important sometimes.

Related Links

·   Articles on Applications
·   Also by Koko
·   Contact author

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Re: Donations and sponsored development are import
by The Vigilant on Thursday 28/Feb/2008, @14:12

>Pleas don't be stupid and don't say
Those are nice words. What part of the "doesn't base its development model" did you not understand?.

Eric's project is nearly unique in that point. Yes, KDE gets boring bits of technology coded by paid Trolltech engineers (Qt), some core developers are paid by Novell&co and some projects raise money to cover operational expenses (servers, etc...) but what other project has a big chunk of developers time paid by voluntary donations?. The KOffice example doesn't fall into that category either, nor paying for features. Even if other projects I'm not aware of work that way, KDE certainly not. So my statement was certainly true (I have an advice for you for free: Careful reading before writing always helps)

But being unique must not be bad. It is just very difficult and you must be careful how you say things in order not to scare away interested readers (possible donors). If you read the entire thread you'll see my point was more about the way he asked. I wasn't judging Eric's way to work.

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Re: Donations and sponsored development are import
by Eric Laffoon on Thursday 28/Feb/2008, @20:49

Now I get to laugh... It's always nice to know if I am somewhat alone in how I do things I'm at least not alone in understanding what I'm doing. The point about how you say things is a good one. It seems I'm not the only one who initially didn't get your message in the tone which declare you intended. It's not entirely surprising.

If you catalog behavior and traits of people you meet you will note that geeks who write code tend to be really poor at interpersonal communication. In fact this is one of the reasons I think Andras is so unsual because he is so good at both. On the limites of weird, I grew up a geek who tinkered and was lousy with people, then took a 2 year diversion into sales and business. I now do both and have recently written a book that deals with communication in marketing. I am as weird as they get, and while I may be wordy I'm usually very good at expressing myself in writing.

However the internet takes only 7% of effective persuasive communication in the form of words, compared to how effective our communication would be face to face. This can also go both ways. Your advocating caution to me is something I listen too because I detest assumptions. A logical assumption would be that my communication skills trump the average geek, but assumptions not being certainties lead to trouble. You probably don't know about my dark un-geek side, but you should also be careful with your presentation of ideas.

In the terms of pure advocacy, if you think someone is missing the mark, rather than spawn a long off topic discussion a strategic move is to email them personally with your concerns so they can review and if need be make a preemptive post to correct.

Thanks to Koko for illustrating my point just in case people aren't clear. BTW if anyone is interested we're still hundreds of dollars behind where I'd hoped to be, but that is likely mostly due to the day the story hit.

http://kdewebdev.org/donate.php

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