Han-Wen Nienhuys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 20000 downloads of the 2.6 release
wouldn't be nice if each one donated $1? :-) > 1. apart from the "involved" people like you, how do you convince > people to donate money? I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I think > that the past two months of sponsored features have brought in more > money than twice the amount of donation over the past 2 years. You don't > get anything in return for a donation: no support, no features, just a > thank-you note. I see your point. But the thing is, as you know, that work other than adding new features has to be done like fixing bugs, refactoring (maybe the user will not even see any benefit at first, but it will help to develop more features in the future), and so on. > Psychologically, it's much easier to part with money, if you get > something in return. the idea for this campaign would be like "ok, we don't know yet the best way to develop a business model so lily main developers can live from it, but right now we need your help to guarantee that the development will not stale/stop in the next x months. meanwhile we will continue to see how we can develop a business model". > 2. getting donations will create a tension between sponsored features > and unsponsored work. For example, if there are a lot of small donators, > should I start working on Tie formatting out of my own accord, or do I > wait for someone to come along who needs it bad enough to pay the > (larger) sponsor fee? I think that we can have both things. the small donation campaign would be to guarantee that you (Han-Wen) would have time and piece of mind to work in whatever you like in lily. People donating would have a fuzzy feeling that they are contributing with very little money but helping the project stay alive. > I would be much more comfortable if a campaign is set up to amass money > for sponsored features. For example, I could post a "dynamics > improvement project" with specs and a price-tag and people can then > contribute. When the price target is met, I start working, and collect > the cash once its done. that's a good idea, the one problem I see is that maybe people will be pitching very different features and what if the price-tag is not reached for one feature? that may discourage donors. I mean, suppose that are propositions for 5 new features but only 2 of then reach the proposed price-tag. 3 of them wouldn't be implemented and the people who donated would feel frustrated. (I'm been a little pessimist here) Also people that would usually donate 10-20 for a general founding may not donate for specific features just because they don't have anything specific in mind (or in my case they have lots of features in mind :-)) Anyway, are you still using paypal? The link is still on the page but I remember you saying that people shouldn't use it to donate. This is a very important topic and I see this problem happening more and more in free software projects. This is a long-time concern for Ardour's developer Paul Davis, was the main reason that made Dan Robbins resign from gentoo and was one of the reasons that made Tom Lord just[1] resign as the Arch maintainer. Pedro Footnotes: [1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2005-08/msg00030.html _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
