Lars Gullik Bjønnes schrieb:
The people that sponsor abdel is listed at the page.
We had a rule earlier that if you wanted to be listed you had to say so in
your donation message.
Are potential sponsors informed about this before they send their donation? I'm wondering that
nobody did this until now.
I was in contact with Andre regarding cost for the last meeting: the
response was largely: don't sweat it.
Interesting. But some had to pay flight and/or trains.
So Lars, I several times asked you to communicate to us developers (private
mail) what money we got the last years at our general LyX paypal account
that you own.
I have replied, but perhaps not to you.
Not on the list or I have missed it? and not in a mail to us developers. Can
you do this please now?
We have never payed for transportation earlier, and I can ensure you that
that will be a way to depleate all resources in a jiffy.
That's why we developers should know what money we have and what we usually got
per month/year.
From your comment it seems not be too much, but how much money exactly? It would be of interest to
know an estimated income per month seen over a year and for example if it in creased after a new
major release. Of course it is not needed to communicate every single payment we got.
Concerning transportation: We usually meet in Europe. Europeans can by cheap flights for even 100 €
two ways. But when Richard and Bo want to join use, they cannot buy such cheap flights, so when we
have 300 € for transportation I think it is fair to give them the money. (Just a thought.)
They know a bit I guess...
We had this topic in Berlin and this time nobody know anything.
there is a stead trickle of money being
donated... f.ex. today I got 2 euro...
I mean 60 € per month is better than nothing. This would be 700 € per year and enough to buy e.g.
server hardware and to spend some money when an oversea developer wants to join our meeting.
What Abdel has set up with his sponsor page is in my opinion how sponsoring
should work for a free OpenSource project: Transparent and encouraging for
potential sponsors as they know what they are sponsoring. And I don't think
it is important if they sponsor LyX in general or a certain developer when
he implements a special feature some sponsor would like to have.
(what if lyx does not want the feature?)
Was a joke? Several users donated to this project, so of course it is then useful for the users and
we are working to provide a useful program.
Before Abdel set up his page we agreed to the two projects/features. And the ideas came from the
users list where people again and again asked for the same feature.
Every developer can offer to be sponsored to implement a certain feature and I very much like this
possibility. Some projects are very time intensive and therefore not yet done, so when a developer
decides to spend several weeks (to be extreme) to implement a feature why shouldn't he get some
sponsorship? In my opinion is this the same as Google does with its summer of code project.
When Abdel don't need the money or needs less time than expected he can (and I think he will) spend
the monex to the general LyX funding.
Actually I go out on the limb as usual and say that how Abdel has setup this
is almost exactly how I would _not_ have done it. (Speaking of sponsorship
for specific features.) IMHO too focused on specific persons/developers.
Abdel's sponsor project is the result of many discussions, at the devel list but also on the users
list. It turned out that users like this way of sponsoring as they could decide what to sponsor.
regards Uwe
