Lars Gullik Bjønnes wrote:
> That being said Lars, I guess you received some money throughout the
years thanks to your paypal
account and we know basically _nothing_ about it ;-)
This is an important issue. We for example had to pay all costs for our
last developer meeting on our own but the general LyX donations are exactly
for that purpose in my opinion. Moreover are the people who sponsor us still
not listed at our webpage while this is the case on Abdel's page and one of
the reasons for Abdel's success.
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.
I was in contact with Andre regarding cost for the last meeting: the
response was largely: don't sweat it.
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.
But you never haven't replied. But this info is needed for example to plan
our next meeting so that developers can for example be payed a part of the
flights, beer, food, etc.
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. All expences while
at location has been payed though, except for berlin.
When you don't want to make this public to all developers, then at least
some of the developers should know this. Currently even not JMarc and José
knows it, right?
They know a bit I guess... there is a stead trickle of money being
donated... f.ex. today I got 2 euro...
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?)
Could happen - in theory. A feature so controversial that it won't get
in, not even "disabled by default" in preferences. In that case whoever
took the money have failed their contract, and ought to give the money
back. (Or possibly maintain a fork with the controversial feature - if
doing so is worth the money.)
Plans for new features therefore ought to be discussed early, to avoid
wasted work. That isn't special for paid projects.
I am not sure how realistic such a outcome is though. Features are
usually optional. Those who don't like "online spellcheck" don't need to
use it, for example. There could be a risk of some new developer getting
paid for a feature, and then implement it poorly, buggy or with a
hopeless coding style. If the developer can't get the project merged and
is unwilling to fix it and won't return the money - we get a situation
where the LyX project looks unreliable.
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.
Idealism is fine, but it may be easier to get money this way. Someone
who has money to spend, will often want to know exactly what they get
back. They can see that they get a new feature, a feature that they want
and deems "worth it".
Money spent on fixing "8 longstanding bugs" or a developer meeting may
eventually result in real improvement of LyX, but you may not be able to
sell this concept to those who want to buy visible features. Unless they
know how software development works.
Helge Hafting
