Kai Blin wrote:
On Monday 29 June 2009 07:51:03 Austin English wrote:
On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 12:46 AM, Kai Blin<[email protected]> wrote:
Yes. Realistically, there will be a contract involved regulating what
needs to be done to get the money. I very much doubt the government just
go and drop money on random paypal buttons and hope for the best. The way
I've seen stuff like this work before is that there's a call for bids
from companies to implement certain features in a piece of software,
maybe with the requirement at a reasonable effort to get the produced
changes upstream.
Ah, misunderstood what you meant there.
Eventually some sort of foundation would be the best thing to head
toward, but that's a legal headache.
I don't see how a foundation would help with a a situation like that. To recap
the (theoretical) situation. Someone, let's call him the client, wants some
features implemented in Wine and is ready to spend money on that.
Now, there's three things the client could do. He could hire some developers
to get the stuff he wants implemented. That's a huge administrative effort
just to get some lines of code done, and as you tend to pay employees by
work-hours, you need to estimate how long it will take to implement the
feature.
The more obvious thing to do (IMHO) is to go and contract somebody, company or
individual to implement these features. As opposed to an employment contract,
you usually agree on what needs to be delivered and pay only if it is
delivered.
Now what I understood you're suggesting is that instead of contracting a
company or individual, the client could give the money to a Wine Foundation.
How is that money going to turn into the code the client wants to have? Is
the Wine Foundation going to hire Wine developers to work on such stuff? Is
there enough money in development services like that to offer a stable job to
any developer?
There may very well be - Mozilla had a few full time employees years
ago, and at the time they had about as many users as we do.
That doesn't even count other roles a foundation could play, such as
community organizing, developer recruiting, sponsoring "summer of code"
projects year round, or even just serving as a tax deduction for
Codeweavers' donated code.
Thanks,
Scott Ritchie
