what about a consolidated bounty program?

there's a list of unimplemented features. hackers can claim to be willing to implement a certain feature for a certain expense. users can spend money to get them implemented. minimum spending is 10€. if there's enough interest in the feature, expenses will probably be raised. of course there must be a committee, that approves the features and ensures, that implementations are worth their money.

regards,

holger engels

i am waiting for something like this!

i think the FSFE should organize the whole thing.. or the OSS Alliance.. or.. and then you should be able to donate and also to say.. this money is for the developers of "kopete" or maybe more specific.. this money is for the development of a desktop sharing plugin in kopete..

That would be also a nice way for the community to get more interest in the features they want to be added. And for the devs to earn money to buy more coffee

Great idea,

Gnome already have it: http://www.gnome.org/friends/

While it sounds like a great idea, I don't really think it is...

It changes the incentives. Right now, developers create what they believe is right, since they know how the system works and what would work nicely and what won't. Giving "ransom" for a feature, on the other hand, changes those incentives, and the people working do what they do for monetary gain. You could pay $10 for a feature, they'll make a dirty hack to get it to do what you want, but that won't be good for the long run. Wladimir Palant (creator of Adblock Plus) sums it up nicely on why he does not even have a donate button.

I'm not saying that donations are bad (unlike Adblock, KDE is a huge project which does need donations to operate efficiently) and I'm not against paying developers (it's no secret that Aaron Seigo of Plasma works for Nokia/Trolltech), and I'm not even saying that hiring certain developers to do some task is bad. However, I am against creating a centralized system where people award "ransoms" for anyone who would implement their feature.

so you just have to donate without a specific purpose.. the projectleaders or someone above the average programmer could then debate how the money is spent.. thats why i proposed to give the money to some FOSS organisaiton like FSF that would decide what a feature is worth, who gets the money and when a feature is implemented good enough to earn a donation..

I don't believe how it works... The donation money, as far as I understand, is used for the infrastructure - servers, bandwidth, etc., not to pay the developers. The developers do what they do because that's their passion, not because someone told them to do that. I would rather them continue to do what they love instead of halfheartedly implementing features because someone paid them to do so.

Alec wrote:You could pay $10 for a feature, they'll make a dirty hack to get it to do what you want, but that won't be good for the long run.

Of course a steering committee has to approve the feature requests and align them with the roadmap.

Holger

While donated money or the upcoming supporting member membership for KDE e.V. is not used to pay developers, it is also being used to for development.

For example KDE e.V. money is spent on travelling and accomodation reimbursments for contributors so they can attend meetings such as "developer sprints", where developers of a project gather at some place for a very intensive hacking session.

So while developers are still working voluntarily, money is being used to reduce limiting factors such as communication delay, interpretation errors on written communication, etc. resulting in more and better code being written.

Cheers,
_

I'm with this program. But it will need a lot of work to be implemented. We need a system that handle the feature requests (i.e. specifications) and hold the donation (or pledges).

It would really boost kde development...

Kde is for me the best desktop environment, but at some points, some core features are missing, and it seems to be a lake of developper, even for features that are really needed... for example :
- Voip client ! with pim integration
- Googleapps support in PIM
- PDF support in scanlite...
- improve stability and kompatibility of one kde browser
and and and...

- Since a lot of users are missing the same features, if each one spend a few $, then it would be shortly be possible to develop the feature...

- it would be also possible to enable the kde development to be more user oriented (what the user need first, will be add first).

Sure it as some drawbacks, but at the moment, I need to buy propriatary software, or use non-kde software because of missing features...

It must be done as soon as possible !

I just wan't to add, that, in fact it could only be for kdeapps... and then the kde team could decide if they wan't to adopt the code in kde or not... but at least an opensource kde feature would be available, it is better as nothing, and today, there are a lot of "nothing"