3

Several days ago, a controversial suggestion has appeared about getting the bugs fixed for a donation. I think that the suggestion of Alessandro.Rossini (whose name I formerly misspelled as Alberto under the influence of KDE Brainstorm Monthly) is not so much about money, as it is about the desperation over things that don't get fixed for a long time. Purely hypothetically, we can imagine that Alessandro is someone using the platform to its fullest potential in his research field, but nevertheless not a developer. His problems might not be perceived by an average user. Out of desperation, he can't come up with anything better than offering banknotes to get his problems fixed. I think that his suggestion can be restated as follows:

• Apart from voting, there should be other opportunities for non-developers to get their "private" bugs fixed. (Let me remark immediately - I'm not against voting. Voting shows what bugs the majority. But in a non-adversarial community, other methods of improvement might be possible than design by jury.)

For example, one could imagine a four-week summer camp with crash-course of programming for Alessandro, that would leave him able to fix his bugs by himself. Or, one could imagine having Alessandro examined to make sure that he is a user more worthy than others and bestowing on him a special non-developer power-user peerage with a lifelong title to speedy bugfixes. But Alessandro suggests something else - he offers his earnings in exchange for the developers' work. In effect, he shows his will to do the work himself, up to the point that he doesn't know how.

The votedowns and negative comments to Alessandro's suggestion actually are not against the idea itself, but rather against the use of banknotes (which suffer from multiple problems) to convert his work into a developer's. If not banknotes, how about giving him a quest to fulfill to get his bug fixed?

KDE summer of code? - There was idea about this and I think it will be done. Don't know if it's bug centric or idea centric...

I think main Idea os open source is that
"User shouldn't pay for it"
but not
"User mustn't pay for it"

See the difference?
If I, or anyone else have business built on KDE, I need some feature.
I'm losing money without this feature, more than cost of its development.
I could hire some guys who will do that and then give source code to KDE.
From my point of view - I give money, I get things working.
And I don't care is work done by KDE team member or by 3rd party guy.

Of course if I have some spare money and this feature not big, and I have no business it changes nothing.

User must have ability to pay someone to get something created/fixed/working, that's user's freedom.
I don't see good reason why I need search some other guys when Kde guys sitting right here, on this forum.
If I want to pay money, I'm able contact directly to someone and pay him.

Why not make it more systematic?
I hope my position is clear

While I appreciate that people are getting very interested to the topic, I think that it is not beneficial to create another post for the issue. This would just fragment the discussion and add redundancy.
Please keep the discussion in the original post.

Best regards.

There is no need for me to say that I do not agree with you that it is not beneficial to create this thread - otherwise I wouldn't have done it. However, I fully support your wish to keep as much of the discussion as possible in "your" thread. Whereas your problem is stale bugs and your suggestion is donation to get them fixed, my problem is seeing your suggestion voted down by the junior fans who get goosebumps whenever you say "money", making it a Catch 22 for you. In my infinite arrogance, I suggest that the project leaders start thinking about a different way than banknotes to enable people like you to make their offering. That's the difference between your suggestion and mine, which I think grants it right for a separate thread.

This whole fear of money is really kind of ridiculous. There are, supposedly, some existing FOSS bounty systems. Adopt and formally recognize one of them for KDE bugs. So maybe I can have the ftp KIOSlave work properly again (hasn't for all of KDE4) -- I would be willing to donate some small amount in anticipating of others doing so as well.

yerenkow wrote:See the difference?
If I, or anyone else have business built on KDE, I need some feature.
I'm losing money without this feature, more than cost of its development.
I could hire some guys who will do that and then give source code to KDE.
From my point of view - I give money, I get things working.
And I don't care is work done by KDE team member or by 3rd party guy.

Fixes made by KDE teem will get into trunk as soon as possible, 3rd party problems, well things don't go so fast. Also doing this "officially" avoids situation if 2 develiopers decides to fix the same file at the same time.



$$$$ problem could be solved by making public offers /transactions, so the community would know who is paying.
Being afraid, that some developers would and work only for $, well, I think most of them already could go and find a job with stable salary.