[Arm-netbook] The Libre Guild of Program Changers [Formerly "Re: Standards Organization as a Potentially Universal Free/Libre Software Developement Sustenance Model:

[Philip Hands]

Neil Jansen <njansen1 at gmail.com> writes:

...
> As far as commissioning software goes, I think that a lot of end-users
> of open-source software that don't necessarily program or contribute
> much would probably like that idea, if they had some sort of a system
> to organize those ideas.  If it were a website, maybe it would look
> sort of like Kickstarter and/or Indiegogo, but where people could vote
> without giving any money, as an option, with possibly a donation
> button and donation amount tracker indicator, where the user could
> donate in bitcoin or some other hopefully more convenient manner.

Great care needs to be taken when considering paying people to do things
that they might otherwise do for the love of it.

If you introduce a monetary incentive, and the work is then done by
people who's primary motive is money, then while the volume of
contributions might well go up, the quality could plummet.

You may then find that those unpaid heroes that stand as gatekeepers,
triaging patches that come into free software projects, suddenly find
themselves drowning in excrement.

They may be just a little upset when they discover that the reason their
lives just got noticeably worse it that other people are being paid to do
that to them. If the problem is sufficiently bad they may lose their
motivation.

Net result: the project that you were hoping to help gets some crappy
patches, and loses some long-term contributors.

Perhaps my view is overly skewed by they way it didn't work for Debian,
with Dunc-Tanc -- see for instance:

  https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/10/msg00026.html

On the other hand, Debian's LTS _is_ done pretty-much in this way, and
doesn't cause much angst -- but it's very clear to everyone that nobody
was doing that job before someone organised a way to pay for it.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/    http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,    GERMANY