I have little Open Source experience, because Inkscape is the only Open Source project I've contributed to (lib2geom doesn't count). To me, assigning a more prominent role to money detracts from our project.
It would help me to have some info about: - other projects that have some funding scheme and how it works out for them - how much money are we talking about? - who feels comfortable helping out a payed bugfixer with fixing his bug? i.o.w., where do we find a bugfixer than actually *can* fix a bug, without help from volunteers?
Counter to the general opinion here, I don't believe bug fixing is unrewarding. I believe many people here are just not capable of fixing it (without some serious effort into learning new stuff), myself included.
If we start paying money for fixing some bugs, do we plan this as a one-off thing or do we really believe it is a sustainable scheme? I don't believe it is smart to pay money for explicit results piece by piece. What if the money stops for a bit? Did we just lose another dev? I have a lot less problems with money going to people that have worked on the project for a while and are "rewarded" with a payed job, compared to someone who has never worked on Inkscape and gets the same payed job.
---- Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:
On Tue, 2013-09-10 at 16:42 -0300, Guillermo Espertino (Gez) wrote:
- Separate investor and producer. If you're a volunteer developer; then
at that instance you are both investing and producing. If you are being paid to develop then you are /just/ the producer and if you are paying then you are an investor. The investor should be a separate role in a project much like a translator, bug hunter or designer.
Crediting an investor (more than we do now) feels like a slap in the face of developers. Yes, indeed, a volunteer developer is investing in the project. But I feel this investment is much larger than simply a monetary investment. (it's just money) It'd be a shame if someone simply paying money can earn any credit at all that is even remotely comparable to what Bulia, etc. deserve. We shouldn't overdo the whole crediting thing. There is a huge range of deserved credit in our project. Fixing 10 bugs or writing a new feature should make you feel good for yourself, not because the official Inkscape team writes you an official thank you email according to procedure.
Cheers, Johan
Btw, an experimental study showed that "Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance. " DOI: 10.1126/science.1132491 Simply reading this email does that to you.