On 9/22/10, bulia byak wrote:
Now that we're discussing a redesign of our site, does anyone else feel that we should have such a Marketplace page on it, possibly replacing the nonfunctional Donate page?
In general I think that being able to get at least some of the developers paid for their work make a perfect sense. At least half of the new features over last several years have come from GSoC anyway, and Tav's work was extremely successful.
There is one thing we need to understand however: some features take a lot of time to code, and we might never see enough money to support their development. E.g. last time I checked MIDI editing in Ardour collected just $1200 which doesn't cover 1% of the actual cost (that hasn't stopped Paul from doing actual work, though). You can easily find comparable tasks in Inkscape. Not that we shouldn't try, mind you :)
Another thing is that any development efforts, except probably custom extensions development, should be discussed in the list and be mentored by the team.
This is exactly where I see the problem: presumably the project still has a committee, but it doesn't look like the committee is around. I had my reasons to contact it about a year ago and never heard back from it. People in this list asked about financing travels for developers and never heard back from it (at least, not in the list). Our PayPal account hasn't been restored yet, to the best of my knowledge, despite of being inactive for years.
I don't like what I'm about to say, but I have to say that: we need some kind of authority in the project to orchestrate it, because without it any kind of marketplace is likely to ruin the whole project. I, personally, would prefer to have the committee come back from wherever they are.
Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org