On 3/13/11, Teto wrote:
I agree, except that this money could be used by extra-programmers (means not the usual ones) hired just for a particular task.
Except Inkscape committee is dead against paid development.
Excuse-me. Can you explain in few words why it didn't work for other programs? I'm interested.
Coincidentally I had to reply this question not so long ago to a completely different person, so I'll just copypaste, OK?
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In a software project you have different tasks that demand from little to a lot of time. When you are paid to do something, you start treating this as a fulltime job with all the consequences like estimating time spent for this or that work. Which is why bounties work only for small tasks, because they don't take much time to work on. However there usually is a huge amount of small tasks in a big project, and user base is rarely ready to tolerate every single one. So the choice is often between being on your tod with your bounty and wait till it's implemented or spending same money on proprietary software that already has this feature.
Why it doesn't work for bigger tasks? Because bigger tasks take heaps of time to work on. The bounty of 50K USD to finish GEGL (a new GIMP engine) in 2005 or so was never done, because the person who agreed to do the work simply got burnt out and left.
And now with numbers. Have a look at Ardour's bug tracker:
http://tracker.ardour.org/view_all_set.php?sort=sponsorship_total&dir=AS...
Implementing MIDI tracks is definitely not $1145 worth. It's at least 100 times that much. It actually took two Google Summer of Code projects (2006 and 2007) and heaps of work beyond that (2008, 2009, 2010 and onwards).
The next task in that table is AAF / OMF support that surely isn't US$ 455 worth and looks more like at the very least 5K worth.
The next thing that is already implemented is VSTi (virtual instruments) support. Can you imagine $130 being a fair price for that job?
Even when you go down to much smaller projects like e.g. http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=2662, you cannot possibly imagine a skilled programmer working for ten bucks an hour. He'd earn that much working in McDonalds. And actually that particular task demanded redoing quite a bit of stuff in VST support code, so it's not even ten bucks an hour, more like two.
In short, it doesn't and cannot work directly. I'll be truly amazed if it will.
Now, I know of one project that succeeded being a bounty. Earlier this year Tavmjong Bah improved text tool in Inkscape. The project was $1.5K worth, it was a more or less fair price for the project given that it wasn't full time and the programmer in question was not a professional programmer. But simply finding that money was a huge problem. A completely different person was supposed to do the project, but after months of waiting he simply got tired and moved on, so it took a whole new massive PR force to actually get the money from the community and even so a lot of it was given by a single donator. And we had to find a new programmer to work in this, of course.
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Hopefully it answers your question.
Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org