On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 7:55 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine
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 :)
That tends to self-regulate. Someone wants something done, and has some budget. Someone can get it done, and has a pretty good idea of how long it will take. Assumedly that second someone also wants it done, and so can work for less money than the average market rate. They will discuss this and hopefully reach some kind of balance.
Another thing is that any development efforts, except probably custom extensions development, should be discussed in the list and be mentored by the team.
Of course. It's not exempt from all the usual rules: discuss on the list, fill in Release Notes, respond to bugs and criticism.
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.
If you want a committee to discuss development matters, we don't have it, and I think that's a good thing. We operate more or less by consensus.
If you want a committee to accept donations and distribute them as travel grants (possibly little else), then we don't have it either, and it's probably not a good thing. But people have a natural reluctancy to take responsibility for other people's money, especially when the amounts are small ("more trouble than it's worth"). Given that we've been able to operate without it, perhaps it's not that critical. Though if someone trusted now comes forward willing to collect donations and manage the resulting fund, I don't think anyone will object.
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 really don't see how it can ruin anything. A scenario where someone pays money to implement something disruptive, and it all passes under the radar of the community, seems rather far-fetched to me.