2015-04-05 0:21 GMT+02:00 Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...>:
On Sat, Apr 04, 2015 at 12:30:29PM -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
On Sat, 2015-04-04 at 08:06 -0300, Felipe Sanches wrote:
Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects Benjamin Mako Hill
I've got massive respect for Mako, we used to hang out at Grendel's back when he was here in Boston. But his above treatise is one sided. It goes to great lengths to explain why the organisational structures of projects should stay volunteer based (which I do agree with) but doesn't make it clear the difference between inderviduals, companies or the stratification of organisation as projects interact.
There's some good observations in there - of particular note:
Another related model is to pay programmers to do work that participants recognize that no volunteer can do... Features that have remained on a todo-list and that are widely recognized as important are good candidates for strategic funding. Widely advertising feature requests and then only funding unimplemented requests can also be effective. However, each these suggestions can run the negative risk that people not fix a problem or address an important issue if they think that, eventually, they or someone else might get paid to do it.In the Inkscape funded development model, we have a deliberate delay put in between when a proposal is made, and when it can be funded, for precisely this reason.
I wonder to what extent this really happens, i.e. how many people are deliberately delaying their volunteering due to the prospect of collecting a feature bounty.
I guess one way to investigate this problem is to look at the effect of GSoC. Are we getting more or less volunteers because of that initiative? Are some people deliberately not volunteering because they prefer to do their work as a GSoC project and get paid?
Regards, Krzysztof