Gary Schubert
There’s nothing on the form that says it accepts HTML, why would you think it does? If you had just posted the URL you’d have been fine.
Pay yourself to submit a patch.
I’ve been working on a small project for TWO YEARS now. I COULD finish it in less than a month if I had a month to dedicate myself to it EXCLUSIVELY (meaning: taking time off from my current job).
Of course, my financial needs (being married with two kids) are such that I can not take an unpaid leave of one month, and vacation time isn’t feasible either. So, if someone donated me the amount of money corresponding to a month’s wage, I could go to my boss and tell him I want a month off., and I’d probably get it.
I bet that there’s a lot of other programmers in the same situation
right now… you’re right in saying that open source projects run on time, not so much on money… but money DOES buy time.
I also agree with Bill: part of the problem is that the donated money HAS to be spent in a responsible manner, even if Jeff has stated explicitly he doesn’t care how it’s used up.
Hire somebody to do Quality Assurance. This is the area most often sorely lacking in open source.
It’s also the area that few people what to do in their free time to contribute to projects.
Hire somebody to do Quality Assurance. This is the area most often sorely lacking in open source.
It’s also the area that few people what to do in their free time to contribute to projects.
Another thing they could do, if the main developer is, as most Italian devs are, a contractor, stop working for a month on his daytime job, and work for a month only on his project.
Or, at least, that’s what I’d do if I was a contractor.
@Trev: this is an ASP.Net wiki, and the .NET ecosystem isn’t that rich compared to the dozens of wikis, forums, portals and CMSes in PHP. For an intranet, it would be pretty neat.
@Lacrymology : Spelling it M$ doesn’t really add to your credibility.
Give it to contributing developer who wants to spend a month away from their day job.
Or hire a contractor for a little bit, but not for coding–perhaps art, documentation, or web design.
Regarding comments about paying developers:
-
Existing contributors don’t need to get paid - they’re already doing it for other reasons
-
$5000, whilst a generous donation, wouldn’t pay a contractor long enough to make a difference to the project
-
I personally wouldn’t let a CS student loose on my code :-), but even if Dario wanted to, an internship is (a) mostly a US thing, except for medical doctors, AFAICT, (b) kind of difficult to provide when you are not a company
Spending it on equipment or training or professionals that don’t require in depth project knowledge (which leaves out tech writers) seems more sensible. Or just lots and lots of beer.
A statistical sample of size one is impossible to derive meaningful data from. Also, if the individual is employed full time then there is perhaps no direct mechanism to translate money into time – a contractor would probably be able to use it between contracts for a couple of weeks of full time development.
I don’t think it’s the case that money is useless to open source contributors, it’s that such a big amount it useless. A lump-sum of $5,000 isn’t enough for a developer to live off, so it’s not enough to justify the developer leaving their job to devote more time. Lots of frequent donations which amount to a steady amount would be more useful, as it would allow the developer to perhaps cut down on the hours they work and be confident in being able to still live of that amount of income.
It’s more of a teach a man to fish situation. The developer can’t do much with the $5,000 except indulge themselves, which isn’t in the open-source developers’ nature. But if you encourage more people to donate and slowly-but-surely bring the amount of donations to that person up, then you can have much more of an effect.
Or you could buy him another monitor, those always save time!
Maybe they can donate it to another open source project that might be able to make use of it. 
Italy? Best way to use the money would be - 4000$ to bribe a local politician to make the software mandatory for a certain council office. 1000$ to bribe a local journalist to write about the software. Then get government money to open a local software house, grab the fundings, move to the US, give back 6000$ and open a serious business there without all the hassles (taxes, laws, corruption, friendships, etc) involved in anything resembling decent work we have in Italy.
whops, did I say it out loud? Of course it was a joke.
The better way to probably spend that money like Jon suggested is probably a bounty for features. These software projects always have a long list of things that need done, and a little money is enough to spur a college student to work on the project. Probably as little as $50.00 a week would be enough to get the ball rolling and get some real features out the door.
Mono has had some really good success with the Google Summer of Code internships. Maybe that is the way get things done.
By the way on a different note, if anybody has a good idea what I can do with the domain name buggd.com I am all ears. Seems ripe for software developer website or messaging website.
Such as your code is full of bugs. Or stop bugging me with your messages. Might even consider doing something like I mentioned above with it, if I had time to plan out what is needed.
If anybody has any good ideas, please contact me at http://www.coderjournal.com.
Having looked at his website, Dario is a contractor, 5000$ is 3300€ more or less, which is a bit less than what a contractor gets in Italy for 15 days of fulltime job.
He could, between contracts, spend 15 days on his project.
Pay for travel, fees and other expenses to go to a .NET conference or two. He could improve his skills and give a talk to drum up interest in the project, possibly leading to new contributors to the project.
Or new hardware:
- an Aeron chair
- extra/new larger monitors
- his dream keyboard
…
I’m surprised and disappointed by this as well. For me, my development time has a potential monetary value, so unless that time is already being compensated for via other avenues, it seems like that’s kind of an obvious compensation.
Other possibilities like design, marketing, docs work seem like good ones too. I’m surprised this hadn’t occurred to Dario.
I have put hundreds of hours into my own open-source projects, and donations are minimal. I did receive a grant from OWASP to work on a particular OSS project I proposed, and the money meant I could dedicate my free time to working on that project rather than other pay-for work.
We had a long discussion about this in the Tikiwiki project. Currently, we have no ads on our websites. No donations or whatsoever. Hosting is covered by some contributors, quite a few of which (including myself) make a living out of consulting around the project. When someone hires a developer to add a feature, fix a problem or anything, it’s a targeted decision. They choose what they want, they choose who will do it. If you give money to the project, the community has to decide what to do with it. It’s not that the projects don’t need the money, it’s just that they often don’t have the decision making structures to decide what to do with it.
It’s just a balance problem between major and minor contributors, and the conflicts that may occur simply because major contributors are pretty much the only ones who can take these decisions.
We found a few things we could do if we ended up having money:
- Pay for bounties on open bugs voted by the wide community that no one volunteered to fix.
- Cover travel expenses for developers to meet.
The last one does feel like the best way, but then we need to decide who to invite. Gatherings in the project are fairly common and they have a huge impact on community building. However, not all contributors have the same resources and currency exchange just makes matters worst.
Seriously, you should only pay for something specific. This decision making process you skip by just telling the community to do whatever they want just pushes the problem away. Instead of being alone in the process, you ask a group of people to do it. O(1) vs O(n^2) in communication paths.
Next time:
- Ask for communities what they would do with the money when they apply so the money does not sit for 4 months, or
- Invest in something that matters to you and handle the decision making yourself.
Save your charity for curing diseases or feeding the hungry.
Needy programmers should get a fucking job.
Hire a developer for them. Do the work to track down someone with the right skillset, then pay them. It’s the gift of time. Let them decide what to do with the developer’s time, but a decent contractor should be able to give you 50-100 hours? And maybe, you end up creating a contributor after his paid time is up.