Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
But I think it would be great if there was a Pd general fund, then we could use that to pay people for past work, or pay people to do work that needs to be done, but isn't getting done.
Do you think there are people willing to pay for stuff they could get for free sooner or later? - Please don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of getting paid but my experience shows that cool and free software is only cool and free as long as one can ask the developer for new features without having to pay to for them to be implemented. (Or even without having to fear the answer "I only will do this for money!")
I would love to give up my day job and devote that time to hacking on Pd. I am sure many of you feel the same.
Yes, I like this idea, too. But wouldn't this change the way the Pd community works?
I've decreased my Pd-coding activities to a minimum for some time now because I was tired of getting back 'just bug reports'. This does not mean that money is everything but I realised that I often enough ended up in spending time on coding stuff I didn't need for my own work. Having a central Pd-donation system could help to get in money for some things, but I'm very unshure whether people would actually donate some money for stuff that is already there. As you pointed out some time ago, since everything is open source it's often easier and faster to implement new features by just hacking the code instead of asking (and now probably paying) the original developer...
Olaf