Hi!
� wrote:
there is one the advantage of a bounty / marketplace / whatever you call it ... the donor decides, what he supports and what he want to support
I see this as an disadvantage. Money shouldn't make decisions.
Money never does any decisions - people with money does. I don't think spending money for software automatically leads to any disadvantages. We all spend virtual money on software - programming an external or creating a patch by myself costs money, because I spend my time for these works. The question is: is there anybody out there, who can do the same job more efficiently than me and can I do another task in the meantime for money more efficiently. In that case, you save real money (or your time) just better work managment. And creating bounties would help to find the right man for the right work.
I'm glad about this discussion here, because of its timing: we use pd (=create patches) at our institute but we can't contribute to the development (=programming externals/the core) due to the lack of time/people. That's why we could _spend_ money to improve some functionality of pd we need - doing pd development, most of you are more efficiently than I am. We don't have any fixed objectives until now, but knowing that there's something like http://www.gnome.org/bounties/ for pd would help us to plan next milestones concerning pd this summer. We can imagine paying for improvements or new features in pd, without knowing where does the money goes (conferences, meetings, events, organization issues, PR things or even the programmer of the new feature itself).
Piotr