Hi,

I think yet another point should be thought over. I can understand that the university wants to have a confirmation or a bill or something they can hold in hands, a paper which makes them feel happy instead of a software licence. So why not have a certain certificate which makes someone an official sponsor of Pd. For a fixed sum of money. 500 / 5.000 / 50.000 / 1.000.000 USD (exlusive contract for one year... hehe). Additionally they will be listed on a website and maybe mentioned in the annual Pd-report... They want to spend the money now. Please take it!!!

Later we decide who is responsible for the money (one person, many persons, an organisation) and for what the money is spent (programmers, structural things, workshops, meetings, artwork...)

Marius.

----- Original Message ----- From: "günter geiger" geiger@xdv.org To: "Chris McCormick" chris@mccormick.cx Cc: pd-list@iem.at Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 9:10 AM Subject: Re: [PD] Bounty [Re: no licensing, no money?]

Hi Chris,

For me your proposal seems to be the only feasible solution for the bounty system but I still believe that it is not what the original poster wanted.

The problem that the original poster had was to pay for the work already done. Not by a single person, but by the community in the whole and Miller specifically.

So, again, the idea of the treasurer and a non-profit organization is a good one, paying people for coding, and especially the way that Novell does in the gnome bounty system is not so good. I would rather pay people for doing structural work, for attending to meetings, giving workshops etc. With the bounty system I already fear the features that get implemented chosen by the criteria of who pays best ....

In Graz they already have a non-profit organization for pd, and I know that the legal setup is not complicated.

Maybe pd-graz can take over this task, they have done a faboulous job with the pd-developers conference, the next time such a conference could be partly financed by donation money and organized by the pd community in the whole.

Guenter

On Thu, 19 May 2005, Chris McCormick wrote:

...

Hi,

Why not make a decentralised bounty system? someone with a paypal account is nominated 'treasurer' via a democratic process. There then exists a website where anyone can create feature requests. Anyone can also add a bit of money towards a feature request, which goes into the treasurer account. Then, once the feature has been completed, if a majority of pledgers agree that the feature is completed, the money is tranferred to the account of the developer who did it.

Not that I neccesarily agree with the concept of bounties in the open source world, but to me if there had to be a system that would be a logical one.

Best regards,

Chris.

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So, again, the idea of the treasurer and a non-profit organization is a good one, paying people for coding, and especially the way that Novell does in the gnome bounty system is not so good. I would rather pay people for doing structural work, for attending to meetings, giving workshops etc.

well, doing workshops / organizing meetings is a lovely thing, but does it produce code? i mean the documentation / education problem is one thing, the development something else. also, i don't think it's a good idea to talk about workarounds for the major problems of pd, but actually trying to solve them ... (e.g. how many people seperated the gui from the dsp by using two instances of pd and how many people thought of a clean solution)

Maybe pd-graz can take over this task, they have done a faboulous job with the pd-developers conference, the next time such a conference could be partly financed by donation money and organized by the pd community in the whole.

i like the idea of having conferences / meetings ... it's a lovely thing ... but i have a few remarks on that...

• has there been any discussion about the future development during the

pd-confention, except questions to miller, presentations of externals?

• iirc the only development done was an improved macos installer and the

port of the tooltips to 0.38 ...

i think there are 4 different aspects:

• arts: commissioning pieces, realized with pd
• documentation: writing docs, giving workshops, teaching
• conferences: developer meetings
• development: writing code

i think it is important for a donor to know, how his money is used ... some donors won't be able to go to conferences in europe, because they live in new zeeland, some are not interested in funding arts, since they use pd for scientific purposes, some are not interested in reading documentation / attending workshops, since they already know, how pd works, some are not interested in development, since they have problems learning the language...

on the other hand it would be wrong, if someone thinks, he supports the "development" just by financing documentation / meetings ... so the only thing i could accept for a non-profit organization is to have these 4 sections, and letting the donor decide, which section to support...

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 ...

1.5¢

t

On May 19, 2005, at 9:24 AM, günter geiger wrote:

On Thu, 19 May 2005, Tim Blechmann 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.

I see it as necessary to encourage some people to contribute money. A
lot of people want to direct their money to what they deem to be
important. In the U.S., donors to NGOs can specify what they want
their donation to spent on, and that organization is required by law to
use it that way. But they don't have to specify, they can leave that
up to the organization as well.

Neither option is exclusive. We can have both donor-specified
development for those who want to give money that way, and a general Pd
fund, which the developers decide how to spend.

Still, that leaves the question open of how we make these decisions.
Personally, I think that developer votes would work best, something
along the lines of Debian.

.hc

Guenter

...

1.5¢

t

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Hi all,

If a user does not have enough trust in the PD organization then they will probably not give any money for any purpose anyway.

that's not necessarily true. Since i am part of a small company spending money on PD development i can say that there are parts that are crucial for PD to be useful for our project (like optimization issues, audio layer quality, general usability and some special features) and there are parts where i wouldn't spend money on (like the TK part). We don't have enough money that we don't care - maybe others have. From my point of view i would also like to choose developers who i trust in terms of skills and style of coding. Sure we could have opted to spend our money in pure proprietary programming, but we wanted to show our respect to the community. There are already a number of improvements (mainly to the developer branch) that hopefully make it into main PD soon. Also most of my publicized externals are spinoffs from commercial funding.

best greetings, Thomas

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