Hello Airsay & everyone, Airsay raised the following interesting question on the "Fineract Customization" email thread, which to me seems worth discussing on a fresh new email thread here:
"Are there any avenues to donate to the project to have specific functionality built into Fineract?" So, you CAN donate to the ASF at https://donate.apache.org, but this ("just") contributes to the capex & opex costs of e.g.the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) running issues.apache.org etc. for all projects. You CANNOT donate directly to our Apache Fineract project, and that's perhaps a Good Thing and a Feature, not a Bug? ;-) It would be complicated to determine where such money would go (IMHO). You COULD certainly just donate to specific individuals; e.g. I personally set up https://github.com/sponsors/vorburger once.. :-) BUT I suspect that you may really be asking something else... what you possibly are really getting at here is "I have problem XYZ or feature request ABC, and am looking for someone to implement that for me, and am willing to pay any interested party real money to do so" - am I right in assuming that may at least partially be the real question that you were asking? As far as I know, there absolutely are parties possibly interested in working with folks such as you like this (for full disclosure: I personally am NOT one of them). But perhaps it's not so obvious to you how to connect with such parties? I believe we all together as the project community could perhaps do better at enabling this. A while ago we discussed some ideas about creating some sort of magical sophisticated "matchmaking marketplace" site for such requests. We haven't really progressed on this, but... perhaps this really isn't that complicated? I have a simple suggestion for you, and anyone else interested: If you need something done which you don't have the know how for implementing yourself, and don't want to wait for a volunteer to possibly look into some day, then first create a JIRA issue describing whatever it is - as always. Then send a short email to this developer mailing list sounding something like this: Subject: "$€¥£₱ for FINERACT-123", Body: "Hello, we need FINERACT-123, and are willing to pay a mutually agreed upon fee we'll privately settle on first to anyone interested who is able to fully implement that to our specification when a Pull Request for the requested functionality was made available and merged into the develop branch of Fineract. Please direct reply offlist to me with any questions and your proposed quotes for implementing issue FINERACT-123." BTW if I were you, I would fairly strongly feel that it is in both YOUR and this community's interest to have any such work done "upstream first", on https://github.com/apache/fineract. To you, it makes it easier to upgrade to new releases. To us, it helps move a common unified code base with new features and bug fixes forward. If it's functionality that someone implements for you on a "private fork" that they are offering you, then discussing that, IMHO, should not happen on this public mailing list at all. We do understand that sometimes customization requests require changes to existing code, but believe that it's possible to combine "upstream first" and "local customizations" through modularity; there is currently new energy on exploring this (NB FINERACT-1127 & FINERACT-1171) - more about that separately later. Maybe you'll get 0 replies to such an email. But IMHO it's worth giving that a try and see what you get... I'm (very) curious myself! It's IMHO totally OK for follow-up discussions to be held privately. We the community would simply see JIRAs being self assigned, pull requests being raised, reviewed and merged. Money may have flown to Make It So - there's nothing wrong with that (at least to me personally), and that doesn't have to be public on list. If something like the model outlined here takes on and proves to work, then the Apache Fineract community could eventually even start to maintain some sort of list, in a simple MD doc on Git, about "Recommended Implementation Partners" - based on publicly verifiable contribution track records (i.e. merged PRs) by parties offering such services in reply to "$€¥£₱ for FINERACT-123" email threads. Further thoughts on this topic very much welcome on this public thread! M.
