<snip> Donations to an emc2 entity (whatever form it would have) are basicly hard to manage. Sure the donor can suggest what the money should be used for, but still "someone" has to decide specifically "who" should get the money. I find that as a potential source for tensions. (lots of bad scenarios cross my mind: a dev announces he will do the task, but in the end doesn't. more than one dev start or fix the task, the money needs to be splitted up, probably not in a 50-50% fashion, etc). And it also implies an overhead (Stephen described this quite nicely in his email, I won't repeat myself: accountant, project manager, etc).
An entity that runs on donations (like some of the big open source projects out there) has developer employees, people that work on the software for a living. Currently we have only developers that work on EMC/emc2 in their spare time, for fun (and are employed somewhere else). I don't think any (but I'm only speaking of myself) are willing to give up their current employment, and switch to a - potentially unsafe - employment by the EMC entity (what if donations stop coming in after 3-4 months?, etc). One system I've seen on some projects that might be applied on EMC/emc2 is a "bounty" system. Basicly a database where donors add their feature request, and the amount of money they are willing to pay for that feature. Developers are then able to add comments, to claim a bounty, and report when/if they finished implementing it. Transfer of the amount will then be personal between the bounty submitter and the one that implemented the feature. here's an example: http://www.opensourcexperts.com/bountylist.html Just my 2 cents Alex ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stay on top of everything new and different, both inside and around Java (TM) technology - register by April 22, and save $200 on the JavaOne (SM) conference, June 2-5, 2009, San Francisco. 300 plus technical and hands-on sessions. Register today. Use priority code J9JMT32. http://p.sf.net/sfu/p _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
