Man I hate to be an email nazi, but people continue to do this, so here goes (This is not directed at you personally, many people on this list do this): Please don't top post. If you are not replying to a message, start a new thread. If you are replying (even peripherally), practice proper replying/attribution form. If us geeks don't show the world The Way, then who will?
* Joseph Hardin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [03.06.29 03:24]: > Just a point I was wondering about, is there a way to specify what you > would like the donation to go towards(nothing too specific, just the > name of a developer or a project). Something for those of us that can't > spnsor a developer on our own, but want our money going into a specific > area. I think this an interesting idea (which must have been hashed out somewhere here before). I don't want to take away from the donations that a) enable key developers who spend most or all of their time making gentoo better for all of us, and that b) pay for infrastructure costs such as hardware and bandwidth. That obviously should, and needs to continue, in some form. But, say there is a certain bug #66666, which is a very tricky complicated bug to solve. Now, what if I'm some rich geek (which I'm not.. rich that is :) who has a 100USD to blow, and would like to pay to see bug #66666 fixed without having to fix it myself (I may not be able to fix it myself even if I had the ability to, due to time/family/work/etc constraints). Additionally, say that this is a bug for a fairly popular package, and there are ten or twenty other people who would like to see this bug go away, and being good purveyors of linux/open-source/gentoo, they are all also willing to pay varying amounts of money to see it fixed. This is after all how things often tend to happen in the real world ... how many people here make their own food/clothes/furniture/etc and fix their car/water-heater/plumbing/street pot holes/etc, *all* themselves? So, why can't we make it happen in the open-source world. Peer recognition will not pay for someone's food and rent. Additionally, maybe I'd like to see a certain enhancement done to portage sooner rather than later (reverse-dependency checking anyone? concurrent downloading during compilation of multiple packages?). It doesn't have to be gentoo-specific. Maybe I'd like to pool up with a few thousand other people to have some netscape/mozilla engineers make phoenix faster, or better yet, openoffice faster and better at importing MS Word .DOC files. Maybe it would take 100,000USD for that to happen (and remember that people are usually willing to work for less pay if it's going to a good cause), and as a smart investor, I am not willing to throw in my hard-earned money in unless I can be assured that there are enough other people willing to pay for this particular feature/fix as well, so that I have a certain level of assurance that it will happen if I (and the others) put up my share. It would be nice to see some kind of non-profit open-source contribution and barter-system infrastructure setup (volunteers?) that could handle such a thing. It could be for gentoo initially, and after tweaking and debugging it, could be generalized to accomodate any open-source project that wanted to use it (with sourceforge like accounts). It would be good from all aspects for fairly obviously reasons: - allows those of us who can't or don't want to contribute with our time to further our favorite software or distribution - would improve the quality of open-source software - would in many cases, especially the cases of popular or important software, allow those developers who do what they love to pay their rent from doing it - would encourage more developers/programmers to get involved, and scratch itches that no one else has addressed yet - would reward those developers who make really cool software with monetary incentive to continue to their software, and make it better. - would cause open-source model to be more competitive with propietary software model - would allow a response of "put up or shut up" to people who whine on IRC about broken ebuilds, nvidia drivers not working in Gentoo, etc. [ rest of top-posted email deleted ] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
