Writing reports on deliverables isn't overhead, it's documentation of new features (which would have to be done anyway). Though presentations would certainly be overhead, as well as filling out forms, forms, forms...
-Jonathan Message: 2 Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 20:19:34 +0100 From: Graham Percival <[email protected]> Subject: bounties To: Jan Nieuwenhuizen <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected], LilyPond Development <[email protected]> Message-ID: <20100615191934.gb10...@sapphire> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 08:25:27PM +0200, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote: > Op dinsdag 15-06-2010 om 16:50 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Graham > Percival: > > > That has been attempted before... hmm, 2007? Han-Wen tried to work on > > lilypond full-time, but there just wasn't enough people offering > > bounties > > I am considering to offer commercial support and may be able to do > that on a part-time basis. However, working on two bounties has > illustrated that bounty work can be quite tricky. Indeed; there's almost no relationship between the amount of work required and the amount of money being offered. > It would be very > nice for someone doing this for a hobby and getting to know LilyPond, > but commercial support requires some level of predictability. Actually, somebody pointed out (privately) that chasing bounties is less appealing for inexperienced developers: a $100 bounty could very well take you 50 hours to complete (i.e. if it's your first time working on spacing code), making the job $2 / hr. > Also, if the amount of work is not consistent but takes the form > of a few thousand euros once a year, you would be very lucky if I > (or whoever else would take this on) would happen to be available > within a reasonable time frame to work on those. Yes. I'm not trying to discourage people from offering bounties -- it's certainly better than nothing! However, there's very good reasons why programmers don't immediately start working on any issue that has a bounty being offered. One idea I've toyed with is seeking a grant to work on lilypond. Various governments and agencies give research grants; I'm pretty certain that we could get a grant to improve medieval chant notation or contemporary non-Western scales or whatnot. However, this would probably require - a bunch of grant applications - collaborating with some musicologists (i.e. a medieval chant expert, or John Cage scholar, or whatever) - overhead of writing reports about deliverables, giving presentations to people, etc. - etc. In the process of doing the specialized notation, the developer might fix a few "normal" bugs as well. If there was a concerted effort, particularly between the European academics involved with LilyPond, it could be done, and we might even be able to fund a full-time developer for 6 months or even a year. However, I'm not certain the effort would be worth it -- writing grants is a lot of work; we'd probably have to make multiple attempts; dealing with the administration of the grant would be a lot of work; etc etc. Cheers, - Graham
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