I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match
donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly,
whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight
of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes. Given
that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this
works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those
donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in
pointless arguments. I suspect the levels of money won't be all that
high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is
important. I think we need to answer questions like:
* Who is eligible for the money? Any committer? Only "active"
committers? What defines "active"?
* How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined)
get the same amount? Is it split by number of commits? Number of
lines of code changed?
* Who owns the bank account? Who has visibility of it? Is it
available for public viewing?
* Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing
it amongst individuals? Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate"
activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?
Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate
stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende -
you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as
something different. Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write
it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.
Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if
they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf
will make its own money and has its own associated costs. I don't
really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your
altruistic activity with NH) are related. If they are, then any one of
us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to
an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.
Any thoughts?
Cheers,
Steve
On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:
Guys,
I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that
campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.
Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like
to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.
NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in
the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it
is done for free. We would like to be able to dedicate more time to
NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we
can spend on a free project is limited.
In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign
<http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8615> that will allow you to donate
money to the project.
Click here to lend your support to: NHibernate and make a donation at
www.pledgie.com ! <http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/8615>
*What is this money going to be used for?*
This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to
sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.
As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me
personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial
interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler <http://nhprof.com/>),
so I don’t feel I should benefit from the donations.
*Donation Matching*
Moreover, my company, Hibernating Rhinos
<http://hibernatingrhinos.com/>, is going to /match any donation /to
this campaign (to a total limit of 5,000$), as a way to give back to
the NHibernate project for the excellent software it produced.
*Why should you donate?*
If you are a user of NHibernate, you gained a lot from build on such a
solid foundation. We ask to you to donate so that we can make the
project even better. If your company uses NHibernate, ask it to donate
to this campaign.
