Personally, I'd be inclined to agree. As soon as we try to split the
cash, it's going to get ever so complex which was kind of the point of
my previous email - if we do want to "pay ourselves" then we're going to
have to deal with all of that and more (don't mention tax, anyone). If
we think there's gonna be enough cash to clear our mortgages then
perhaps it's worth it, but since I suspect it's more likely to be the
occasional beer & pizza I'd rather avoid the overhead.
Having the cash to fund other things (such as technical writers,
software licences etc.) would be easier to manage and, providing we
spend it wisely, do no end of good to both NH and the community.
I've dealt with various clubs and organizations before where money was
involved, so understand the complexity that it can lead to. Having said
that, I've never done it on an OSS project, so I'm happy to be convinced
in either direction :)
On 03/02/2010 21:22, Davy Brion wrote:
personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers...
yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_
to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills
i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira
server, a faster svn server, things like that...
On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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.
