inline On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Steve Strong <[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. > Sadly, I agree. > 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? > > That is something that I would like to see discussed here. Ideally, I would like to see some form of committers getting money for work they do. Trying to nail it down by the numbers would only encourage what is basically cheating. Optimizing to make the numbers work vs. the good of the project. Maybe some form of time commitment from people to do work on NH? I am not sure. Another option would be to literally put money on features. I would love to see Search & Shards go into production ready status, and I am sure that if we had someone pushing them full time, that can happen in a short amount of time. My company's contribution is going to be directly to Fabio, with the expectation that will allow uninterrupted work on NHibernate. > - Who owns the bank account? Who has visibility of it? Is it > available for public viewing? > > I don't want to get into a situation where there are funds to be managed long term. That would require us to setup a more formal way of managing things. Perhaps we should, but that isn't the way things are now. > > - 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?! > > Regarding sponsorships, the only way it would make sense to do so if there was something to get back from having more visibility/users. Currently, if we have another 100,000 more users, do any of us really care? Spending money on marketing is literally throwing it away, since we have no was to recoup that. > 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. > I am not saying that this won't change at some point, but at the moment, my company can sponsor my own involvement in the project, so it makes sense to spread the money to allow other people to spend more time on it. > 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. > > I am NOT doing that out of some sense that commercial interests preclude involvement in this. I am doing this to increase the pot available for the other committers, since I don't currently need an additional monetary incentive to work on NH. > 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. > > [image: 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. > >
