Hello list. In these days, reading the various whishes in the past thread [1], I was wondering about the various "business strategies" to speed up and give more robust support to QGIS development. I don't know if the way of putting a reward on the head of a certain target has been discussed before, anyway I want to share some thoughts. It could be considered in a two-way meaning:
- an user (single o corporative) needs a certain tool/utility/feature/etc: he describes it and put a reward on it. It becomes an open task to which anyone can contribute, also providing more foundings (a way to gather sparse needs) - a qgis developer is able to develop a certain tool, or to solve a bug, make an improvement, etc., but he needs money (not everything can be done on free time!). He puts an expected reward on his work. Maybe/probably there can be users that would find its work very useful and could contribute to its founding. In both cases the reward could be distinguished between development reward and short-term/long-term support founding. I'm not referring only to software dev but documentation, diffusion supports, etc., too. Obviously it would need the design of an efficient, effective and transparent founds management design, and a system to submit a "contract" with the parts involved. The complexity of such a system could be managed involving the local actors that offer QGIS support, both in the development offer and the requests gathering, but with a shared common system. I don't introduce the idea of a commercial brand/trademark because it's critical under many aspects, but we could reproduce something similar to guarantee on the quality of this system and of the products... I'm considering to apply the idea to other cases other then QGIS, because I find that it can encourage potential founders, realizing a direct relationship between them and the developers through a concrete, focused, task. Besides it doesn't contrast with the traditional polling system, and the core development choices leaded by the developers team and invoked by the community. While the latter remains the foundamental, voluntary based, QGIS development approach, my proposal could be part of a parallel, more structured, commercial system... What do you think about this? Could it be something feasable and useful for QGIS? Cheers, giovanni PS: I'm sorry for my english but I hope I've been able to explain the basics of my idea! [1] http://n2.nabble.com/Ideas-for-QGIS-plugin--td2240074.html _______________________________________________ Qgis-user mailing list Qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user