On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Gunhild Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I'm sure the desire to see Rosegarden developers recieve some form of > financial compensation for the time and energy they put into the project > is widespread. Still, they're not exactly showered in donations. I've > never donated as much as a penny, and the reason is that I don't have > enough money to make any substantial donation and it would just feel > silly to just throw in a ridiculously small amount.
I think there are lots of good reasons why not many people donate to this project. Some of them might be: * The program itself doesn't prompt you to -- you would have to notice the small link on the website. We wouldn't want to nag, but we could probably get away with prompting only once, at some random point during the first month of use of a new version of Rosegarden -- or something like that -- if we were aiming to make a serious effort to make donations work. * SourceForge's donations page is a little awkward and rather impersonal. * There's no guidance about how much would be a good idea to donate. A single "Do it now!" button with a modest fixed amount and zero choice would probably be more effective than the half a dozen quite various amounts SourceForge offers. * There is the awkward feeling you just described, in which a small donation seems too inadequate to be worthwhile. What helps here is knowing that many other people are also donating small amounts, and that it is proving helpful. * Our description of why you might want to donate is somewhat half-hearted. This is probably related to the prior point -- just as users might feel that their donation is not going to be enough to be useful, so we might feel that it's hard to raise enough to be useful and we wouldn't want to trouble you if we can't do that. We would need a quite different approach if we were going to set about it more seriously. * The donation goes to my personal PayPal account, and it's not evident that this is an appropriate place for "Rosegarden team" donations. We would need to have a more effective way to make it clear that donations will be distributed where they would be most useful (and, after making it clear, to actually do that). I guess we'd need a "disbursement committee" of currently active RG persons, or something like that, rather than one not very organised individual. * Many people dislike PayPal. It's worth comparing with the Ardour project (http://www.ardour.org/) which actively solicits donations in subscription form and is quite transparent about their number and size. Ardour has an added sense of urgency about it because its main developer is actually working on it full-time right now, rather than just seeing what happens or hoping to be able to work on it full-time in the future. As you can see from the Ardour home page it does bring in a certain amount, though an amount that would still be below minimum wage over here at least. Could we do as well as that? Could we do better? How much worse would we have to do before it became not worthwhile for us to bother our users by pressing for financial support, and/or risk serious disagreement amongst ourselves about how to use the donations? A lot probably depends on why we imagine people to be paying: * for us to stick around and be able to provide support and do new work? * because they feel part of a community and they see that some of that community is in need? * because they like the program as it stands and just want to say thank you? (This one suggests that former but no longer active developers ought to get a cut too, whereas the first two do not.) * just because we asked them to? * because they have some specific requirements that they want to encourage us to work on? (This is the Cofundos one, I guess. My problems with it: [a] not effective for the lots of small features that I imagine many people would like; [b] disproportionately favours pure development over the other roles that people in a project take; [c] there is no guarantee that the people most able to carry out a particular job will be in a position to do so even if they are sponsored: it may be more productive for the same money to be used differently, but the sponsors can't generally anticipate that; [d] it implies that a small number of users who are prepared to commit the most will be able to steer the project in their direction -- is that a good thing?) This is a difficult topic to discuss; it tends to get a lot of "well, we could do something a bit like this or that, but I'm not quite sure how" and very little of "what I think we should do is EXACTLY THIS, and I propose to sort it out right away". Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
