Am 25.03.2013 16:45, schrieb Peter Wendorff: > If you want to have feature X done and you're not able to do it > yourself, but you want to pay for it, go for it: find a coder, pay him > and provide patches that are easy to maintain or where the current > maintainers believe you or your coder maintain the code in future (by > your payment or without), and you might get what you want even without > coding skills.
Yes, but there you have the problem that there is an established “system” for that missing. Of course, I could start a kickstarter project for every small issue (let’s say I really want to have smart quotations in a newly created word processor). But then all the things like searching for a developer, introduction into the project etc. takes too much time and thus money. At least in projects with some size it would be nicer if there were some kind of affiliated programmer would be nice: He already knows the project and how to implement something. On the bug tracker it would then be necessary to donate some kind of money which will then be associated with a specific bug or feature (or a feature group). Maybe there can be some milestones which are needed to be reached. I guess for most bugs, the OSS projects are happy if new features are implemented. I am not talking about “i want a radical different interface and I pay 2138354 Euros so that it is supported” (well, you could do that, but then you would likely get a fork), but rather these small issues, where the only problem is lack of manpower (or personal interest of some programmers). > > I understand people that do not spend time in their own (free) osm > routing service implementation, if there's a chance to get a paid job > from osmf in a couple of months - as long as nobody else is doing the > same for free up to then. I probably would prefer doing something else > first then, too. I do understand that problem. Some people may think “why should I do this for free if somebody is paid to do it?”. But look on the other hand: From an outside perspective, many OSS projects, as advanced as they are, are in no way up to commercial standards. Sometimes, a commercial program is at the same level after 2 or 3 years of development as some OSS application which is developed for 15 years. And the development is not standing still: in the future, it will change even more. I don’t think that there will be some kind of convergence, but rather even more divergency in the future. If application development has become so difficult these days (one does expect more than a simple command line application from most programs), it seems that money can help with that. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
