Hi everyone, I've been talking to a developer of PySoy (http://www.pysoy.org/), Arc Riley.
The developers of PySoy are attempting to set up an organization called the Copyleft Games Group. This organization would be an umbrella organization for various FLOSS game projects. It would be a registered non-profit organization, and could collect revenue (from donations, summer of code, ads, etc) on our behalf. This would be useful because it would free any revenue from tax liability. Additionally, people would potentially be able to donate to Wesnoth and have their donation be tax deductible. I have invited Arc Riley to the mailing list, and he may answer any questions people have about the Copyleft Games Group. The group already has a lawyer who intends to be on their board, as well as noted FLOSS activist, Jon "maddog" Hall. Starting our own "Wesnoth Foundation" would be nice, but it would be a lot of work and overhead. Rather, it seems to make a good amount of sense to join an umbrella organization with other FLOSS games. Naturally, this heavily relates to the topic of money being involved in our project, and I suspect is going to be at least somewhat controversial. I would like to remind everyone that most successful FLOSS projects have sources of funding, some amounting to millions of dollars. These include Mozilla/Firefox, Linux, MySQL, Ubuntu, and OpenOffice. It has also never been part of Wesnoth's approach to exclude the potential for acquiring some revenue for various purposes. Our current lack of funding actually skews our development model somewhat. Any company would be insane to spend weeks of a good developer's time to optimize code to save a mere $500 in server costs. However, on Wesnoth that is exactly the kind of thing we do, because we have no substantial cash supply yet. If anyone was interested in what we might spend money on, here are some things: - server infrastructure (including multiplayer server, add-on server, stats.wesnoth.org; potentially forums, web site, etc). - funding developers for specific needs (hardware they need to contribute effectively; any other costs they might incur that they have difficulty paying) - potentially to fund a "Wesnoth Conference" -- to allow developers to meet, face to face. Anyhow, I'm going to throw this out to any questions or comments people might have. David _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
