Anyone at LinuxTag?

Scott Ritchie scott at open-vote.org
Mon Jun 29 01:28:59 CDT 2009


Kai Blin wrote:
> On Monday 29 June 2009 07:51:03 Austin English wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 12:46 AM, Kai Blin<kai.blin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>> Yes. Realistically, there will be a contract involved regulating what
>>> needs to be done to get the money. I very much doubt the government just
>>> go and drop money on random paypal buttons and hope for the best. The way
>>> I've seen stuff like this work before is that there's a call for bids
>>> from companies to implement certain features in a piece of software,
>>> maybe with the requirement at a reasonable effort to get the produced
>>> changes upstream.
>> Ah, misunderstood what you meant there.
>>
>> Eventually some sort of foundation would be the best thing to head
>> toward, but that's a legal headache.
> 
> I don't see how a foundation would help with a a situation like that. To recap 
> the (theoretical) situation. Someone, let's call him the client, wants some 
> features implemented in Wine and is ready to spend money on that.
> 
> Now, there's three things the client could do. He could hire some developers 
> to get the stuff he wants implemented. That's a huge administrative effort 
> just to get some lines of code done, and as you tend to pay employees by 
> work-hours, you need to estimate how long it will take to implement the 
> feature.
> 
> The more obvious thing to do (IMHO) is to go and contract somebody, company or 
> individual to implement these features. As opposed to an employment contract, 
> you usually agree on what needs to be delivered and pay only if it is 
> delivered. 
> 
> Now what I understood you're suggesting is that instead of contracting a 
> company or individual, the client could give the money to a Wine Foundation. 
> How is that money going to turn into the code the client wants to have? Is 
> the Wine Foundation going to hire Wine developers to work on such stuff? Is 
> there enough money in development services like that to offer a stable job to 
> any developer?
> 

There may very well be - Mozilla had a few full time employees years 
ago, and at the time they had about as many users as we do.

That doesn't even count other roles a foundation could play, such as 
community organizing, developer recruiting, sponsoring "summer of code" 
projects year round, or even just serving as a tax deduction for 
Codeweavers' donated code.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie



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