Anyone at LinuxTag?

[Austin English]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 1:18 AM, Kai Blin<kai.blin at gmail.com> 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?

No, that's not what I was saying. I was actually referring to the
comment about random paypal buttons and a lack of a real
infrastructure for accepting donations.

For the (theoretical) problem of what to do with a large (potential)
donation, that's a whole different problem.

-- 
-Austin