Anyone at LinuxTag?

Roderick Colenbrander thunderbird2k at gmail.com
Mon Jun 29 08:55:36 CDT 2009


On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 8:28 AM, Scott Ritchie<scott at open-vote.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>

A full foundation could give us advantages like that. I really think
that we could raise quite a bit of money (just see what other projects
are receiving). We mainly lack good goals and policies what we should
do with it. Sponsoring WineConf and perhaps even developers makes
sense.

The danger is of course competing with Codeweavers but I don't think
it would be better for both. Right now Codeweavers works on areas
which are critical to get programs they support working. This includes
'boring' stuff like msxml, msi, jscript and other parts which
volunteers barely work. There are also big parts like our beloved DIB
engine which take a lot of resources and might only get implemented if
there is a serious need or a big paying customer. Else it is too
expensive.

I can imagine that if we had some good goals and organize lets say 1
or 2 fund raisers a year you might be able to raise 50k. This could be
used for purposes like the ones explained but parts can also be used
to sponsor Codeweavers (or an external developer) on things like a DIB
engine which else never get implemented.

Thanks,
Roderick



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