Re: roadmap status update/update request

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

> allow voluntary up front contributions but the user chooses which bounty to 
> attach it to so popular stuff quickly builds up into big bounties

At first sounds good, but there is a problem here:
Quickly, a casual user will need to pay more than he would normally pay 
Apple or MS to buy their products every 1-2 years (and I must say here, I 
get way more new features each year with new Mac OS X versions than I get 
with Gnome's timed releases). For example, for my 20 feature requests I 
might need to pledge around $1000 for all of them. While this is still 
extremely cheap considering that consultant work is about $200 per hour in 
US, we still talking about OSS which should be cheaper and be more friendly 
to "customers", aka users. Also, this gets quickly very expensive for the 
users and the whole thing is bound to fail.

And this brings me to the second point: I would not like to see a bounty be 
more than $2000, no matter the feature's complexity. If we get 5-6 features 
ending up having crazy amounts of money in them, even if they are trivial to 
implement, we end up with these two new problems:
1. Other features that might really need fixing will get "forgotten" because 
there are no bounties on them, or the bounties are too low.
2. Might create a new standard of how gnome works and developers would 
refuse to code for something without getting paid. It might sound stupid 
now, but if this bounty thing works, that's what will devs expect in the 
future, by default: money.

What I am trying to say is, that "auctioning bounties" are _dangerous_ to 
the Gnome project. Instead, if a fixed amount of money is given by people 
every year and then the Foundation distributes some of that money to most 
active developers, I think it would be most cost-efficient for both users 
and the project without the dangers of having the devs working for money 
alone. Every 3 months, the Foundation would release activity logs (in a 
"glorious top-20" kind of thing) and share the money accordingly. This would 
get the devs motivated instead of having them thinking "I don't want to work 
for annoying users for only 1000 bucks". Also, there would be the actual 
competition between developers, which can also keep them motivated.

Eugenia