Re: Formation of Gnome-user-foundation

[Olafur Arason <olafra gmail com>]

There are two non exclusive types of people that would pay money to Gnome:
Passive: People that would be happy to use Gnome Friends and like that you
are in charge of using that because they are appreciate the work that you are
doing.
Active: People that like what you are doing but want to make it better with
they're contribution. Because as we know not everybody is a programmer or
could help with documentation or translating, but still want to help but some
times that help is perceived as we want you fix this problem in your free time.
This isn't what most people want to seem like, so they don't say anything.
Those people want a venue where they can contribute and feel appreciated.
Most of them don't want to deal with bugzilla or if they do they have to
pay lots of money (more than 30$) to get the feature that they want
because it wouldn't have the accumulative effect the Gnome-user-foundation
would have and none of the social effect. Your money is worth more in a
system that votes on bugs to fix, because even though you don't get your
pet feature, you may get a feature that you like and would pay for if it
wouldn't be possible to get your feature. Also because of the review structure
of Gnome-user-foundation the feature request would be nicer to look at,
with examples, and you wouldn't be paying for features that would never be
done, because they are to difficult or wouldn't fit in with Gnome. Plus 
Gnome-foundation would get part of the money, that is raised.

But it all comes done to your interest in this project, the time you are
willing to put into it, because I don't have the resourced to pull this off,
plus this would need a lot of support from you.

Olafur Arason.


On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 12:11:22 +0100, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
> Maybe we need to make it clearer that donations to the existing GNOME
> Foundation directly help to improve GNOME itself, by paying for very
> definite things.
> 
> For instance, the GNOME Foundation pays the costs of some developers to
> get to GUADEC and GNOME summits - developers who otherwise could not
> attend. These meetings have consistently encouraged progress and
> provided clear direction.
> 
> If we had many more donations then we could do other things with high
> impact, such as improve our infrastructure.
> 
> So, we have a Foundation already, and it's a good idea to make a
> donation:
> http://www.gnome.org/friends/
> 
> I personally like the idea of bounties and would even like them
> responsibly integrated into bugzilla, but it's not that big a deal.
> 
> --
> Murray Cumming
> murrayc murrayc com
> www.murrayc.com
> www.openismus.com
> 
>