Re: mc^2 news (august 2016)

["Yury V. Zaytsev" <yury shurup com>]

On Thu, 18 Aug 2016, denisgolovan wrote:

> But why not try some form of crowd-funding / bounty-hunting?

I can only speak for myself and my experience is that with most successful 
crowd-funding projects, maintainers end up getting paid several times 
lower wages than the market rates, and this income is unstable (that is, 
no indications whatsoever as to what happens when the money from the 
campaign runs out). In exchange for that, however, they get to work on an 
exciting open source project of their own choosing and enjoy flexible 
working times.

I have a lot of respect for the engineers who do go for this (I know some, 
and they are really seriously brilliant), but, very unfortunately, this is 
not a compromise that I'm personally prepared to accept.

Besides, I don't even want to work on mc all day long :-) It's a great 
hobby project for a few days per week, but that's about it. So, my 
personal dream would be to find an employer who is ready to sponsor 1/2 
days per week of open source work (the more, the better ;-) ), such that I 
could put part of this time towards mc, but on a regular basis (i.e. 
weekly) rather than ad hoc, and still enjoy all the perks of not being 
"self-employed"; how this pans out we shall see in the near future.

Now, yet again, this is just my personal view of things...

> I mean to structure those 500+ bugs/features ("future" milestone) in 
> some meaningful way + put some estimates(weeks, dollars)/difficulty for 
> them and try to pursue people on popular Linux forums for support.

If you are willing to invest some serious effort into pulling out 
something like that, let me know if there is anything I could reasonably 
help you with.

In my personal view of the situation, however, then the biggest problem 
with mc codebase today is the abysmal state of test coverage, which makes 
maintenance a gamble and demands extreme efforts to review patches.

Before this problem is addressed, I'm not very positive about soliciting 
massive contributions, which will end up rotting on the Trac waiting for 
code reviews and rewrites... that might never come.

--
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev