[Ardour-Dev] donations

[Paul Davis]

On Sun, 2008-11-30 at 12:55 +0100, schoappied wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> If I subscribe to Ardour, what are the possibilities to stop this if I 
> want? Can I stop it at any time?

You can cancel it at any time, with no extra charges or consequences of
any kind.

> Can you guarantee a particular development for donators? Let say for 
> example, with this amount of money we can guarantee midi support within 
> a period of time?

I am considering opening up a new donation "category" specifically for
MIDI. Money that is paid towards MIDI will go primarily to developers
who work on MIDI, rather than other areas of Ardour.

> Is it possible to have some influence on the development of Ardour if 
> you're a subscriber or is it possible to ask for a specific tool when 
> gathering money with a group people?

If you are a subscriber (and you mention this when communicating with
either the mailing lists, IRC or the bug tracker), then your voice will
be a little louder than it would otherwise be. However, please keep in
mind that the total amount associated with subscriptions is really
relatively small, and so although I certainly try hard to do what
subscribers are asking for, at this time there is not enough money
arriving from ardour users for me to feel totally bound to the
"community will". 

On the bug tracker, there is a feature that allows for sponsorship of a
particular feature/bug. This works entirely through a "promise"
mechanism - no money is required, you are simply promising to pay once
the feature is completed.

Again, however, keep in mind that there are very few features that can
be added to ardour in less than 1 hour. Most feature requests require
several hours work, quite a lot require days, and several require weeks.
Please consider how much programmers get paid in the area that you live
in when thinking about how much a feature should "cost".

I am also considering making 5-10 sponsored features visible on the
ardour.org website, to make more people aware of this idea.

--p