[Ardour-Users] Donate for your favorite feature (was: Couldthis solve Ardour's financial headache?)

[John Emmas]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Thomas Vecchione"
Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] Donate for your favorite feature (was: Couldthis
solve Ardour's financial headache?)
>
> While I believe there is merit to the idea of making donations for
> features more visible, I think you are being a bit overly optomistic on
> how much of a difference it would make in terms of financial numbers.
> Would love to be proven wrong though.
>
It's never satisfying to say "I told you so" but when this 'sponsored
feature' idea was first floated (last year, sometime) I do remember saying
that it would never work while the requests were jumbled up among a
database of bug reports.  At the time, I suggested separating the feature
requests into a separate mantis of their own where they wouldn't get lost
among the general hubbub.

The existing scheme was useful as an experiment and if nothing else, it
proved that high visibility is crucially important.  However, Thomas has
hinted at a far more serious problem that the existing scheme has also
highlighted.  The biggest reason for the failure of sponsored features has
been the ludicrously small amounts being pledged.  Features that would take
weeks of development time are being requested in exchange for a few tens of
dollars. .Separating the features into their own (high visibility) database
would undoubtedly help this,  Arranging them in a league table would also
help because users could immediately see which requests were gaining in
popularity.  But the bottom line is that people will need to be more
pragmatic about how small the user base is and how long these features take
to develop.

To set up something more 'visible' would probably use up a lot of Paul's
valuable time - but as Thomas points out, if people aren't going to be
realistic with their pledges, the end result, ultimately, will be no more
effective.  I'm not sure there's a simple solution to this problem.

John