[Ardour-Users] Donate for your favorite feature

Patrick Shirkey pshirkey at boosthardware.com
Sun Jan 11 18:45:28 PST 2009


John Emmas wrote:
> ----- 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.


If no one else wants to do this I will be happy to spend some time on a 
pledges pages that makes things more accessible...


Cheers.

-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.






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