[Ardour-Users] Could this solve Ardour's financial headache?

[Patrick Shirkey]

Patrick Shirkey wrote:
> John Emmas wrote:
>> How about this for another wacky idea....?
>>
>> Currently, Ardour is bringing in around 1,400 dollars per month.  I 
>> don't
>> know how that gets distributed but even if it all goes to one person,
>> there's nowhere near enough to pay someone full time.  OTOH it would
>> probably be enough to pay someone's expenses - so.....
There is definitely no reason the subscription funds should be 
distributed to anyone other than Paul and maybe a couple of the other 
long term committed devs.

However I wonder if there is a target that when reached will be 
considered fair payment for the past 12 years effort and the 
subscriptions money will then become available for allocation to new 
features on Mantis which could then be voted for to decide how much they 
value the community places on them. Paul could then be in charge of 
deciding how much the feature would cost to develop, how much from the 
subscriptions kitty could be assigned and then it would be upto the 
community to fill the gap with pledges or direct cash injections.

Only members of the site would be elligible to vote so that would 
encourage user to get involved too as they would be able to contribute 
to the dev process by voting even if they couldn't afford to contribute 
financially or in other more traditional ways.

Tie it up with an embedded access to the site which could be optionally 
disabled by a config option at compile time or license key for those who 
can't be bothered compiling themselves and we would have a reasonably 
good chance of increasing the momentum for user contributions.

Perhaps to start with their could also be a fundraising round to build a 
base for the Mantis kitty and Paul could offer to match it equally with 
revenue earned from subsrcriptions up to say one months worth of 
subscriptions.

That would give us approximately US$3000 to start assigning to the 
Mantis bugs/features to kick start the new system.

Does this idea get anyones approval for a suitably devious plan?



Cheers.

-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.