[Ardour-Users] Donating to Ardour

[Paul Davis]

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Stephen Doonan <stephen.doonan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello-- I think it's a great idea that people can donate to the "bugs" of
> their choice, in addition to one-time general donations or subscriptions
> (I'm a subscriber myself). I just have two comments/suggestions:
>
> 1) The idea might be better as donations for requested features and bug
> fixes, not just bug fixes. For example, the feature I would most like to see
> work proceed on, and for which I am going to donate $100 myself, is the MIDI
> functionality, which is more of a feature than a bug. :-)
>
> 2) It's not as easy for a person to contribute as it could be, and making it
> as easy as possible may (will probably, in my opinion) increase the number
> of donations. At mantis, it's not obvious how and where to donate, and even
> if one has the insight to know that one must register with Mantis in order
> to donate, those are a few extra steps (registering, confirmation email,
> finding the mantis page again or going back to Ardour.org and starting over
> with the link) that are just more hurdles to jump before one can actually
> donate. A simple list of feature requests and bugs with "PayPal Donate"
> buttons beside them might be a lot more efficient and "friendly" to a
> web-browsing public.
>
> The object in my opinion should be to make it as attractive, obvious and
> easy as possible to donate money to Ardour.

Your suggestions are all fine, but they seem to be taking the system
away from a post-pay one and toward a pre-pay one, which I don't
believe will succeed. I don't think its reasonable to ask people to
pay for a specific bug fix before its been fixed. It should certainly
be easier to "sign on to the honor system" for a particular bug.