[OpenIndiana-discuss] Developer funding model musings

[Reginald Beardsley]

How about something along the lines of the following:

List active developers on the website for OI along w/ what they are working on.

If you want to fund that person's work, you sign up to provide a certain amount which is divided into equal allotments for each month remaining in the calendar year.  Your choice of how much.

The amounts currently committed for the calendar year per developer are shown so that people can make intelligent choices of where to commit funds.  Beyond a certain point more money to one developer will not make the work go faster.  It effectively "crowdsources" hiring and pay raises.  

For a sensible person to work full time on OI they need some sense of stability and predictability.  Martin's doing wonderful stuff, but I don't think he's being sensible.  But sometimes being sensible conflicts w/ major achievement.

There needs to be a way to keep the transaction costs down.  The Paypal skim gets pretty hefty for a small monthly payment. If Paypal would be willing to take a single payment and split it into multiple equal payments with only a single transaction charge it would be pretty easy to set this up.  Does anyone deal w/ Paypal enough to know if they'd do this?

The idea being to make it possible for an individual to work on OI as they would a regular contract job.  There's staggeringly high unemployment worldwide and in Europe especially.  That ought to get us some good talent at bargain rates if we can just work out a viable payment model.

Have Fun!
Reg