[OpenIndiana-discuss] Developer funding model musings

[James Relph]

> 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

That sounds a pretty reasonable approach, although there's 2 things I'd add:

	-	The possibility to add bounties for requested features.
	-	As Jonathan mentions - having a common pot (eg. 20% of donations go to that).  Not just for tickets/marketing etc., but perhaps there needs to be a mechanism to distribute that across all developers (I'm thinking of a way to avoid the situation where, for example, a neat ZFS project gets loads of funding, but really critical (but maybe more boring) security projects don't get enough?

James