[OpenIndiana-discuss] Developer funding model musings

[Reginald Beardsley]

--- On Tue, 1/29/13, James Relph <james at themacplace.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> 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?
> 

I completely agree w/ both.  

I'd like to suggest as a social convention that the initial "license fee" be 10% of system cost and "support fee" after the first year at 5%. Purely voluntary the way tipping service staff in restaurants used to be. No distinction between used or new equipment.  So if you spin up an old SPARC system using Martin's work you contribute 10% of the purchase price.  2% to the general support coffers and the rest to your choice of staff (which in this case should clearly be Martin).

On further reflection I think there should also be a tally of who's contributed and how much. My assumption is that there are people building systems for clients.  It would provide a means of evaluating how much OI based work they're doing which would be valuable to potential clients looking for a system or support.

Could this be setup as a custom Paypal page on the OI website?  Does anyone have experience doing things like that?  If not, does Illumos have the management infrastructure to take care of this?

The idea being to provide complete transparency so that no one can scam the system.  If prospective OI users see that there is significant funding of development they're more likely to consider it as an option.  I can recall several comments from people of concern that OI would go away. I can easily see a small consultancy client being more comfortable w/ Linux than OI because of the visible funding level for Linux.

Have Fun!
Reg