Re: paying for Han-Wen's development work

[Pedro Kröger]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:

> The reason why I am skeptical of donations, is that I myself have
> never felt inclined to donate for open source software. 

I afraid you are wrong on this one. You have donated countless hours of
work for free software. This is priceless. In *your* particular case I
believe it would be asking to much for you to work in a major FS
project, try to make a living out of it, and still donate money to other
projects :-)

I believe that are users who don't have the time or inclination to
donate work, so they rather be happy donating some money.

> Finally, I fear that such a service will need a lot of work setting
> up. In this respect, sponsored fetures are very nice for me.  I can
> easily experiment with pricing, delivery conditions, work-estimates,
> etc. and if I make a mistake (I regularly do),  I can set different
> conditions for the next sponsored feature.

that's a good point.

> I know that Bram Molenaar, of VIM fame, has a community website set
> up, where you can exchange donations for "feature votes". For every X
> dollar donated, you get to vote what Bram will work on next. How does
> that sound?

we can try something like that. Anyway I think that it is a good idea to
have a list of the features that one can donate for and the price they
will cost. I think that it will help donors to see what they want (we
always have to count the inertia effect)

So, maybe sponsored features can be one of the business models for
lilypond and I think we should go for it (I mean, make it more
evident). But How about start a campaign anyway? something like "we need
your help to keep lilypond development going, please donate any
amount". I can start it, if you agree.

I also recommend we put a paypal icon on the front page, and maybe a
small text.

Pedro