[talk] suggestion: redesign "sponsoring" page.

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi,

regarding our discussion about LilyPond sponsorship
(http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2012-11/msg00204.html),
i see the following issues:
- information about supporting Lily financially isn't visible enough,
- users are confused as to how exactly they can support LilyPond financially.

We need to keep in mind that:
- supporting LilyPond financially is not the same as supporting
David's work on LilyPond financially,
- few users can afford donating large amounts of money, i.e. more than
$50 (and sponsoring a feature in Lily usually requires a large amount
of money),
- we don't have enough resources to create and maintain a "general
LilyPond fund" - it wouldn't be feasible.

i suggest to:
- put a "donate" button on the main website, probably near the
pondings, pointing to http://www.lilypond.org/sponsoring.html (notice
that it won't be a "donate to David" button),
- on the sponsoring page, have just one disclaimer [1] "There is no
general LilyPond fund, because it would be too difficult to decide how
the money should be divided between developers (and because the legal
stuff would be a chore).  Instead, we ask you to support LilyPond by
supporting developers working on LilyPond, see below"
- split the remainder of the page between "features for hire"
(one-time bounties) and "continuous support" (giving money to an
individual without setting what exactly he has to do, just to enable
him to continue his work - what we do with David now).

By the way, the link to gitstats is nice, but i'm pretty sure that
"ordinary users", who don't know what a commit is and whether number
of changed lines of code translate to coding skills, have little idea
what all these numbers mean.

[1] there are so many disclaimers on that page now that the whole
business looks suspicious.  If i was "just another user", not
subscribed to the mailing lists and unaware of how the development
looks like, i would probably think:
"gee, better not give them any money, because it seems that it will
most certainly be wasted; that Kastrup guy may have no ability
whatsoever, and they're so disorganized that they even don't know
who's actively developing the program at the moment, and the whole
thing 'isn't their business'..."
i estimate a 80% probability that i wouldn't donate *anything* in that
situation.

what do you think?  I hope that this would make things clearer while
not giving anyone any unfair advantage.

cheers,
Janek