Re: paying for Han-Wen's development work

[Graham Percival]

On 19-Aug-05, at 4:20 AM, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:

> Graham Percival wrote:
> > If people will give money to support a once-a-day webcomic (which can 
> > be
> > quite interesting/funny/touching, but only for about 60 seconds per 
> > day), then we
> > should be able to get a non-trivial amount of money for lilypond.
>
> The reason why I am skeptical of donations, is that I myself have 
> never felt inclined to donate for open source software.

Yeah, but we're not trying to get _you_ to contribute money; we're 
trying to
get _other_ people to do it.  :)

> Likewise, it would be great if we could find a way to levy a small fee 
> for some LilyPond related service. Unfortunately, I haven't been able 
> to come up with a suitable model. Maybe someone has an idea?

This is certainly a better idea... Mandrake had a few special features 
that you
got by donating, although I can't remember what they were.  Actually, 
no, I can
remember two of them: access to download some non-free packages (ie 
NVidia
drivers, acrobat pdf reader for linux, etc), and the ability to vote on 
what packages
to include in mandrake CDs (ie should Audacity be on CD1 or 2?)

> I think the service should:
>
> 1. Offer something that isn't available or difficult to obtain without 
> the subscription. For example, download access to LilyPond binaries is 
> a nice idea, but due to the GPL, this is difficult enforce, and it's 
> at aodds the enormous growth of Lily usage, which I also rather like.

It's not difficult to enforce[1]; if we wanted to do this, it would 
definitely work.
[1]  well... ok, it's impossible to enforce.  But sure, somebody else 
could offer the
binaries as well... but I don't think that would happen.  Or if it did, 
I think that most
people would donate anyway.

The big problem is the growth of Lily usage, as you stated.


> Finally, I fear that such a service will need a lot of work setting up.

That's certainly true.

> Sponsored features also satisfy the two conditions above: due to my 
> l33t sk1llz, I can implement features almost immediately, and 
> evidently, getting a feature in LilyPond is something you can't get 
> anywhere else.
>
> 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?

I like that!  Actually, you could extend this quite a bit: roll the 
feature votes together
with bug votes and "direction" votes.  Once somebody has donated money, 
they can
vote on
- specific features (as currently done, but having an infrastructure in 
place for it,
and making much smaller donations feasible)
- bug votes: if gliss-accidental.ly (an invented bug name) is 
particularly troubling
for you, vote to have it fixed.  These are basically the same as 
features, except
(presumably) on a much smaller scale.
- direction votes: should Han-Wen work on better OSX integration, or 
general
typesetting layout, or improving the font(s), or bugfixes, or 
lilypond-book, or...?

Hmm, on second thought, "direction" votes are too vague.  Actually, 
transgaming
had this kind of system (buy a subscription; each month there's a poll, 
where
you can vote on specific games, or vague directions like "better 
audio", "better
3d support", and "better old 2d games"), but they're a company with a 
number
of programmers.

- Graham