Funding Radeon driver development

[Daniel Stone]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 09:46:18AM +1000, Daniel Kasak wrote:
> * BOUNTY METHOD
> 
> Personally I like this method, and I assume end users will favor it too. 
> Transgaming's voting system keeps users interested and engaged in 
> specifying the direction of development, and I believe this is a major 
> contributor to their success in keeping customers paying monthly 
> subscriptions ( works for me anyway ).
> 
> Positive:
>  - likely to attract more ( and continued ) funding from end users
>  - allows users to specify which features they want to see developed
> 
> Negative:
>  - restricts the freedom of developers to work on stuff they want to do

For what it's worth, what we discovered in Ubuntu when we did bounties
was that the amounts involved were far too small -- if you want a month
of developer time, you've got to pay the rent, food, and all the bills
in that period.  This isn't likely to be a small amount.

On the other hand, most developers are already pretty heavily commited
anyway (jobs, studies, etc), and would have difficulty walking away for
a month, even if the amount was raised.

Lastly, it's often not a money issue, but simply time.  A lot of people
are working on about twenty different things, and so it doesn't end up
being that they need money to entice them from their 'real' job to work
on a given piece of code, but they just need to be enticed away from
their other work on X or the kernel or whatever, and towards that
specific effort.  And, most of the time, in those cases, money won't
really help, since it complicates things.

Some food for thought.

Cheers,
Daniel
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