Re: Kickstarter for Emacs

[Tom]

Chong Yidong <cyd <at> gnu.org> writes:
> 
> So far, I haven't seen much call from individual Emacs developers for
> financial support, but individual developers (e.g. of third-party
> packages) can always set up their own donations mechanism, rather than
> using Kickstarter, which as far as I can tell is just a way to funnel
> money to Kickstarter Inc and Amazon (who take a whopping 10% cut from
> donations).  Their PR campaign sure is impressive, though.

That's why I said the model is the point, not Kickstart itself.
If there is other ways to do it it's also good. The important part
is there should be a way to quickly set up projects to fund 
specific features like on Kickstartes instead of having static,
generic donation points like the FSF donation page.

> 
> If there is interest in funding anything at the Emacs project level, the
> FSF has set up a mechanism for donating to individual GNU packages,
> currently used by GNU Octave and GNU Telephony; see
> 
>   https://my.fsf.org/associate/donate/working-together
> 

Yes, but it's project level support. I was talking about feature
level funding, so that people can fund the implementation of their pet
feature explicitly instead of giving money to the generic project
and let the developers decide what they want to work on.

People are much more willing to give money if they know it will 
go to fund the specific feature they want implemented. Paying
for scratching my itch makes my itch go away, so I'm willing to
pay for it.


> But, as I said, I don't currently see much need. 

There is no neeed, because there is no way to fund specific features.

For example, I often read on the net people saying that they love
emacs, but for Java they use Eclipse, because that understands
the language (intelligent completion/refactoring out of the box)
better.

What if someone, say a freelance developer, says the he wants to
improve emacs java support significantly (of course, the goal should
be more specific), but for that he needs to work on it several months
full time. In order to do it he needs funding, so he doesn't have to
take up on other jobs during these months, so he does it if people
donate a certain amount.

That's how the projects on Kickstarter work and I bet there would
be quite a few people willing to pay a few dollars for emacs to have
Java support comparable to Eclipse. The only problem is currently
they can't do it, because there is no way to fund a certain feature
explicitly.

So I think there is a need, only developers don't consider this
possibility of funding their work. That's why I started this thread,
so somebody may start such a project which he wants
to do, but can't, because of lack of time and other work commitments
and money making needs.

The only thing to keep in mind the project should be something 
which interests lots of users (like better Java support, but surely,
there are quite a few others), because people won't fund niche features
which only a handful of people need.