Re: bounties

[Marc Hohl]

Jonathan Wilkes schrieb:
> Writing reports on deliverables isn't overhead, it's documentation of 
> new features (which would have to
> be done anyway).  Though presentations would certainly be overhead, as 
> well as filling out forms, forms,
> forms...
>  
> [...]

> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 08:25:27PM +0200, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> [...]
> > I am considering to offer commercial support and may be able to do
> > that on a part-time basis.  However, working on two bounties has
> > illustrated that bounty work can be quite tricky.
>
> Indeed; there's almost no relationship between the amount of work
> required and the amount of money being offered.
Until last year, I was member in the TeX users group and Dante
(the german TeX users group), and while I am not sure whether
the number of TeX and lilypond users are comparable (of course
they are, in strict mathematical sense :-), there was a predictable
flow of money due to the member fees. Dante, for example, hired
a professional programmer for recoding TeX in Java, a project
called NTS, and I think this was worth $5000+.

Fulfilling the prejudice concerning Germans and associations
(I wouldn't surely be the ideal person for founding a lilypond
users group), I am willing to spend a fee, say $50 a year, for
supporting the lilypond development. If there are 99 people more
(and I think there are a lot more!), we would have $5000 to pay
someone for improving lilypond.

The major drawback I see is that a organisation has ... err, to be
organized somehow. There's some overhead due to the maintenance
of the members, and all members want to be informed about the
latest news, hence we need something like the Lilypond Report
being printed in regular intervals ... but on the other hand, perhaps
this is not a drawback at all, because an active organisation is
attended more by the public, thus more people see that there is a
free alternative to all the widely accepted notation programs, more
members are acquired, and so on.

I don't know if a discussion like this has been taken yet,
and (probably being not too Germanic :-) I am not very fond of
this organisation stuff at all in general, but I am sure there are people
which cannot work as developers but have the ability to manage stuff ...

Just my 2ct.

Marc