Re: Presentation: "Publisher-grade LilyPond" in Ottawa

[Valentin Villenave]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Graham Percival
<address@hidden> wrote:
> I believe the highest bounty so far was 250 euro, back in the days
> when Han-Wen was working full-time and Trevor Baca was requesting many
> new features.

FTR -- The highest bounty I ever paid was 500 euros, in 2007.

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 8:25 PM, Jan Nieuwenhuizen
<address@hidden> 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.  It would be very
> nice for someone doing this for a hobby and getting to know LilyPond,
> but commercial support requires some level of predictability.

Absolutely. That's why I've always said that we should have something
like a "bounty thermometer" (such as the one they use for Blender's
open movies IIRC, or http://haikuware.com/bounties/ as well). Right
now we start with fixing things, and then care about the money, but I
can imagine it the other way around:

 - step 1, we establish a public list of "most wanted" features or
bugfixes, and developers who could be willing to work on these
estimate the amount of time (i.e. money) required to address each one
of these;

 - step 2, we gradually gather the money (there are a number of ways
to do so), on a "neutral" bank account: that means, the Lilypond
Foundation, of the non-profit LilyPond organization that's being built
here in France,

 - step 3, whenever the required amount of money for an issue is
reached, the developer who called dibs on said issue does his job, and
takes the dough.

However, if Han-Wen's LilyPond-design experiment has to teach us
something, it's that considering this only from a development
perspective is not enough. Therefore, I do believe that we should
*also* consider having "LilyPonding" branch, for newbies, musicians,
composers, teachers, who sometimes need to have a large score typeset
quickly but don't have enough skills or time or patience to typeset it
on their own. Sort of a "rent-a-LilyPonder" service :-)
Advanced users who could handle this type of jobs would get paid
(obviously), but a part of the money could also go to development
funding.

(Full disclosure: I have actually founded my own small one-person
company to offer LilyPond-related services, such as publishing,
training, composition, arrangement, LilyPonding of sorts, etc. And
AFAIK, as of today there are at least half a dozen other
companies/small-businesses like mine.)

Cheers,
Valentin