answered
2014-04-28 14:57:42 +0300
I am responding to your comment as an answer, because the comments field does not allow enough characters, so apologies for this.
Your original post said "operation for developping Jolla apps/features" and your example was for support for whisperpush (which on every other platform is released as a separate application). So it seemed clear to me that you were talking about apps as opposed to OS features.
When you say that Jolla is much less about apps... I don't know what you are really going on about. Apps are integral to adoption of Sailfish. You can't expect everything to just be part of the core OS. Application development on top of the core should be encouraged. Developers who run into core limitations, are naturally going to contribute to getting these things improved if they know that stability for their applications is dependent on these changes, particularly if they are getting paid for their applications.
Agreed that hard work is required in the OS itself, isn't that what Jolla pays its own full-time developers for? Furthermore, there are a fair number of volunteers who contribute to Sailfish/Mer/Nemo regularly. Sure, it would always be nice to see more people helping out here... but if you crowdfund some people and not others, then you end up with a situation where a volunteer just thinks that he/she is being shortchanged volunteering when some people get paid for this stuff.
I'm not really against what you are proposing, but I just don't think its that simple. Here are some things that you need to consider. How do you decide who to fund, or who is a better contributor? Who manages the allocation of these funds? What happens if I donate money for a feature and the developer never gets around to working on that? If you only work with pledges, how do you make sure that people actually pay-up when the feature is done? How do you ensure that changes made by the developer actually get accepted into one of the core development projects? What happens if the developer introduces a serious bug, but does not get back to it? Does this result in some unpaid developer having to fix up someone else's mess? What about QA, testing, documentation etc? Why does the funding always get aimed at developers? There is much more to bringing out safe, reliable and useful features than straight development work.
On top of this... presumably the person who codes the crowdfunding application, hosts it and manages it will also want their cut. This just looks like a middleman type operation. I would much rather just pay the developer directly for a new application (that could be dealt with if Jolla allowed payments or donations through its store)or donate to Mer: http://merproject.org/donations.html. Most of the people working on these projects track TJC etc, so they're aware of the problems that people run into and the general wishlist.
All of that said, if you still think this would be a really valuable thing to do, set it up yourself and see whether you can get a following of people who are willing to donate cash for bounties. Suggesting that developers spend time working on this, rather than doing it yourself, just takes developers away from the task at hand.
Shouldn't Jolla just provide a facility for paid apps on the Store? That way you get a variety of developers motivated to tackle problems all at once. I'm not against your idea... but I think app payment in the Store would probably be just as effective. I think its been requested numerous times, but hasn't been forthcoming. An alternative, if Jolla doesn't want to handle payments, would be to just allow developers to put a Donate button linking to Paypal etc onto their app pages.
roboro ( 2014-04-16 14:03:38 +0300 )editThis is different IMO. Because Jolla is much less about apps than iOS/Android. Some hard work is required in the OS itself to enable more features for the apps, and much work is required there, this is _not_ about making an app, and thus cannot receive payment like an app (moreover, the result of this work should be avail for everyone).
So no, I think this is a totally different issue.
vbmithr ( 2014-04-26 15:03:02 +0300 )edit