Financial support for third party software projects

In addition to bounties for making technical advances in the shared source code base, I think it would be supportive of ROOL to consider how the system could be used to aid third party developers.

How about “Financial support for third party software (2011)”? Third party developers who produce free software do so largely unpaid, although most (all?) also accept financial donations. If an agreed list of such projects could be established, ROOL could collect funds on their behalf. The purpose of this would be to raise the profile of worthy projects and encourage donations from users.

Issues arising:

• Criteria for inclusion, including a deadline date for applications (assuming an annual scheme)
  • If this proposal is deemed worthwhile, some sort of community agreement could hopefully be reached as a result of discussions here
  • I don’t think the criteria need be too extensive, e.g.
    1. Name
    2. Established since
    3. URL
    4. Email
    5. Software licence type
       • Commercial version is currently or is likely to be available for sale?
       • Main differences between free and commercial versions (if there is one)
       • (Perhaps need to be wary of crafty submissions to obtain a bit of development cash and then release only a commercial version in usable form, i.e. crippleware)
    6. Category/type of software
    7. (Char-limited) description – no essays wanted!
    8. Multi-platform?
    9. Versions of RISC OS supported in current version of software
    10. Number of persons active in project
    11. Current targets (for year in question), e.g. functionality, planned number of releases
    12. Previous targets met? (for rolling applications in subsequent years)
        • Reasons, if not
    13. Willing and able to share expertise with developers working on the shared source code base (even if only from time to time)?
• Establishing “relative importance” in order to allocate the distributions
  • This could be a tricky one, with an equitably shared solution perhaps being the simplest to administer and justify
  • But how about basing it on an estimate of person-hours spent on the project in the preceding year? Perhaps completely new projects could receive the average amount of distributed funding.¹
• Expiry date for 2011

Presumably further forum involvement will be invited at the Wakefield Show. Therefore, perhaps nailing down the criteria by a date a couple of weeks (or more?) after the show, and an application deadline one month later could be worked towards.² For future years, it might be desirable to have the applications agreed a few months before the proposed expiry date of the bounty (and setting this expiry date for the start of the year).

¹ I’m not a statistician, but simply using the mean average may not be appropriate.

² Only leaving project owners one month to complete their application, but likely criteria would probably be apparent well in advance of the show.

Steve, Ben and I discussed this and think it’s a good idea, but maybe a bit premature:

1. We want to wait and see if the bounty scheme in general is going to take off. It’s very much an experiment right now.
2. We think it’s a priority that fundamental OS issues are addressed, or there won’t be any developers left anyway…
3. There’s a worry that if we add a pot for one developer, another developer might feel left out; we risk accusations of bias, since we become responsible for deciding whether or not to run a pot for a developer on our site. Developers can always run their own similar schemes, or come up with other ways of generating revenue, if they wish.

That’s not to try and shoot the whole idea down in flames! It’s just to say that we’re in early days with this right now and we’ll see how it evolves. So your suggestion – and any other suggestions – are most welcome and we’ll be keeping all such things in mind.

Bounties for funding specific developers… ehh, I don’t like that idea. For example, a bounty for Peter Naulls to port an up to date Gecko browser to RISC OS with a RISC OS friendly UI… no. (Naming him because he would be the logical choice for such a task, having done the Firefox port.)

Bounties for releasing a piece of software, though, that’s a good idea. A bounty for anyone to do such a port, though, that’s more open, and probably more likely to get results.