[PD-dev] SourceForge "Donations"

Olaf Matthes olaf.matthes at gmx.de
Thu Jan 22 11:56:16 CET 2004


Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> But I think it  would be great if there was a Pd general fund, then we 
> could use that  to pay people for past work, or pay people to do work 
> that needs to be  done, but isn't getting done. 

Do you think there are people willing to pay for stuff they could get 
for free sooner or later? - Please don't get me wrong, I really like the 
idea of getting paid but my experience shows that cool and free software 
is only cool and free as long as one can ask the developer for new 
features without having to pay to for them to be implemented. (Or even 
without having to fear the answer "I only will do this for money!")

> I would love to give up my day job and devote that time to hacking on  
> Pd.   I am sure many of you feel the same.  

Yes, I like this idea, too. But wouldn't this change the way the Pd 
community works?

I've decreased my Pd-coding activities to a minimum for some time now 
because I was tired of getting back 'just bug reports'. This does not 
mean that money is everything but I realised that I often enough ended 
up in spending time on coding stuff I didn't need for my own work. 
Having a central Pd-donation system could help to get in money for some 
things, but I'm very unshure whether people would actually donate some 
money for stuff that is already there. As you pointed out some time ago, 
since everything is open source it's often easier and faster to 
implement new features by just hacking the code instead of asking (and 
now probably paying) the original developer...

Olaf






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