On Tue, 22 Sep 2009, Ben Klein wrote: [...]
The real issue is that anything that *looks* (to a normal user) like "give money and get your bug fixed" is not going to be good for the Wine project. That includes pledges.
That's just your opinion (both that pledges == donations and that they won't be good for Wine).
Regardless, pledges simply don't solve the administration issue of who gets the money. Developers working on bugs with pledges would no doubt feel entitled to it. THIS is where the admin nightmare resides.
I think a previous email had a very simple solution to that: the WPF gets the money, nobody else.
Sure that means we won't get 'bounty hunters', but for most bugs the pledges would have to reach into the thousands of dollars for them to make sense from a purely economic point of view (both due to administrative overhead and due to time it takes to fix them).
That said I really don't care much because the Wine project would not know what to do with the money anyway. It's not that sponsoring developers to go to the Wine conference is not good but it does not scale.
So if we raised 10000$ in a year, how would we use them to move Wine forward?
Hire contractors to work on specific issues? What contractors? Get a part-time Wine developper to work full-time on Wine for a while? What would he do after the money runs out?
Hardware purchases? What kind and for what? Maybe for the patchwatcher? Maybe hire someone to administrate the patchwatcher machines part-time?
Marketing? Where? How? Would it really be beneficial? Wouldn't 10000$ be too little?
Well, maybe someone will have a bright idea?