Willing to pay for new features?

[mike548141]

I was wondering, have the project owners considered adding a forum where people could donate towards a feature?

I know most developers do it for the love of it but say there are 50 of us that would really love LDAP and OpenID authentication and each of us are willing to throw $10 into a pot towards the developer/s that are willing to develop the feature to the project owners satisfaction?

The code would belong to the project, it would be licensed FOSS (from memory ispCP is moving the code to GPL2 from Mozilla?).

It would let us (the users) create incentives for skilled developers either within the project or outside of it to produce the features we care the most about. After all many of us do not have either the time or the skill to write code for the project but are still keen on seeing it develop further.

While the amounts may not be enough to pay the rent it could pay for a new computer, some books, a night out etc...

Of course you could remove the cash from it and just use a poll/vote system. But frankly I like ispCP, I probably don't have the time or skill to develop the features I want so if I can throw a little cash in to get the specific features I want then I see it as a win/win.

MC

[c0urier]

Sounds to me like a good idea, this is used within many projects also known as "Post a bounty" - 1 Guy makes a request and places a bid, more users join the request with the amount of money they have to spare. The creator makes sure the developer is payed by collecting the money from the different users/bidders. And then doing an overall transfer, it could also be an option that all users just directly transfers to the developer, probably more fair.

[mike548141]

Yeah I was thinking how to reasonably handle the transfer. There are probably people that know better ways out there but my idea would be using Google checkout, or Paypal, to pay into a ispCP fund.
When the project owners accept the code they release the cash to the developers account.

Maybe something like,
1) A user publishes an idea on the forum for a feature.
2) The user/community uses the forum to flesh out the specific attributes and requirements of the code to be created
3) If there is enough monetary interest in the feature from the user/s then ?someone? creates the feature as a "product" for sale on Google checkout.
4) Set the cost of the "product" at $1
5) Each user can donate what they wish by purchasing as many copies of the "product" as they wish e.g. 5 x product feature A and 10 x product feature B is a donation of $15.
6) This should make it easy to track how much money has been donated towards each feature and by who i.e. 400 purchases of feature A by users x, y, z...
7) A developer (somewhere/somehow) creates the required code and the project owners decide if they will accept it into the tree
8) Once the project owners accept the code they release the cash donated (for the specific feature) to the developer

Of course this does mean that we are donating in the hope a developer comes along but I would happily donate on that basis since individually it should be small amounts. And I think that is better than the people promising to pay and then the developer having to chase them all up.

MC

[Smallserver]

We can all donate via PayPall, but is anybody doing that?

Herman

[mike548141]

Agreed but I see donating to the project (which is essential) and offering bounties on new features as separate matters. The project, obviously, is more important to fund otherwise the whole thing falls apart.

However the bounty is about people creating an incentive to create features that the project developers may not have a interest in, may not feel is a high priority or do not feel is in their skill set to create.

MC

[RatS]

Hi guys, I was reading your posts and disagree a bit with your idea. We already got offers of companies to develop a special ispCP feature, but we rejected them with the reason, that we do not want to be forced to deliver something special under pressure.

On the other hand, paying a developer sounds good, but it does not value the work of all the other developers. I take your idea and try to build a model that will help all of us: ispCP and its developers.

Overall I'm glad to know that you are willing to pay for the development of our software. It gives us the confirmation, that we are doing the right things.

[bloombox.de]

Any news on that one? I'd really love to have some features and we would also like to pay someone to develop for the community ...

[mike548141]

Nothing really, there seems to be only a few of us interested in paying for features that ispCP doesn't currently fulfill and some/all of the project team seem to be against the idea.

MC

[Nuxwin]

Hello ;

We are not against the money, but against the pressure. We have already a lot of work. All your asks are achievable*, but we should have time to implement them in a good way.

* When accepted.