Re: [HACKERS] Increased company involvement

Anyone interested in pooling funds for features should take a look at
http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/funding.html, which is about a FreeBSD
developer who offered to work full-time on developing some specific
features should enough people donate. Also worthy of mention is
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/.

I think that for certain key features there's probably a lot of people
who would fork over between $100 and $1000 towards getting a feature
completed. Improved replication might be a good example. Table
partitioning would absolutely be an example. If there was a means for
these people to donate money towards work being done on some feature,
it's very likely that large chunks of development time could be paid for
just from smaller shops, let alone places that can afford to toss $20k
towards the development of something.

On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 12:47:45AM -0500, Kris Jurka wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 29 Apr 2005, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> > One thing that might help is a more open sponsorship "clearing house".
> > Example (not meant as a bid, but just to illustrate): the JDBC driver
> > needs a scanner overhaul - it breaks on dollar quoting and a bunch of
> > other stuff. I could do that work (as could others, of course) but I
> > don't have time, unless someone buys some of my professional time.
> > Someone might want to do just that, but how would they find me?
>
> I don't think this is a big issue.  I don't know of any companies who were
> desperate for a feature and willing to throw money at the problem who
> couldn't find a developer to take them up on it.  Right now this seems to
> be a kind of behind the scenes operation that relies heavily on knowing
> the right people, but I think most of our sponsor contact points are able
> to point sponsors to the right people.  Could this process be more open?
> Depends on how the sponsor wants to handle it, they probably don't just
> want to throw the task out there and see who comes calling, they want an
> assurance from someone they trust that the chosen developer is capable.
>
> One thing that definitely would be nice would be to be able to combine
> funds from various sponsors for various features.  Alone a company can't
> spring for it, but by pooling resources it could get done.  This is a lot
> tougher to coordinate and unless there is a complete spec in place
> different sponsors will pull in different directions.  Other bounty type
> schemes don't seem to produce results, largely from a lack of cash.
> (Here's $500 for two weeks of work).
>
> Anyone care to shed some light on how it works now?
>
> Kris Jurka
>
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Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant               decibel@decibel.org
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