On 28/08/12 00:28, SomeDude wrote:
I wish Walter went on kickstarter to get public funds allowing him to hire a couple of full time developers.
Yes, but you have to be cautious about things like that. Having people paid by the project to work on things can demotivate the efforts of other contributors.
There is another project I have some connection to where one of the major contributors, a freelance developer, started soliciting donations to enable him to dedicate work time to the project, with in particular a promise that if more than a certain threshold could be raised, he'd be full-time on it.
The effect of this was decidedly ambivalent, with several project members feeling they didn't contribute to the project so that other people could make money off it. It's not clear that the extra time he dedicated was worth the loss of those other contributions.
It's a different thing if some 3rd party comes in and says, "OK, we're going to pay some of our staff to work on this project." But having the project itself select certain people to be paid, or having project members solicit donations in this way, can be problematic.
At the very least you'd need to define the parameters and expectations quite precisely, so that people can see where it does or doesn't overlap with work they might have contributed as volunteers.
