On 28/03/2009 20:07, Lars Gullik Bjønnes wrote:
> That being said Lars, I guess you received some money throughout the
years thanks to your paypal
> account and we know basically _nothing_ about it ;-)
This is an important issue. We for example had to pay all costs
for our last developer meeting on our own but the general LyX
donations are exactly for that purpose in my opinion. Moreover are
the people who sponsor us still not listed at our webpage while
this is the case on Abdel's page and one of the reasons for
Abdel's success.
The people that sponsor abdel is listed at the page.
We had a rule earlier that if you wanted to be listed you had to say
so in your donation message.
I was in contact with Andre regarding cost for the last meeting: the
response was largely: don't sweat it.
So Lars, I several times asked you to communicate to us developers
(private mail) what money we got the last years at our general LyX
paypal account that you own.
I have replied, but perhaps not to you.
But you never haven't replied. But this info is needed for example
to plan our next meeting so that developers can for example be
payed a part of the flights, beer, food, etc.
We have never payed for transportation earlier, and I can ensure you
that that will be a way to depleate all resources in a jiffy. All
expences while at location has been payed though, except for berlin.
When you don't want to make this public to all developers, then at
least some of the developers should know this. Currently even not
JMarc and José knows it, right?
They know a bit I guess... there is a stead trickle of money being
donated... f.ex. today I got 2 euro...
What Abdel has set up with his sponsor page is in my opinion how
sponsoring should work for a free OpenSource project: Transparent
and encouraging for potential sponsors as they know what they are
sponsoring. And I don't think it is important if they sponsor LyX
in general or a certain developer when he implements a special
feature some sponsor would like to have.
(what if lyx does not want the feature?)
Who is lyx? We are individuals doing what we want.
Actually I go out on the limb as usual and say that how Abdel has
setup this is almost exactly how I would _not_ have done it. (Speaking
of sponsorship for specific features.) IMHO too focused on specific
persons/developers.
Well, too bad that's how I've done it and nobody objected at the time...
Just for clarification:
If that was not clear, I am not doing that for earning money. Those
1000 euros are not going to pay for the time I already spent on the
continuous spellchecker for example. I put in place this project page so
that developers can have some kind of formal aknowledgement from the
users. And I immensely appreciate all the people that have given money.
It felt really really good. I'd like other LyX developers to feel the same.
Abdel.
