Re: GNOME, Bounties and paid development [Was: Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?]
Luis Villa l...@tieguy.org wrote: ... Luis worried that making the TODO list the Bountie list was dangerous, because people might end up doing only the things people pay for. Have we already started down this slop already with company involvement? ... With that out of the way: it is still a valid concern, but there are ways around it - since that time a variety of crowdfunding sites have sprung up that could let people other than the Foundation pitch in and select goals. ... The Elementary project claim to have had a lot of success with Bountysource [1]. Allan [1] https://www.bountysource.com/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME, Bounties and paid development [Was: Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?]
On Thu, 2014-09-18 at 11:56 +0100, Allan Day wrote: The Elementary project claim to have had a lot of success with Bountysource [1]. Earlier in this thread, they suggested that their bounties are mostly going out to regular Elementary developers who would have worked on something else for Elementary anyway, instead of incentivizing contributions from outsiders. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME, Bounties and paid development [Was: Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?]
Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.org wrote: The Elementary project claim to have had a lot of success with Bountysource [1]. Earlier in this thread, they suggested that their bounties are mostly going out to regular Elementary developers who would have worked on something else for Elementary anyway, instead of incentivizing contributions from outsiders. Daniel Foré seems to think that it has helped them increase the number of contributors, at least according to one post on Google+. Allan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME, Bounties and paid development [Was: Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?]
Changing topic as this thread has branched in many directions (as others later in this thread pointed out). On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 15:16 +0200, Bastien Nocera wrote: On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 13:58 +0200, Sébastien Wilmet wrote: On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 09:51:15AM +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: The approach to budgeting is similar in that the Foundation and Google both have a budget, but our budgets are quite different. Any spending in any area means that that money cannot be spent in another area. What if the Foundation decides to just organize OPW, which is already a good contribution, but doesn't sponsor itself interns? By doing that, the saving permits to spend the $10k or $5k on something else, like sponsoring an experienced member of the Foundation instead of sponsoring newcomers. For example when a Friends of Gnome campaign (like for the accessibility or security) is finished, the Gnome Foundation could add $5k to it. What exactly do you hope to achieve by saving $5k? One of the problems for the Friends Of GNOME campaigns is that we have trouble finding interested parties to work so cheaply to implement the goals we set out. When I was on the board, I put together 2 call of bids for those campaigns, and I constantly heard from consultancies that the amount was so low that the only reason that they would be interested in it was to help GNOME. I doubt that the amount is significant enough to pay the people necessary to achieve the goals we set out. I just wanted to lend a little insight into this as someone who was faced with what probably was one of your bounties. I hope I can help to clarify the situation to other readers (as I suspect Bastien already understands this pretty well) from the point of view of a consultant. At Openismus we did briefly consider submitting a bid for what if I recall correctly was a $50,000 bid which had to do with improving the onscreen keyboard with regards to localization (things are a bit fuzzy, it was a long time ago and I don't recall all the details). The problem I perceive here is that we submit detailed proposals all the time, things that we work very hard on, which does incur risk that needs to be mitigated somehow or covered in the operational budget of the consultancy. In my opinion, submitting a less than professional bid is not an option, and can even be severely damaging to your reputation as an individual or a company. My rough estimation is that the cost of the work involved simply in preparing a bid for this bounty is anywhere between $5,000 to $10,000, I could be underestimating that as I did not have intimate knowledge of what operational overhead this would incur on top of the analysis and work which must go into preparing an acceptable bid. I know that these bounties were presented with the best intentions and really appreciated to see movement on that front, however I don't really see how that can work well unless we, the foundation can really afford it. In another light, if there was a way to sweep all of the bidding overhead under the rug, then it might have been alright to work on that bounty even if 50K might have been considerably lower than what we might have normally asked for that work (as you mention, it would be a sort of favor to GNOME). Of course without a proper bidding process then it would be unfair, the whole thing is very complex and as such, I'm not sure that it's the best option for the foundation's spending. I think perhaps, if we organized bounties which clearly and definitely improve software that industry is going to use, and not only for the singular purpose of the GNOME Desktop Environment, then perhaps we would be able to get some real backers in the industry to come together with us and put together a bounty that is worth bidding for. Best Regards, -Tristan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME, Bounties and paid development [Was: Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?]
Hi, On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Tristan Van Berkom tris...@upstairslabs.com wrote: I think perhaps, if we organized bounties which clearly and definitely improve software that industry is going to use, and not only for the singular purpose of the GNOME Desktop Environment, then perhaps we would be able to get some real backers in the industry to come together with us and put together a bounty that is worth bidding for. I think there are two ways to approach this: (1) the way you suggest above; and (2) by having smaller bounties which do not require a bidding process and can be picked up by contributors who would generally donate time, but could use some extra money in order to afford to contribute their time. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME, Bounties and paid development [Was: Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?]
On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 15:43 -0500, meg ford wrote: On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Tristan Van Berkom tris...@upstairslabs.com wrote: I think perhaps, if we organized bounties which clearly and definitely improve software that industry is going to use, and not only for the singular purpose of the GNOME Desktop Environment, then perhaps we would be able to get some real backers in the industry to come together with us and put together a bounty that is worth bidding for. I think there are two ways to approach this: (1) the way you suggest above; and (2) by having smaller bounties which do not require a bidding process and can be picked up by contributors who would generally donate time, but could use some extra money in order to afford to contribute their time. Either way, there is a high administrative overhead, as it was proven in the past when Novell (in communication with GNOME Foundation), and then GNOME Foundation with the help of Google tried bounties. All of them for GNOME. Before going to some details, the short story is: the outcome was what we know now as Google Summer of Code. Some of the administrative things you have to consider: * Determine the issues you want to fix, assess them and put them value. * Set the rules * Getting the maintainers involved to: (1) check if the fix is worth, (2) review the patches, (3) pushing them in master * People to track the patches, update status of bounties (to avoid double work for potential contributors) * All the dance to exclude people from certain places where GNOME Foundation cannot send money to, get bank information, wire money, track everything was good, and makes that everything goes well that IRS won't complain. * ... Also, what is the goal you want to pursue? Who would you expect to apply for? I quote an email of Nat (somehow forwarded to wikimedia foundation): [...] One quick point on numbers: only 11 bounties have been paid, but we've had patch submissions on 50% of the total bounties; release engineering timelines have made it hard for bounty submitters to get some of their patches accepted by module maintainers, and therefore paid, so that contributes to the small number of paid bounties you see. One thing that's surprising is that pretty much all of our bounty submissions came from first-world economies. Despite efforts to promote the bounties heavily in e.g. India. I think there's a need for a bounty administration infrastructure; some piece of software that can run these programs automatically, instead of the mostly hand-generated web pages I wrote. http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/797 Current board members can dig in the board-list archives from 2003-2006-ish, to get more details. I bet there are also here in this list, and in the board meeting minutes, for example, from 2004-08: Nat gave a summary of the current situation with the Bounties. We've reached the 1st round and so far give out $7460 for 10 bounties. It's currently stalled because of an Evolution code freeze - will launch again soon with a new deadline. The Bounties are proving to be effective in attracting new Evolution developers. Nat asked if it would be useful to have a general mechanism where anybody could put money against a bug item? Owen asked if it was more interesting maintaining a TODO list. Luis worried that making the TODO list the Bountie list was dangerous, because people might end up doing only the things people pay for. Have we already started down this slop already with company involvement? The first try was Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt, funded by Novell but lead by GNOME Foundation: http://web.archive.org/web/20070210190246/http://www.gnome.org/bounties/ http://web.archive.org/web/20070208175703/http://www.gnome.org/bounties/Google.html -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME, Bounties and paid development [Was: Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?]
[Resending in full, as in my previous I accidentally pressed the Send button by mistake] On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 15:43 -0500, meg ford wrote: On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Tristan Van Berkom tris...@upstairslabs.com wrote: I think perhaps, if we organized bounties which clearly and definitely improve software that industry is going to use, and not only for the singular purpose of the GNOME Desktop Environment, then perhaps we would be able to get some real backers in the industry to come together with us and put together a bounty that is worth bidding for. I think there are two ways to approach this: (1) the way you suggest above; and (2) by having smaller bounties which do not require a bidding process and can be picked up by contributors who would generally donate time, but could use some extra money in order to afford to contribute their time. Either way, there is a high administrative overhead, as it was proven in the past when Novell (in communication with GNOME Foundation), and then GNOME Foundation with the help of Google tried bounties. All of them for GNOME. Before going to some details, the short story is: the outcome was what we know now as Google Summer of Code. I don't pretend anyone stop pursuing bounties on GNOME, but please, don't start from scratch, dig the board meetings, the mailing list archives, and any other source of information. This has been discussed lengthly in the past. Some of the administrative things you have to consider: * Determine the issues you want to fix, assess them and put them value. * Set the rules * Getting the maintainers involved to: (1) check if the fix is worth, (2) review the patches, (3) pushing them in master * People to track the patches, update status of bounties (to avoid double work for potential contributors) * All the dance to exclude people from certain places where GNOME Foundation cannot send money to, get bank information, wire money, track everything was good, and makes that everything goes well that IRS won't complain. * ... Also, what is the goal you want to pursue? Who would you expect to apply for? Don't even mention that for maintainers will have to spend some time for answering questions, to answer how the things work they way the do, things they don't want to see in their projects, and so on. I quote an email of Nat (somehow forwarded to wikimedia foundation): [...] One quick point on numbers: only 11 bounties have been paid, but we've had patch submissions on 50% of the total bounties; release engineering timelines have made it hard for bounty submitters to get some of their patches accepted by module maintainers, and therefore paid, so that contributes to the small number of paid bounties you see. One thing that's surprising is that pretty much all of our bounty submissions came from first-world economies. Despite efforts to promote the bounties heavily in e.g. India. I think there's a need for a bounty administration infrastructure; some piece of software that can run these programs automatically, instead of the mostly hand-generated web pages I wrote. http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/797 Current board members can dig in the board-list archives from 2003-2006-ish, to get more details. I bet there are also here in this list, and in the board meeting minutes, for example, from 2004-08: Nat gave a summary of the current situation with the Bounties. We've reached the 1st round and so far give out $7460 for 10 bounties. It's currently stalled because of an Evolution code freeze - will launch again soon with a new deadline. The Bounties are proving to be effective in attracting new Evolution developers. Nat asked if it would be useful to have a general mechanism where anybody could put money against a bug item? Owen asked if it was more interesting maintaining a TODO list. Luis worried that making the TODO list the Bountie list was dangerous, because people might end up doing only the things people pay for. Have we already started down this slop already with company involvement? https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2004-August/msg00173.html I think Luis Villa's concern still is valid. The first try was Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt, funded by Novell but lead by GNOME Foundation: http://web.archive.org/web/20070210190246/http://www.gnome.org/bounties/ The next time, it was funded by Google, applying some experience from the previous bounty hunt: http://web.archive.org/web/20070208175703/http://www.gnome.org/bounties/Google.html This was before GSoC exists, but it starts to resemble it. There was even a wiki page to discuss lesson
Re: GNOME, Bounties and paid development [Was: Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?]
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 2:35 PM, Germán Poo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: Luis worried that making the TODO list the Bountie list was dangerous, because people might end up doing only the things people pay for. Have we already started down this slop already with company involvement? https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2004-August/msg00173.html I think Luis Villa's concern still is valid. Almost a decade old. Jeebus. With that out of the way: it is still a valid concern, but there are ways around it - since that time a variety of crowdfunding sites have sprung up that could let people other than the Foundation pitch in and select goals. Luis ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
