It is hard to work on the issues related to yunohost and its apps. It needs a lot of knowledge and is time consuming. Everybody working somehow in support knows that communications take their time and solving an issue the rest of it.
Why would we do that?
we like yunohost (huh?)
we want the issues to be closed, because it might affect our own installation
we hope by making yunohost better more people will start using it including sys admins and developers who’d likely share some of the burden of maintenance
we do not know what to do else with our spare time? (haha!)
The people able to really work on yunohost I’d think can sell their knowledge very well being paid for using it. In the end everybody needs to make a living, buy food, pay rent.
I can only talk about myself: I do not have time, I’d love to work more for FLOSS, but I have a job (including a lot of FLOSS as well) I need to take care of, because I need to earn my living.
Beside donating for yunohost as a great project which is incredible important I think, I wonder whether it could help if people could offer rewards for solving certain issues (whatever they are, bugs, feature request, …).
If more than one person really needs an issue solved and doesn’t have the time or competence to do so, there could be several rewards offered for an issue. The more people want an issue solved the more money could be in the pot.
If we’d look at that as a symbolic thing and less like a contract thing it could be purely based on trust since it would be clear from the beginning that the person solving the problem wouldn’t could expect the people sticking to their words, but wouldn’t have any measure of forcing them to pay.
On the other hand this could evolve sometimes into some kind of system (there is open source software out there for such models if I remember correctly) that formalizes this approach into something like a crowdfounding.
But - for a simple start without any overhead - what would you thing about such an idea?
Would you be willing to offer rewards for things being solved?
Would you take up the challenge to win some of the rewards even if they are likely symbolic for the time really needed to do the work?
If you answered at least one question above with yes for yourself - how would you expect the rewards to be communicated?
I see a few areas of discussion, one of which is: How do we determine which issues should be rewarded, and how big should be the reward assigned to each issue?
I propose an answer to this is to choose a governance team. They would decide which how many issues the community would like to vote on, then choose to fill those spots, then put the issues to vote, and the issues get a reward assigned commensurate to the number of votes.
Periodically this process can happen. Periodically the rules or themes for this process can be updated to ensure some types of issues aren’t neglected for a long time.
If such a thing was developed, I’d be happy to contribute some money per month towards that.
My naive idea has been, that every individual decides for which issue to offer what reward.
E.g.: several people would like to see xyz-app integrated. One person really needs it and offers 10€ for the integration. Some others chime in to make the work a treasure hunt. At some point the issue is delegated to someone who is willing to solve it. If this person solves the issue in a form that upstream accepts (the major contributors being responsible for the code base) everyone having offered a reward decides whether it is time to send the money.
In the commercial world this is like a company integrating new features or working on specific bugs in open source on the account of some customers willing to pay for it, because the open source software is critical to her business.
I guess you can already do that (and should) - there’s a donation page. As I understood this money goes to the contributors maintaining the infrastructure and the main repositories.
In contrast my idea extends this to vote with a reward for certain issues. It should not replace donating to the core team.
I like the idea, but dislike it at the same time.
This kind of way of working could cause huge side-effects, for example, why continue to maintain NextCloud (which require a lot of work) if the maintainers can just wait so people will pay ?
All work is currently done for the beauty of YunoHost, not for money, and money tends to rot things.
So, yes, a monetary complement to push certain development could help, but I think that it will do more harm than good.
Same here. You’re point is absolutely valid. On the other hand we already live in this world/system.
Anybody with enough money could try to hire any developer to contribute to yunohost.
I’d hope that even with such an attempt we’d not end up doing everything we love for money only.
I find some hope in the way it works for Purism: there are developers being paid and there are a lot of people contributing just because they love the idea.
But I totally agree that there’s a risk we’d spoil something beautiful by starting something like this.
Rather than introducing money straight away, we generate a short list of issues the community votes is important, and advertise that list somewhere.
With a list, the community can focus its efforts on them. Maybe someone can make it easier for a less - knowledgeable person to solve an issue by providing a plan or by offering mentorship for a specific issue.
If it’s an issue on a voted shortlist, there is some prestige for helping to get them resolved.
In the future, this plan can be improved by adding money to items that appear on the shortlist for many months in a row.