[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers

> On 12 May 2011 17:55, Marc Paré <marc@marcpare.com> wrote:
>
> > Le 2011-05-11 17:01, Samuel M a écrit :
> >
> >  I believe, that The Document Foundation can employ Developers for
> > > LibreOffice. I believe the community is able to get the money for that on a
> > > monthly base.
> > >
> > > We saw that the community was able to rise 50.000€ in 8(!) days. It will
> > > be possible to get that money in a year for one full-time developer.
> > > These two examples show that this works even over a longer period of time
> > > (note that these projects are much smaller than LibreOffice):
> > > - Ardour (http://ardour.org): $4500 are raised every month to pay the
> > > main developer
> > > - Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com): $5500 were raised in April to pay
> > > the main developer
> > >
> > >
> > > Despite from having full-time developers, for volunteer developers it
> > > would be nice to get money for fixing a specific bug / implementing a
> > > feature. Ardour has such a system where you can donate for a specific issue:
> > > http://ardour.org/bugbounty
> > > I think something like this would bring great benefit to LO, since users
> > > can show what they want to be fixed most and developers get some money for
> > > coding (or at their option donate it to TDF).
> > >
> > > To be honest, if we could convince most school districts in any country to
> > adopt the use of LibreOffice as their main suite, dropping MSO and
> > contributing a small percentage of their "per seat" cost savings, then we
> > could see some distrcits paying to have accessibility issues worked on or
> > some other aspect of LibreOffice that would be of interest to them.
>
> In essence this was the idea behind setting up the INGOTs. Your idea is
> simpler *if* you can get agreement with large centralised bureaucracies.
> It's not easy, I have been trying for more than 10 years ;-)
>
> Schools in the UK make individual decisions about the resources they use. We
> had to make INGOT certification wider than just OOo/LO simply because most
> are entrenched in MSO. OTOH we know some have switched as a result of
> learning more about FOSS through the certification process.  If we can
> generate volume international take up, funding developers on the project
> would be easy.

Whilst certification seems a good strategy, what about parental power
being exerted upon schools? One would imagine that if parents
(espcialy of low income families) were aware of free software, they
would implore schools to follow suit.

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