[Foundation-l] Re: Rewards for developers

Sun Jul 25 04:38:13 UTC 2004

On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 02:51:19 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Dori wrote:
> 
> > It seems too convoluted and prone to conflicts to work effectively
> > IMO. Donors are unlikely to identify all the features/bugs needing
> > work.
> 
> Aw, come on now. That's not really a problem. We can certainly give
> Jimbo and/or the Board of Trustees the additional power to assign up to
> 25% of unassigned donated money to development task.

I don't know that we could. It might piss off some donors if we said
we'll use this for hardware, and we end up using it for software
features. Although we do have some money that wasn't donated, and we
could certainly advertise that doners could donate toward a specific
feature/bug. However, that's not what I was talking about. I simply
thought that the process had too many rules to be properly understood
and to work well.

> 
> The point is just anyone who personally thinks a particular feature or
> bug is really overdue, should be able to directly encourage developers
> by saying "I offer you $xyz for this". The more important a bug or
> feature is to the community, the greater the amount of money will be.
> 
> > Likewise, we're unlikely to reach an agreement to the
> > percentages.
> 
> I think you didn't understand this part. There is no agreement or
> consensus required. Everyone specifies percentages of their own (in some
> sort of designated user interface; they're kept secret). At the end of
> the month, they are averaged out.

Yes, I did misunderstand that. I still don't see it as a fair method
though. Averages could give some screwey results which might leave
people who made more work, receive less compensation.

> 
> Example:
> * I say: Alice has done 5% of feature X, Bob has done 10%, Charlie has
> done 85%.
> * You say: Alice has done 15% of feature X, Bob has done 15%, Charlie
> has done 70%.
> * Jimbo says: Alice has done 10% of feature X, Bob has done 26%, Charlie
> has done 64%.
> 
> Then the end-result will be: Alice - 10%, Bob - 17%, Charlie - 73%.
> 
> Of course, the averaging could optionally be weighted by the amount of
> money the voters received in the previous month.
> 
> > It might also lead to races between developers who start
> > stepping on each other's work in order to get more money.
> 
> I don't think that will be a problem. Such blatantly un-co-operative
> people can easily be penalised with very low percentages. People will
> know they will get more money if they use their common sense to behave
> within proper forms of etiquette.

It's not necessarily blatant. It could even be inadvertant, or it
could be as simple as if I am going to do this part I might as well do
that part or I would prefer that part to work like I plan it. Coding
is much harder to do collaboratively than editing (unless we're
talking about unrelated parts).

-- 
[[en:User:Dori]]