Pledging money for features

[Kjetil Kjernsmo]

Hi all!

It is an issue I have been thinking about for some time, and I'm curious 
if it has been discussed amongst the developers before.

So, there is a feature I really want, and I have filed a wishlist bug 
for it and all (Bug #107302, specifically), but of course, I fully 
recognize that every developer has ideas of his own that he wants to 
pursuit, that there isn't enough time to hack up every idea that comes 
by and that it is probably best in the long run that whoever writes the 
code gets to decide what to work on.

So, if my ideas are to be implemented, I have to be prepared to pay for 
it too. Now, I live off a normal salary too, so a contract to pay the 
total costs for a given feature is beyond my reach, but say that I 
say "I pledge to pay €100 to whoever gets the feature in Bug #107302 
into KDE". That's not a lot of money, but if the right guy sees that he 
could probably do it in a reasonable amount of time after several 
people have made similar pledges, then perhaps it could work?

Now, this introduces a lot more complexity in the social fabric of a 
free software project. All kinds of things could happen: I might not 
feel that the feature fulfilled my intention behind the request and 
decide not to follow up my pledge, and the guy who then had spent the 
time might feel cheated. We might both be content with the new feature, 
but then, it might not make to the official branch. All this would 
probably call for regulations and bureaucracy, and lawyers... *shrug*. 
It would be a long discussion.

OTOH, it could help a lot more people making a decent living from 
writing free software, so it might be worth thinking about. Have you 
people thought about it?

Cheers,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Programmer / Astrophysicist / Ski-orienteer / Orienteer / Mountaineer
kjetil at kjernsmo.net
Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/     OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC
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