[kwlug disc.] FLOSS Fund thoughts

[Andrew Cant]

Another member of the cabal chiming in. :)

I read the article and it did sound like Jeff donated money to a project
that did not need it. He explicitly described the donation as a "grant",
which suggests that it was not OK for the developers to just pocket the
money as a gift. But from the response that he got from the project leader,
they already had everything paid for and did not need any money to run
the project. Why did they need a "grant"?

Kind of seems like it was a bad match from the get go.

> I'm not saying that leaving the $5000 in the bank is an ideal outcome,
> but philosophically I think the Fund is to reward people for the
> software they have already written, as opposed to thinking they should
> use it "productively".

I agree with Paul. Heck I am even OK with the $5000 in the bank. I
figure if it gets the developers a little closed to financial independence,
that might eventually buy they more time for free software.

If I was paying for proprietary software that I liked, I wouldn't worry
about how the developer was going to use the money. Improve the
software, invest, buy a pony, whatever; if it made them happy then I
have rewarded them and hopefully clearly signalled that I like their work
and hope that they will continue.

This "reward" idea feels nice and simple to me. No worrying about if the
recipient is using the donation "correctly".

> Personally I think that many of our contributions have been used, if
> only because we have the questionable habit of nominating really big
> projects. 

True. But these may be the kind of projects that can actually use money
to directly support the project. I would image that most small project
mostly need time from developers/artists/documenters/testers/whoever.
The amount of money probably can't buy them anything useful in this area.
Maybe we can pay their bandwidth fees for a month or 2.

Andrew
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