Donations lazarus / 8-Other ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gymgoal · 2008-04-23 17:47 I wonder why Lazarus team does not take donations. I feel obliged to the Lazarus developers. I would donate some money (the sum will depend on commercial success of my application :-) I understand that when someone buys stuff from the "The Store", he donates. I will buy something when I finish my program (hopefully in the beginning of May 2008). By the way, The Store web page is broken. In any case I think that Lazarus team should also accept direct money donations. I have a suggestion about donations, to make them fun. There should be an option to donate to the project in general, or for a specific new Lazarus feature. There should be a graph similar to poll results (bars with percentages) that would show number of people (not money sums). This would make donating fun and a little competitive. What do you think? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- OnixJr · 2008-04-23 21:37 There are "bounties section" on the wiki: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Bounties. Editing: The correct link is: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Bounties (without DOT)... Thanks r_1gm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Ishenin · 2008-04-24 01:20 Lazarus developers dont work for money - they work for idea For most of us lazarus developements is a: hobby, good oportunity to communicate with good professionals from different countries, good oportunity to learn more. We dont try to earn money on lazarus. Work for money make you too constrained. On the other hand, if you want to donate then there is not a big problem. We can take your money and try to attract some students to implement useful lazarus features, or we can simply buy beer on them ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gymgoal · 2008-04-24 02:00 OnixJr, what is "bounties section" for? It's completely empty. PaulIsh, I will donate, but I'm not that rich to pay several students. My suggestion is to give us an opportunity to collectively finance features that we need. When someone works for idea and for fun only, I may never see things that I need. Say I need something that is missing in Lazarus. I'm a little guy somewhere out there and no one will ever listen to me :-) But if there are 200 guys like me who badly want this feature, and we donate $10 each - this is $2000. Then Lazarus leaders would say: We are busy over our heads doing the stuff that we like to do, and we don't care about this feature. But if someone can program this he/they can take the money. I'm sure there will be talented programmers who will want to do this - for all your reasons like fun and learning, plus for some cash. Don't forget about countries where $2000 is more than what an average guy earns in a year. What do you think about this? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- r_1gm · 2008-04-24 06:40 http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Bounties link up there is empty because there a dot on the end, try this link, the current bounties maybe not great like your idea, but it's good enough   Cheers.. Regards, Rody ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gymgoal · 2008-04-24 10:57 By the way, how does one find the Bounties page? I don't see a link to it from http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/ I don't think that Bounties is good enough. It is not any good to me. The problem with the Bounties is that one person (or one company) has to fork out the whole amount. One would have to spend more than a commercial tool costs to get a decent feature. Look at the posts there, most of them are $50 - $200. Some are $1000 but I think that those features require 10 times more $. That is not going to generate a lot of interest. My idea is that many people pay a little each, and everybody gets a new and exciting feature pretty soon. It would be more difficult to implement my idea, but think about the good that it could do. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cyber_python · 2008-04-24 11:01 In my opinion, it is the Lazarus website(mostly the frontpage) that needs redesign in order to contain more info about the project and links to significant stuff (such as bounties, the wiki documentation, screenshots etc.) in the form of a text description of the project. The news could remain under the description or they could be accessible from a link in the menu. You see, I have been using lazarus for more than 4 years and just recently started using the wiki documentation (I had not noticed the link on the left and always wondered how I could find it). (Sorry about the offtopic ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gymgoal · 2008-04-24 12:50 I agree, the website needs an improvement. I see that it's made with php, so I cannot help here. I can make websites with server-side Java and/or GWT. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LazaruX · 2008-04-24 13:40 Why does money need to be everywhere? It now will start with donations, later it may become commercial? No, no. Keep Lazarus free. Who ever can, who ever wants, will contribute to lazarus for free, just to program, not for money. Free world. Association of Free Programmers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gymgoal · 2008-04-24 14:15 Because I want to make some money with programs that I write using Lazarus. I make some money - I give some money to people who helped me. But I want to decide what my money is spent on, and I want to make some Lazarus features reality (sometimes it looks like they are going do be just dreams forever). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cyber_python · 2008-04-24 15:05 Thats  what bounties are for, but IMHO (like many other features of the Lazarus project) they should be pointed out better. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- marmin · 2008-05-06 12:20 Donations can speed up the development process; one can hire a developer for money ( Imean, ubuntu for example is not made by people wh do it all for free). There is nothing to be 'ashamed' of if one can collect money to pay a dedicated developer (imo). Or use it to pay site bandwith etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gymgoal · 2008-05-06 15:34 I am also concerned about speed of development. Also many features that we need are pretty complex. I think that there is a danger that without donations we will never see them. Most of us are not rich and we cannot pay a bounty of several thousands for a feature that we need. But most of us could donate $10-$50. If a lot of people donate this little for specific feature, we may have our long-awaited features much sooner, and Lazarus will become much better tool. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gerardus · 2008-05-07 17:53 Quote from: "BPsoftware"Why does money need to be everywhere? It now will start with donations, later it may become commercial? No, no. Keep Lazarus free. Who ever can, who ever wants, will contribute to lazarus for free, just to program, not for money. Free world. Association of Free Programmers. Getting funding and donations <> commercial. Firebird, for example has a foundation with a membership & sponsorship system that allows to pay developers. See http://firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=ffoundation&id=contributions for how it works. You can: - Donate money only. the easiest thing to do. - Become a member, voting or non-voting depending on the fee. - Sponsor, based on a fixed fee or a percentage of the sales. - Give resources like hardware, software, hosting or work. I think that could be a good idea for Lazarus. I tried to make little contributions but the last thing I have available is time. Also consider that some core development tasks are complex enough to require a big dedication. I'd be glad to pay for a membership to help fund development. Regards, Gerard. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gymgoal · 2008-05-07 18:46 I think that now, when Codegear is bought by a database tools shop, Delphi will get more database-oriented and less universal. In this case some people will switch from Delphi to Lazarus. This could be good time to organize Lazarus development a little better and maybe to make a foundation like Firebird has. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Ishenin · 2008-05-08 03:00 I warry they will switch from Delphi to Visual Studio more than to Lazarus And about donating by 10-50$. How you want to control where that money will spend? We can create a paypal acount and you will be able to send money there if you want. But creating fund and management is outside our wishes. If you want to create it then feel free to open Lazarus fund, collect money and seek for developers who will do Lazarus features for money. But we heard such ideas once per year and fund still not exists - nobody want to waste his time on that. Dont have an illusion that comparision with Firebird project is new. No - when I only started with lazarus I had the same ideas and I expect other ppl had it even before Lazarus devels have low interest in creating such foundation. And I warry it will never appear from devels initiative. It can only appear if lazarus communiti will build it. Back to donating. What we can offer: option a) transfer any amount of money to the paypal account and they will be spent on:   - attracting students   - representing lazarus on conferences   - every year barbecue   - beer option b) create new bounties ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gymgoal · 2008-05-08 15:11 Sure many people will switch away from Pascal altogether, but some will look at Lazarus, I'm sure about this. I've discovered Lazarus just a month ago. I've told about it to my friends (they all are programmers like me), and they were interested in it's cross-platform abilities. We cannot control how the money is spent, so we need to trust the person who collects the money. This is why I cannot create a paypal account and collect the donations - nobody knows me and people will not trust me. Someone who manages Lazarus should do this. My point is that there should be many accounts - one account for a specific feature that Lazarus users want to fund. Let's say I want a feature. Just for example let's say this is "Full GTK2 Support". 1) I suggest you to open an account for this feature. Let's say that there is a dedicated forum chapter for this sort of suggestions. 2) You setup a poll "Will you donate to speed up Full GTK2 Support". 3) If there are people who answered "yes" (say 50 people or more), then you open a PayPal account for this specific feature and announce this on the Lazarus front page. 4) You also create a Bounty entry for this feature. You regularly edit this bounty entry and publish the $ amount donated for this feature. 5) Somebody takes this job. When it's done, you pay them the money and close the account. How does this sound? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NicoF · 2008-05-14 17:28 Another idea to look at for the future: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Ishenin · 2008-05-15 03:25 This is not a new idea. We tried it last and this year but without success. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- marmin · 2008-05-15 08:21 Ok, it's all like 'we want to donate' and then the devs say 'Ok, do what you want, but we really don't care' . If that is the attitude donating is useless. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NicoF · 2008-05-15 15:40 You have the following scenario: The accountant is happy if the books balance, there's money in the bank and the business show a profit. He doesn't care if there is sales or the business have a great product. The salesman is happy if he can make a lot of sales and earn lots of commission. He doesn't care if there is money in the bank or if the business have a great product. The engineer just wants to create a great product. He doesn't care if there are sales or if the business makes money or if there are money in the bank. All the devs probably falls into the third section. For a business to succeed you need all three, but also someone to co- ordinate the work of the other 3 and can overrule them. Hence the chief executive.