Re: Kickstarter for Emacs

[Vyacheslav Gonakhchyan <ytriffy@gmail.com>]

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On kickstarter there is a reward system. The point is that you can buy
final product for a lower price. And then after the completion of a project
price goes up. That gives people motivation to buy early.
In emacs the only motivation is that you know that the money will go
towards completion of certain feature. But there are no rewards because
emacs is free. So I think it won't be as much successful.

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 1:25 PM, Tom <adatgyujto@gmail.com> wrote:

> Chong Yidong <cyd <at> gnu.org> writes:
> >
> > So far, I haven't seen much call from individual Emacs developers for
> > financial support, but individual developers (e.g. of third-party
> > packages) can always set up their own donations mechanism, rather than
> > using Kickstarter, which as far as I can tell is just a way to funnel
> > money to Kickstarter Inc and Amazon (who take a whopping 10% cut from
> > donations).  Their PR campaign sure is impressive, though.
>
> That's why I said the model is the point, not Kickstart itself.
> If there is other ways to do it it's also good. The important part
> is there should be a way to quickly set up projects to fund
> specific features like on Kickstartes instead of having static,
> generic donation points like the FSF donation page.
>
> >
> > If there is interest in funding anything at the Emacs project level, the
> > FSF has set up a mechanism for donating to individual GNU packages,
> > currently used by GNU Octave and GNU Telephony; see
> >
> >   https://my.fsf.org/associate/donate/working-together
> >
>
> Yes, but it's project level support. I was talking about feature
> level funding, so that people can fund the implementation of their pet
> feature explicitly instead of giving money to the generic project
> and let the developers decide what they want to work on.
>
> People are much more willing to give money if they know it will
> go to fund the specific feature they want implemented. Paying
> for scratching my itch makes my itch go away, so I'm willing to
> pay for it.
>
>
> > But, as I said, I don't currently see much need.
>
> There is no neeed, because there is no way to fund specific features.
>
> For example, I often read on the net people saying that they love
> emacs, but for Java they use Eclipse, because that understands
> the language (intelligent completion/refactoring out of the box)
> better.
>
> What if someone, say a freelance developer, says the he wants to
> improve emacs java support significantly (of course, the goal should
> be more specific), but for that he needs to work on it several months
> full time. In order to do it he needs funding, so he doesn't have to
> take up on other jobs during these months, so he does it if people
> donate a certain amount.
>
> That's how the projects on Kickstarter work and I bet there would
> be quite a few people willing to pay a few dollars for emacs to have
> Java support comparable to Eclipse. The only problem is currently
> they can't do it, because there is no way to fund a certain feature
> explicitly.
>
> So I think there is a need, only developers don't consider this
> possibility of funding their work. That's why I started this thread,
> so somebody may start such a project which he wants
> to do, but can't, because of lack of time and other work commitments
> and money making needs.
>
> The only thing to keep in mind the project should be something
> which interests lots of users (like better Java support, but surely,
> there are quite a few others), because people won't fund niche features
> which only a handful of people need.
>
>
>
>

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