Some thoughts

[bachmeier]

On Tuesday, 26 November 2019 at 22:53:49 UTC, Laeeth isharc wrote:

> I think often it's less about financial resources than a 
> coordination problem.

That's a good point. And as has been said before, once you have 
some money on the line, it forces you to get things in order. One 
problem of a volunteer system is that there's no incentive to 
make it work, even when money is not itself the issue.

> Lots of people probably wouldn't mind fixing bugs or improving 
> documentation to earn some extra money and maybe some people or 
> companies would be willing to support the ecosystem through 
> funding but unless somebody takes it upon themselves to 
> organise a way to make it happen then it won't.
>
> It might be as simple as setting up a page where people can 
> indicate their willingness to fix bugs and send email address 
> along with the sort of daily rate they would need.  Then it's 
> much easier to ask for support if someone will oversee that 
> process.  You could allow people to channel money to bugs they 
> care about provided they channel some to community bug fixing 
> needs.

I like that idea. College students would be prime candidates for 
this but they might avoid it because they wouldn't know what 
their rate should be. It might have to be stated as $X/day or a 
negotiated rate if that isn't enough.

I think there's room for reducing the cost of getting involved 
with development/writing documentation. I eventually gave up 
because there's so much overhead associated with getting 
everything set up and dealing with Git and all that. I wouldn't 
even accept money if it were offered, and others with high 
salaries are probably in the same boat, but I don't want to spend 
my limited time dealing with overhead rather than doing work that 
has value.

Sometimes it's unclear who's even in charge. Dub, for instance. I 
wish you could find the email address of the decision maker for a 
particular issue on the website.

> The barrier to getting Symmetry Autumn of Code started was much 
> more about organisational questions than the dollar cost itself.

We're lucky to have that barrier out of the way. It's been a big 
boost for the language, and will become bigger as time goes on - 
every improvement has an effect for many years.