Enable TDF to contribute more code to LibreOffice with in-house developers to address our donors specific needs

Hi Mike, all,

Mike Saunders wrote:

So I don't know what the solution is, but as someone who's monitoring our
social media channels, Reddit and other things every day, I see a huge
number of feature requests. Many end up on Bugzilla as enhancement requests
too, of course.

Thx for that background & the link to Ilmari's writeup.

It's clearly something we've pondered from the very early days on; the
latest reasonably concrete plan around hosting our own
bounty/crowdfunding platform was running this inside the planned
business entity.

Since bugfixing tends to be expensive, the proposal back then was to
'match' community funding with proceeds from e.g. app store sales;
thus effectively steering money towards what users would prominently
want (and also be willing to chip-in money for).

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

Hi Simon, *,

Back in the day, one proposal for handling this was to have a seperate tendering programme for community-initiated feature requests, funded with the income from putting LibreOffice in the Mac & Windows App stores.

The features to be implemented would be community-sourced, converted from request to proper proposal by a staff member (possibly also funded from the app revenue), validated by ESC and then voted by users The user voting would require sufficient "karma", e.g. from answering on user forums or by virtue of being a Trustee, or possibly by donating to the fund. We had hoped to prefer "new" contributors in the tendering process, and also make it agile enough to not require a specialist sales-person to participate.

That's the undetailed synopsis; I think I have a longer description somewhere in a haunted folder if the new Board is interested.

Yes that what I just wrote in the old thread :slight_smile: : a channel to bring users, bounties, BugZilla issues and freelance developers together, also with the idea to grow the pool of LibreOffice developers.

Cheers,
Cor

Ah - my mail crossed Simons one.
Killing this part of the thread now :wink:

Hi all,

Since bugfixing tends to be expensive, the proposal back then was to
'match' community funding with proceeds from e.g. app store sales;
thus effectively steering money towards what users would prominently
want (and also be willing to chip-in money for).

Thank you for showing your support for even more internal developers.

As the proposal includes investing in developers with funds coming from donors and the app stores the sooner we employ those developers the faster TDF can start satisfying their needs.

Ciao

Paolo

An example for zero-overhead-bounties is Lazarus (VCL for Freepascal) https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Bounties. Well no overhead means we still have to send money, given the (karma) community picks the tasks and decides whether it's done.