[ros-dev] ReactOS Foundation 501c3 Status - Approved

[Steven Edwards]

--- Alex Ionescu <ionucu at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Two issues I see here:
> 
> 1) Developers. Do you mean that each developer will be paid? How will 
> this be done? equally shared? Not to sound like an ass, but there may be 
> times when a developer does absolutely nothing (read: me for the next 
> month), while someone else is hacking away 100KLOC of code. Or someone 
> that generally only does little fixes (which can be really useful, and 
> is all the useful time he can offer due to work/family/school) versus 
> someone which already has assured income and spends 24 hours a day 
> working on Reactos. Would it be fair to pay everyone the same amount of 
> money? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding the issue, but I just want to be 
> fair. Besides, I'm sure many developers might want to refuse getting 
> paid. Working for free is sometimes a personal choice, and the offers 
> certain tangible and psycoligcal advantages. I don't know about others, 
> but I myself would feel bad in many ways to receive money by working on 
> ReactOS. I would feel as if any bugs ormistakes that I make now have 
> monetary losses associated with them.

The idea is to start with the ReactOS Foundation does two things in terms of paying developers.

1. Offers bounties for certain features or bugs in bugzilla. Call them 1 time cash prizes.
 
2. Acts as a escrow or broker for third parties wanting to offer a bounty. (see 1)

I don't think this will discourage development. There are tons of little features I would like to
see that no one is working on atm where a bounty system would be nice. If I had $500 spare I would
put up a bounty for the 3com driver or for the NMake backend for the xmlbuildsystem. Also single
user contributions could be pooled for a bug. NOTE: I DO NOT WANT A PLEDGE SYSTEM. THEY DON'T
WORK. 
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO CONTRIBUTE MONEY TO A BUG THEN THIS WILL BE THE BEST WAY!

Think about the following

-------------------------------------------
Steven Edwards Enters bug #311337
"Make ReactOS have a 3com Vortext (959/930) driver"

Alex gives $50 earmarked bug #311337
Steven gives $100 to bug #311337
Some random user throws in $200 for bug #311337
 
Someone decides "hey $350 will pay for a nice weekend at the beach! I'll take it!"
And they start coding. They get a working driver and it passes QA so it goes in SVN.

The ReactOS Foundation then writes a check for $350 to said developer.
-------------------------------------------

> 2) I think expos should get more then 5%. An expo of 4 people would cost 
> around 2000$ (assuming 150$/night * 3 nights, plus food and other needs, 
> *4 people).  Now at minimum we'll probably want to attend a North 
> American and a European conference, meaning 4000$. The European one is 
> bound to have more then 4 people anyways, so with 6 people, it'll up the 
> cost to 6000$. 5% means that we would need 80 000$ in donations. Seems a 
> lot to me at this stage. Then again, we probably won't want to pay the 
> full cost of an expo at this point, but whatever, I'm just giving ideas 
> and I hope they help!

Nothing is set in stone as we have $0 cash flow atm. It will be up to the board to decide on a
final budget. I just want to have a rough plan in place as I am going to start soliciting help for
funding.

> I would love to be on the board. I think I have some pretty good ideas 
> for moving forward, and it'll be a good short break from coding when 
> I'll happen.

I want to get something up on foundation.reactos.org and then have a discussion on the
ros-foundation list on what needs to be ammended in the bylaws and we can vote on restructure,
memebers, etc.

Thanks
Steven



		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Yahoo! Personals - Better first dates. More second dates. 
http://personals.yahoo.com