[NewIdea]A new way to push ReactOS Development [NewIdea]

[Murmur]

i am on it.I am on it.
Gimme 12 hours more.

I think he ran away.


You guys should add google checkout
checkout.google.com/

[Witch]

i am on it.I am on it.
Gimme 12 hours more.

So what's the status with this [NewIdea]? What's the masterplan? What does the time schedule look like? What is going to happen now? What's is the primary goal with this [NewIdea]? What are the bosses thinking about upstairs?

I feel restless and bored not being able to help out in my own way. Playing things by the book is boring too me.

[SomeGuy]

So what's the status with this [NewIdea]? What's the masterplan?

He might have been talking about this: viewtopic.php?f=25&t=9606

Awesome idea to get going there. The number of posts to the Arwinss thread proves people can do this. It would probably get more attention though if it were moved to General Discussion and made a sticky.

[EmuandCo]

We cannot sticky every post. Sticky is for post with useful and often needed information. I don't see a reason why this post needs to catch anyone's eye every time the get in this forum.

[BrentNewland]

Marat Karatov told the Russian President the project could be completed with about 1 million euros.

I'm visualising a donation/fundraising campaign that takes the total amount needed and splits it into individual projects. Display could be similar to Donors Choose, where donors choose which projects to fund (encourages donations). You could also have a classic thermometer showing how close you are to the total goal (again, another form of encouragement).

Obviously not every project could be funded simultaneously (because most projects would need some other project to be completed before it could be started) - you could link each project to its prerequisites so that a project doesn't show up until all prerequisites have been fully funded. You could also display every project and its prerequisites (so people can strategically donate), similar to a a Tech Tree (perhaps done in flash, on a separate page of course).

Maybe you could get big organizations like Google, Apple, the Russian or Chinese governments, Sony or Nintendo (since they compete with the 360), IBM, Oracle, VMWare, Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, etc. to match any funds raised during a specific period. Combine this with getting articles at major sites (like Slashdot, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Register, etc., all would have to be prearranged), a couple articles on Reddit and Digg, and an Oprah appearance and you should have this OS done in no time.

[PurpleGurl]

Marat Karatov told the Russian President the project could be completed with about 1 million euros.

I'm visualising a donation/fundraising campaign that takes the total amount needed and splits it into individual projects. Display could be similar to Donors Choose, where donors choose which projects to fund (encourages donations). You could also have a classic thermometer showing how close you are to the total goal (again, another form of encouragement).

Obviously not every project could be funded simultaneously (because most projects would need some other project to be completed before it could be started) - you could link each project to its prerequisites so that a project doesn't show up until all prerequisites have been fully funded. You could also display every project and its prerequisites (so people can strategically donate), similar to a a Tech Tree (perhaps done in flash, on a separate page of course).

Maybe you could get big organizations like Google, Apple, the Russian or Chinese governments, Sony or Nintendo (since they compete with the 360), IBM, Oracle, VMWare, Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, etc. to match any funds raised during a specific period. Combine this with getting articles at major sites (like Slashdot, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Register, etc., all would have to be prearranged), a couple articles on Reddit and Digg, and an Oprah appearance and you should have this OS done in no time.

Good idea! Now, blocking display of sub-projects until their prerequisites are met is good to keep the focus on the things which need done first and to prevent false hopes. If I may offer a tweak. For the active projects, you could put on there what pending sub-projects depend on the current ones. Like if PAE Extensions was a sub-project on the list, you could list that DEP support is proposed and depends on it. So anyone interested in giving for DEP support would see that PAE support must be done first and have the option of giving for its prerequisite.

As for Oprah, she might not be an option, but there are plenty of other media options out there we can use.

[hto]

I would suggest to promote ReactOS in artistic community as a Glitch Art OS :)

[clancg2003]

Guys, guys, guys you are WAY over thinking this. Just forget about corporate donations, this isn't the objective here, and I highly doubt any corporations are going to be interested in donating just yet. ReactOS is getting to that stage, but it needs to stabilize more and work on more real hardware before we'll see any interest from corporations or companies. If you really want to discuss corporate funding, make an entirely different thread, quit hijacking this one.

Anyways, back to the subject, I think using the GSOC idea is an awesome idea. I say have people donate a specific amount of money to the project of their choice (I could be wrong, but wasn't GSOC $5000 per successful completion? I say use the same amount, no reason to deviate from a working formula.) and once the total amount of money is donated anyone developer/student etc. can choose to partake in it and give them the exact same amount of time that GSOC used, unless it is an extremely complex project that simply isn't possible to complete within a 3-4 month span (also in this case the money amount should be increased). If the person completes the project before or by the deadline then they get the $5000, otherwise the money is returned to that project or another project. I say the list over here is a good idea of where to start: http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2011

Here are a couple of other ideas I've come up with, don't know how feasible they are:

- Printing support (Spooling)
- USB mass storage driver
- Wifi support
- Network Sharing
- LSASS support
- Perhaps some ReactX related goal
- Bluetooth support?

[clancg2003]

Darn it one other one I forgot.

- Functional PNP manager

[Black_Fox]

Some ideas are present in the wiki
http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Google_Summ ... 2011_Ideas
though there are also still the ideas that were actually done by ReactOS' this year's GSOC participants.

[vicmarcal]

Uhmm, your idea seems to reflect an abandoned ReactOS idea called CFI. It was abandoned because, sadly, it didnt work.
Haiku tried the CFI idea too but they failed.We can talk in a separate thread why the CFI didn't work in Haiku neither in ReactOS.

The new idea is slightly different and seems to be working in an incredible way in Haiku. If it works in Haiku, it should work in ReactOS too. This new idea has boosted Haiku development A LOT.
It is related to "buy Devs time" instead to "tell then what to work on (CFI)"

The main idea is using the Donations of our followers/users/lovers to hire devs. How?
ReactOS devs will send their "Contract requests": They say in which area they want to work, how many hours will they spend on it, and which is a fair price.
ReactOS Foundation, and thanks to the Donations from the community, will pay them to have the job done. If the donations are low then the ReactOS Foundation, sadly, will have to pick just some of them.

This is working perfectly in Haiku. And they have boosted their way to Beta. I am pretty sure we can do it!

The main problem is that right now,and if we (the Community) dont change it, we have more complainers("this doesn't work","why can't i use the mouse.it sucks") than money in the bucket:
http://www.reactos.org/en/foundation_donators.html
Just give a look at that link.

It is quite sad the LOW level of donations there. It just covers the basics of the ReactOS infrastructure, and even some devs are paying from their own pocket or using their own servers to help ReactOS.

So unless we change our way to help ReactOS, it will move slowly due to the the lack of support.
GSOC worked incredible well, you saw that. This idea, almost a GSOC clone, will work for sure.

A pity we don't have enough donnors to move this idea forward.

[milon]

A pity we don't have enough donnors to move this idea forward.

Maybe I missed this somewhere, but why can't we go ahead and set this up anyway? I'd suggest only opening it to 2 or 3 contracts at first, and let people see the impact it makes. You know - give an idea of the average time things took before contracts and list the time it took with a contract. Once people start catching on, more will begin to donate. People don't give to vague generalities much, like "Help ReactOS!" People are MUCH more likely to give to something concrete, like "This developer will code XX functions for ReactOS in XX days and would like $XX to make it happen."

Why not give it a small trial run?

[vicmarcal]

The idea is:
Funding in General,without knowing the projects, and when there is a nice amount, requesting Devs their contracts and paying to the most important ones.
(This is the way most of the serious opensource projects work btw:general donations relocated to subprojects following their respective foundations advise)
If i understood your answer correctly you propose that first our devs send their contracts and then the donnors decide where to donate(feel free to correct me if i misunderstood it), which is slightly different.
Why the projects prefer the first way(the one we are trying to push) and not this other second one?
1)Disgregating the donations.
If the donnors can select where to put the money, then maybe 3 projects are donating at the same time and noone of them are fully covered.An example:
1200(funded)/2000(requested) 1400/3000 3000/5000 600/1200
As you can see none of those projects are fully founded so noone will begin to code it. This situation happened in the CFI,and it is one of the reasons Haiku stopped using it.
In that example you can see 1200+1400+3000+600=6200 donated.
Using the first approach(the one followed by the serious opensource projects), that amount eould have been distributed the following way: 2000/2000 3000/3000 1200/1200 0/5000
So instead having 0 projects being coded there are 3 in the works.
2)Perception of the real needs.
The first time I arrived here I wanted to see a beautiful/gorgeous/incredible Explorer and GUI. Also I wanted a DirectX free version(ReactX).I'm pretty sure a lot of people have had the same first idea, but after being here for some years now I know that there are other prioritary things much more important than the Design. A nice design without USB is nonsense for example.Or why playing Crisys2 in a total unstable OS?
Forum followers knows the real ReactOS needs, but an outsider not, so they maybe will donate in the not real important projects but in the eyecandy ones.
I think we all are agree that the Foundation knows which are the areas that need the real love

So to begin with this we just need donations.

We can create a trial in the Forum, to see how it works, we can begin donating and if this Idea seems to work we can begin a serious campaign focused in outsiders too. If we are not able to make this to work with the community that follows closely ReactOS, I really doubt it would work with outsiders.

Let say it is an internal-mini-fundraising to test ourselves!!
Donating 10$ (a ticket for the Cinema and a coke is not a big thing and can help a lot to reach 0.4!

PS: I have just donated 20$.And I will try to do the same next month.2 spirit drinks less.Improving ReactOS while improving my health! Lol!

[hto]

I have just donated 20$. And I will try to do the same next month.

To which (sub)project?

[milon]

Yeah, I didn't word that terribly well. I agree with you, Vicmarcal, that the donors shouldn't decide what the funding goes to. I was trying to say that it might help to make the contracts publicly visible so that people know specifically what will be accomplished. That makes it more tangible and therefore people are more likely to give. And rather than open it up to a dozen or more contracts, let's just start with two or three. As the funds come in, the ROS Foundation allocates it to the open contracts. Maybe have a meter or something showing how much has come in so far (concrete info for the donors/public). The contracts get completed, and the dev gets paid. People can see that contracts were opened, donated to, and completed. People are inspired to give to cause more contracts to get completed. This might even lead to some sort of overall progress tracking - a kind of forecasting of how much money ROS needs to complete various aspects of the OS. Or maybe that part is just wishful thinking.