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

[vicmarcal]

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.

+1 Totally agree

[Black_Fox]

So, is the idea realization progressing at the moment? I mean, are there going to be some subprojects written or has this so far been more of a brainstorm of how things should be done?

[vicmarcal]

The main goal of this topic is to present the idea to the ReactOS closest followers.Those who care the most and are always around: Forum users
To move this idea forward two groups must help: Devs and Community.
*Regular Devs have scored quite high in GSOC: a font rewrite, themes new support, or even a new reworked network stack. They felt comfortable working in GSOC, and GSOC is more or less the same as this new idea(just that the funds comes from ReactOS Community instead Google)
*But Community is the one that moves the wheel. If the community aren't willing to support it (through donations) the Idea won't be feasible.

Until now, and just looking the Donations page. there arent enough donnors.There are really few donations.So maybe we are not ready yet as a Community.
We should give a step to the front, instead expecting a Miracle.
We should act together donating small amounts.
And we should show Reactos devs that we are here to support and move this project forward.That they can count with us. I'm sure this step to the front will boost their motivation, they will feel closer to us, and it will help to move faster ReactOS to 0.4!
It's time to stop arguing about the slowness and decide to be part of a Community, with C capital letter.
Passion. That's the word.
Let's boost the Passion!

[milon]

If the ROS forum is the wheel that needs to start turning, would it help to display some stats in the forum about donations? Like how much per month we've received, would like to receive, etc? What about adding total donations given to user's info along with their post count? (Assuming they don't want a given donation to be anonymous.)

[Sof_T]

If the ROS forum is the wheel that needs to start turning, would it help to display some stats in the forum about donations? Like how much per month we've received, would like to receive, etc? What about adding total donations given to user's info along with their post count? (Assuming they don't want a given donation to be anonymous.)

Or even REactOS donator /regular donator signatures for forum members to advertise, promote the idea?

[DOSGuy]

Here's an update of my post from Page 1 (Euros and Dollars are treated as equal for simplicity's sake):

Code: Select all

       Total   Donors  Per donor
2011   2195.79    99   22.18
2010   1919.00    94   20.41
2009   2669.17   142   18.80
2008   3471.11   126   27.55
2007   2759.57   118   23.39

At this point in the year, we're on track to have about 2635 currency units of donations by 119 people. Both of these metrics are an improvement over last year, but still down from 2007-2009.

Edit: More statistics about this year's donations.

The median donation is 10 currency units, with 23 people (roughly 1/4 of all donors) donating this amount, and 44% of donors donating less than 10 dollars/euros (so exactly 2/3 of all donations are 10 currency units or less). The much higher average is pulled up by a single 500 Euro donation (the next largest is 125 Euros), while ten people donated 1 dollar/euro. Here's a breakdown of donation sizes.

Code: Select all

    1.00 -   1.99    14
    2.00 -   2.99     8
    3.00 -   4.99     6
    5.00 -   9.99    16
   10.00 -  14.99    25
   15.00 -  19.99     4
   20.00 -  24.99     5
   25.00 -  29.99     3
   30.00 -  49.99     4
   50.00 -  99.99     9
  100.00 - 199.99     4
  200.00 - 499.99     0
  500.00              1

I accept PayPal donations on my own website, so I know that every donation costs me $0.30 + 2.9% of the donation, so PayPal keeps 1/3 of all $1 donations. PayPal's "take" doesn't fall below 10% until you donate about $4.25. In total, PayPal kept 93.5 currency units (4.26%) in fees, plus any margin they charged for currency conversion if this occurred.

Because PayPal is going to take $0.30 every time, if you're planning to donate, say, $5 per month, it's better for ReactOS if you make a single donation of $60 at the end of the year. PayPal really rapes you when you get a large number of small donations.

[vicmarcal]

DOSguy reflects perfectly the impossibility of making this idea real,unless we begin donating.
2000€ at year is not enough to hire a dev(eveness if most of those 2000€ are used to pay ReactOS server and other expenses)
We need to donate really

[DOSGuy]

€1000 from ING would be a big bump, but clearly still a drop in the bucket. If people want this plan to work, they each must donate some amount of money. Any amount would help, but I expect that the limit that almost anyone would be willing to donate would be around $200. If you have to pay more than that, why not just buy a copy of Windows? A free OS only saves you $200 per license, which could be millions for large organizations, but only $200 for private individuals.

[PurpleGurl]

Just a related thought. Why not sell "votes" that determine the priority on which things are completed? Lets say the cost of a vote is $20. Then $100 would be 5 votes which could be split (up to 2 or 3 categories), or put in as 5 votes on 1 item. Then the funds all go into a single pool, but the top 1-3 voted goals get the funds. A system of cut-off dates could be used to prevent sudden changes - ie., once work has started on whatever goals, the previously allocated funds cannot go to anything else. If different goals get the votes at that point, then they catch in on the next cycle. That is different than the funds going into a certain basket from the start. Instead, the funds go into the general funds, and fund raisers get votes which help influence what is worked upon, but don't directly decide things. So the competition would be on the donors' end, not the developer's end. Those who are upset their projects are not getting attention would be motivated to give more or campaign for more donors. So they are buying a chance, not a guarantee. This would place the model somewhere between trading stocks and gambling.

Also, like said earlier, the approach could be that developers decide at any given point what 3 goals are most feasible and important. By feasible, I mean possible at whatever given point in relation to prerequisite work. Obviously they cannot write code for something where the necessary APIs and framework do not exist. So there may be only 3 choices to vote upon, and the majority of donations determine which one gets priority (they all get worked on, but one of the three gets it first).

[clancg2003]

Guys, come on we can do this. All it would take is is $20 a month from each of us. I know the economy is bad right now pretty much everywhere, but $20 is a little more than the cost of a large pizza! There is definitely way more than 500 of us who use ReactOS and we could raise over $10,000 to fund the developers! That alone would probably be enough for one or two programmers to devote more time to the project. If this compounds each month, we can get some very rapid progress going on ReactOS. ReactOS is getting closer to where it can get funding from firms and companies, but it still isn't quite there yet. We need to help it progress to that point.

The one thing that has always amazed me about this project is how far along it has come despite its relatively small size. The developers we have working on it are extremely talented in programming and if there's anyone who can make a windows clone, it is them. All we need is to help them out a little financially so they can devote more time to the project. Even though ReactOS is open source and free, that does not mean that the developers should not be compensated for their time and devotion. Surely we all can agree with this?

Vicmaral, do you think it would be possible to have something on the front page that displays the current amount of money donated so far in the month? I think this would be a great way to motivate the community to donate.

[pbreneman]

Occupy Microsoft!

[WooJoo]

I would pay 60€ a year for a weekly (or monthly) Newsletter like the one which has been (not that often) published.

[clancg2003]

I would pay 60€ a year for a weekly (or monthly) Newsletter like the one which has been (not that often) published.

That's great and all, but come on guys can't we do better than this? How about we get as many community members to donate 15€ each month. That's not a lot at all, and if we can get a couple hundred people to do this (I know there's at least 500 people in the community) we could definitely get a few developers to dedicate more time to the project. The one thing that's always amazed me about the ReactOS developers is how skilled they are at programming. We have so much talent that isn't being utilized right now. Imagine what all someone like Cameron Gutman or Johannes Anderwald, for example, could accomplish if they were able to devote much more time to ReactOS. Remember ReactOS is a community project, and we need to do our part to help it succeed.

[Bblaauw]

In my opinion, donating for ReactOS could be worthwile, but only in the case of meeting the following :
* requesting features, rather than helping general progress.
* obvious (visual) bugs and regressions will have to have been sorted so ReactOS is a 'polished' alpha release. Think of stage 2 HTML/Gecko bug, or VMware drivers, regressed sound and memory requirements, and some visual bugs like DXDIAG texts/numbers/tabs.

* a 'donator/supported' forum user account status might be nice if the donation exceeds some minimum amount.
* also a ReactOS.org user weblog space might be nice so people can indicate what they're wanting to do with ReactOS, what they're currently doing, which issues they run into and what they'd like improved.

Donating for getting features implemented is pleasant, donating so developers get rid of bugs isn't. Perhaps wait till 0.4.0 is out?

[vicmarcal]

In my opinion, donating for ReactOS could be worthwile, but only in the case of meeting the following :
* requesting features, rather than helping general progress.
* obvious (visual) bugs and regressions will have to have been sorted so ReactOS is a 'polished' alpha release. Think of stage 2 HTML/Gecko bug, or VMware drivers, regressed sound and memory requirements, and some visual bugs like DXDIAG texts/numbers/tabs.

* a 'donator/supported' forum user account status might be nice if the donation exceeds some minimum amount.
* also a ReactOS.org user weblog space might be nice so people can indicate what they're wanting to do with ReactOS, what they're currently doing, which issues they run into and what they'd like improved.

Donating for getting features implemented is pleasant, donating so developers get rid of bugs isn't. Perhaps wait till 0.4.0 is out?

Hi Bblaauw,
This is a vicious wheel. If you wait to donate until 0.4 is out because you want to donate in a polished project, then it will never get polished. Donations are less needed when the project is polished as the community is wider.