Great, I’m sure most devs would jump at the oportunity to have the Inc tell them exactly what to do under the threat of unemploymenz, unlike waddlesplash who can decide for himself what parts to work ok exactly.
Anyhow, the report already mentions that waddlesplash is not paid off so to speak, at the current rate the Inc can employ him about 20 years ~.
First people need to donate more then one can think of hiring more devs, certainly not before the one dev there is breaks even on donations.
Naturally there’d be cooperation involved, I was boiling it down to the barest components. Figuratively you’ve hire someone for a task and with any luck you’d figure out and agree on a set number of tasks.
What it boild down to is that setting clear goals, agreed upon or set by an employer, is the best way forward. Stating “Do this and this will happen” is far better than saying “Here’s a bunch of money, do what you feel is best and we’ll await any result”.
Please, everyone interested in discussing how to fund development, search the forums for Patreon or Kickstarter or Bounty. This has been discussed - several times - already in the past.
That isn’t the path waddlesplash was hired under, and it seems to work fine?
The Inc doesn’t want to steer the project, and this would definetely steer it
I’m not dictating what Haiku Inc has done nor what it should do. I’m stating what I think might be good, given my experience and how I would do things. Take it as you will, with any luck my thoughts will help but if not then I least do my best. I’m not a big fan of tearing people down and telling them what they’ve done wrong.
I like to build things up instead of tearing them down so if my input is valuable then so be it, it’s not productive imo to simply gripe about mistakes. That’s easy, being productive is more about giving suggestions.
I can’t really look into your head, so I can’t comment on that. I am asking why you think a different course makes sense, just saying that you think it does doesn’t really voice a why, just an opinion.
I like to have waddlesplash pretty self-directed as that means those of us in Haiku, Inc (certainly the few that are active) don’t have to manage him, and also he generally knows better than us what to work on. Plus we are treating him as a contractor and it keeps that clear as far as our employment arrangement.
With that said, I am sure we could set up some overall goals that make sense, or things the community views as priority, and maybe see if that helps donations. Though I suspect some of that is already happening, just maybe with not a lot of fanfare. Maybe most of this is just about marketing or changing how we communicate some things. Though I think the monthly activity reports are pretty exciting and show good progress? What else would people like to see? (I mean that as a genuine question, not in a sarcastic way.)
When inquired about the R1, @waddlesplash once told that when the system is considered usable, then R1 would be out. I’m sure that he already has an idea about what general bullet points have left in order to achieve status, listing these would already make a pretty solid donation case I believe.
I’ve voiced what I think and why I think what I do. Other than that I can’t really help you, I’ve tried to be as clear as I can to help you out, besides that there’s not much else I can do.
The list of tickets with the milestone R1 is that roughly anyhow.
Though every dev certainly has their own pet peeves! (for me that is the german translation inexplicably not translating app names, making the OS unusable for atleast one person I know; and printer discovery)
I think the goals for Waddlesplash’s contract are fairly clear:
About getting more money to hire more devs: this was discussed several times in the past, few of the existing contributors are interested. The reason is, we pretty much all have full time jobs already, and leaving a job for one or maybe two years of work for Haiku is a bit uncertain and requires a lot of paperwork both on Haiku and on the devs side. It happened for me in 2014 because I moved to another city and had to quit my job anyway. It happen for Waddlesplash for similar reasons. As a result of this situation, we are not really looking for a crowdfunding type of approach where we raise a lot of money a single time. Instead we are looking for people to provide recurring donations, that allow us to build things on the long term. The deal is simple: you give a little money every year or month, and Haiku inc can hire Waddlesplash to fix a lot of bugs and improve a lot of things. If the donations keep increasing, we may reach a point where it’s possible to hire a second developer. It could be me, if I’m reasonably sure that it will last for let’s say 3-5 years at least. If it’s less, I’m not quitting my job and going again through the headaches of setting myself up as a contractor for Haiku, with all the paperwork that would need.
This situation explains why Haiku inc has looked mainly for recurring donations: things like Liberapay, Github sponsors, and so on.
Another aspect is we want to keep all our work in the open (this is an open source project after all). This somewhat rules out things like Patreon (where the idea is to create content exclusive to the Patreon supporters) and also limits the crowdfunding approach a bit (since that also involve specific rewards, which is a lot of logistics we don’t really want to spend time or money on).
One thing that could be considered is hiring people outside of the existing contributors. But then, we would have to do it at a payment rate matching what the industry expects. Not the $20.000 a year or so that Waddlesplash is getting, which is like, half or maybe 1/4 of what he could be earning with a regular software developer job? We’re not going to find skilled developers willing to work for Haiku at such low prices. And even if we did, it will take time to train them to our workflow, the software architecture, etc.
TL;DR: it’s not just about getting Haiku inc to sit on a huge pile of money 
Fundraisers do not work, yes, but the project is at a yearly deficit. From what I understand, @waddlesplash did not work quite full-full-time, but rather allocated less hours for Haiku. It’s not important and not my business to question this anyway, what I’m trying to say, advertising goals and getting more money to get Augustin to work more hours (if he’s available) would make a huge difference in terms of what would the project achieve.
Anyway, I’m not comfortable making random assumptions about other people, I’m out.
Yeah, I know, I was pointing out Goodshop as an existing alternative, since @leavengood said, presumably in reference to Amazon Smile:
I don’t think we will have much of an alternative there
(Unless he was referring to alternative Amazon programs for non-profits)
Yes, I averaged somewhere around 30-50 hours a month last year. It’s almost enough to keep up with all my expenses, plus some other things I do on the side. I will likely increase the average a bit this year, so I don’t have to keep an eye on my spending quite so much. But indeed, this is only really tenable at the moment because I am a bachelor with extremely limited financial obligations and expenses to worry about.
1/3 at least, but if we are talking about the going rate for systems programmers (as pretty much all Haiku core developers qualify as) in the USA, then it’s probably closer to 1/10 or less!