Are there any plans for such a functionality? It would be great when making a donation if you could specify to which development you’d like it to benefit. I am not talking about something strict but at least if the maintainers see 2000 people donating and asking for feature X they can reconsider the priorities.
Of course I am conscious it is rather unlikely that much money will be raised through this system. I don’t think we’ll be able to pay someone a full time job for several months and maybe the whole money gathered could be spent in administration/hosting/material costs. However my biggest hope is that someday this will be possible.
Apart from that would anyone be able to build an estimation of how much would be necessary to do each thing and how fast?
Since it’s also an internet-oriented community and not a traditional non-profit organization, I guess it would give a good image to have a full listing of the expenses visible online, real-time. And the balance between what needs to be paid (regular invoices or bounties) and the money available/required.
While these kinds of donations for a certain purpose would be interesting especially for things like a hardware accellerated OpenGL driver, I’d think that this will only make sense after the release of R1, i.e. when all vital OS components are in place
Interesting idea. When I read the subject I thought it was about how much money might be needed to hire a/start hiring contract programmers.
How much money would be needed for that?
Depends on the programmer. To give you an idea of rates, a company I worked for charged $75 USD / hr for my work. After that, I worked for $40 CAD / hr on a few contracts.
It depends on the person, there experience, what field, how much they need the money, etc. If the person is charitable then they might lower there fees if they think that the project is [enter personal reason here].
To overstep my bounds a bit, I doubt that a project with limited funds (ie no revenue stream currently) this project would be hiring a contract programmer as the prices given above (from what I’ve heard) are on the low end because contract programmers don’t have health plans, etc that come along with working for a company.
Basically it’s too expense. Not to mention that the developers that are coding for free probably won’t like it all too much.