What would you give to have x in Blender? Literally.
People are always posting requests for features they would love to see in Blender and many of them are wished for by a lot of users and voted for online, but that doesn’t help anyone.
So I had this idea that a system should be set up where requests can be posted so that everyone will be able to donate money for specific features, and projects that are really needed by many users will automatically raise enough to produce them.
Coders could then apply for projects and upon completion receive the sum donated for that project.
With 200,000 active Blender users, and donations as little as $1 for a feature, we can raise way more then Google SOC would ever allocate us, and for the features that you want the most.
[quote] ton / Blendernation]
Because of my background in an animation studio, I knew that when developing a 3D tool with the complexity of Blender, it’s important to be very close to the artists. They are the people who should define how the software should work. That’s very difficult to extract from the thousands of feature requests on a website. What would be the most wanted or most useful addition to the software? There are a lot of things you could work on. From my practise, I know that if you give a team an assignment, of making a movie short in six months, they will quickly find out that maybe 90% of the feature requests are nice, but you don’t need them to make a movie. So the artists quickly go to the core, key things that you really have to fix, otherwise you can’t make the movie. That focus is incredible, and also inspires the developers to help this small team of artists to get it done. That’s why I would love to have more projects like Elephants Dream.
so instead of feature request page you could have a movie project page…and people vote the best story with their dollar. Then a group of artists and a director take up the project and on completion collect the money pay for production then split remaining sum.
During the production, a blender dev would come and implement must-have tools for the production team.
But the original idea is good too. When you donate by feature it is easily for developers to see the most wanted feature, and they can make time for it cause it pays off.
The gnome project has done it: http://www.gnome.org/bounties/
Seems this idea works in that case. However I read somewhere that there might be a negative effect if you put money on it - people may not feel as self-motivated as before. [citation needed]
I propose we call it beer money.
You’d need quite a lot of money, and it may discourage people from working on something until it either has a bounty for it or the bounty increases. You also then run into problems where one dev codes part, and another finishes. What then?
