hire new people with donations?

[Originway]

after reading the remark about most people not getting paid to work on warzone it got me thinking on how many of us would donate to actually hire full time devs to work on warzone?
we got 4550 members and if each person can send in $10 that would be $45500
speaking of the site I was looking at who owns it and it shows Registrant: Per Inge Mathisen
Per, how much does it cost to run a server for warzone? you guys don't accept donations it seems

It's perfectly fine - the hard part is dividing it. Most OSS projects just give it to whoever runs the server (in our case, Kamaze - I'm sure he's less likely to find legal problems with a donation if he's the one getting the money ).

i think it is a good way of gaining some money to sustain the project and the site...etc dont you think? And also please put a donate button to help you guys perhaps you shold even be able to work only in the game if you receive enough donations and even contract new developers

There is also the portable version of warzone that they ask for donations and none of the profits are sent to the developers here.

effigy wrote:edit: that said, allowing donations to help with hosting costs would be a nice show of appreciation from the users.


I think that in this case the only real cost is to get domain up, or wz doesn't use server from projects like sourceforge etc. for main page (github account for VCS hosting is free if repositories are public)?

Well then why dont we use the democracy and elect a president for the ressurrection project? Or make in the donations several options like donate to the artwork or donate here to the coders... I think that there are several people that loves or at least liked this game enough to donate... Just in the site that i found you guys there has been 150000 downloads!!! And in the comments the game rating is 9.7!!!

Everything that requires an outlay of money that the Project currently does is donated by members of the dev team; we do not accept outside donations at this time.

then I found this remark

Coming from the blender community, I've seen it done, but it's not without its problems.
-The dev will have to set up his own donation system, to make sure no one else gets the money
-Many people don't realize that they cannot expect much from a donation of, say, 20€. That is a single hour of work.
-In fact, one cannot legally require any result from a donation

so it isn't possible to get new features if you donate? I would donate $10 to get a easy way to add new units in!
how about the rest of you?
how much would you be able to donate for warzone?

[Terminator]

not a long time ago I was thinking about exactly the same thing, but I dont take into count worldwide community, only my russian speaking folks . However the question is who will take all responsibilities for that kind of work, money managment & hireing freelancers. It could be anybody & you dont need permition from devs, only their cooperation with new hired blood.

I have crowdfounded my rus warzone site with donation and few ppl may donate even more than 10$ for helping warzone.

But just now I think.....how about kickstarter ?

[Berg]

You already have the best team working on warzone are you going to pay them up front before you hire these freelancers?

[Terminator]

You already have the best team working on warzone are you going to pay them up front before you hire these freelancers?

yea we have team, but devs work in their free time & I may assume they wont leave their primary job for just a few month of warzone work.
Yes I agree if current devs will do more work they should get donation fond.

[Berg]

Have no reply to that.

[IgorBrehm]

I support the idea

[Jorzi]

It is actually being discussed right now, at least when it comes to server costs. As has been said though, it is a sensitive subject and there's always a constant risk of people getting wrong expectations and feeling decieved.

[cumandgetit]

money for server expenses could work. money for working, never. lots of things money alone cannot make better and could make it worse by thinking it can. this be one of those.

[aubergine]

IMHO donations towards server costs for this website would be a good idea. An alternate is to see if any company would host it for free in return for a mention in the page footer.

As for paid time to write code, not sure that's a good idea, in so much as having proposed this myself at one point I came to realise there are all sorts of problems with the scenario and it would likely backfire badly.

[Originway]

It is actually being discussed right now, at least when it comes to server costs. As has been said though, it is a sensitive subject and there's always a constant risk of people getting wrong expectations and feeling decieved.

where is the topic? I can't find it?

[Rommel]

I would suggest having an elected council, a person from the community, a person from the devs and someone neutral to the project as a kind of balancer. This council could then decide on what to do with earning from donations and such.

I would also suggest that payments be made to the existing devs based on the work they have done, maybe have a portion of income added to a pool that is divided up to the devs based on their contributions. It is quite hard to put a gauge on work done in programming, as a programmer myself there are times that I spend hours on a few lines of code and others that I write hundreds of lines in a very short time... but if there is a dev on the council, they should have a good idea by looking at commits and such to see who has been working hard.

Or the Devs could just get the pool and then work out what to do with the money, maybe they could take turns in using it for unpaid leave or something to put in a solid week of coding. Although with money will come conflict unfortunately...

This would also give an incentive to devs to work a bit harder as well

I would be firmly against hiring any third party devs as this is too much of a kick in the face to the existing devs imo. I know that if I had been contributing to WZ for years and all of a sudden someone out of the blue comes on board and gets paid I would be pissed off.

[Per]

This would also give an incentive to devs to work a bit harder as well

This discussion is wrong on so many levels. Read http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2012050 ... -the-money

[Rommel]

This would also give an incentive to devs to work a bit harder as well

This discussion is wrong on so many levels. Read http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2012050 ... -the-money

Well you are probably right, but what about that idea of paying an existing dev to take a weeks unpaid leave from their Job to concentrate fully on WZ - in this case they are not actually earning more, just having the breathing space to work on WZ uninterrupted for a week.

BTW I have found that devs are normally a little different to bank CEO lol And how can it be so wrong to discuss getting developers some recompense for their hard work, I don't understand

In a perfect word I would like to see enough funds raised for a "once a year retreat" for the Developers where they are flown to a quiet, peaceful and beautiful place to work together on WZ for like 2 weeks.

[Rexy]

Hi progress oriented people!

May I add the idea that, manny governments would like to impose taxes and so forth. Also all the paper work to comply with nonprofit laws will kill most of the benefits to anyone involved. Wish you all success in a better situation about helping our hard working developers.

[rawng]

Maybe code bounties could be set up for specific features or bugs that people could donate to. I'll admit that I don't know anything about the feasibility or effectiveness of code bounties but it seems like a nice idea on the surface.