import/export bounty

[Derek Atkins]

"Ian Smith-Heisters" <i at idiosyncra.tc> writes:

> That's really unfortunate.
>
> Is there a possibility that if we got enough bounties together that
> there could be a contract for a third party in this?

I find it unlikely you could raise enough capital to afford
a developer.  The GnuCash tip jar has only raised a few thousand
dollars over the course of a few years.

> I'd be willing to donate *something* towards getting GnuCash out of
> the sort of rut you describe. I bet we could get other users to do the
> same. Perhaps a pledge drive is in order?

There's the tip jar, but that's just general funds that tend to get
used for things like hardware upgrades and things.

> If the shortage of developer cycles is really as intractable as you
> make it sound, I fear this project will eventually become stagnant and
> obsolete. Should I be looking at investing my time and money into
> another OSS accounting software project that has more steam ;) ?

I don't think it's intractable.  Developer cycles seem to ebb and
flow over time.  Sometimes we get a bunch of really active developers.
Other times we have fewer.  Maybe we'll hit a month or two every few
years when effectively nobody is working on the code, but that's very
rare.

The problem is that we have tons of great ideas (and tons of bugs
already reported) but not enough cycles to implement them all.  So
we don't need new ideas, we need people to do them.

As this is the developer list, I'll state my standard reply:
Patches Welcome.   :-D

>>> --Ian

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available