Possible way forward for Gnucash bug 721822

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.fremont.ca.us
Thu Sep 1 10:19:17 EDT 2016


> On Sep 1, 2016, at 5:16 AM, Paul Phillips <paul at patchpitch.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello John and Frank,
> 
> My name is Paul Phillips, and I'm currently doing some research into ways I can assist with improving the FOSS ecosystem, and one project I'm looking at is Gnucash.  I'm writing not to complain, quite the opposite - thanks for all the effort you put in - It's clear to me that you put in lots of volunteer hours to keep Gnucash going.  As a user myself, I thank you!
> I hope you don't mind, but I grabbed your email addresses from the bugzilla site.  I will not add your emails to any lists so you can be assured that you'll not be getting any spam caused by me.
> 
> I'm writing to ask whether either or both of you (or perhaps other members of the team) might be interested in digging deeper into this performance issue <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721822> in exchange for cash?  There are so far two candidates who've indicated this is causing them continued frustration and might be willing to contribute something.  I'm hoping there are others.
> 
> I believe that others might come out of the woodwork if there was a target figure to aim for.  Is this something you (or other maintainers) might be willing to quote on?  
> Coming from a software background myself, I understand that this can be a "how long is a piece of string" question. But perhaps you could provide an initial quote which is simply to spend some limited time period on further analysis - to confirm the problem for yourself and then determine a solution?  A separate quote could be done on the actual implementation.
Dear Mr. Phillips,

First of all, it is considered rude in the open source community to send mail directly to developers rather than communicating via the mailing list. We have one and I've copied it on this reply for your convenience. You'll need to subscribe in order to post. I've already gotten spam caused by you in the form of two bug comments on Bugzilla promoting your company. That's a violation of Gnome policy. Since you're promoting your company this letter is spam, too.

We have tried bounty programs in the past without success, as have many other open source projects. Per-item payments do not seem to attract developers to projects. The only successful approach in that regard seems to be for corporations to hire developers and assign them to open-source work; the best known examples would be Red Hat, which pays for most of the development on the Gnome Desktop and its infrastructure, and Canonical, which publishes Ubuntu.

Aside from that, the GnuCash team has set goals for future development. Performance is on the list, but not in the context of the bug you're referring to. I don't appreciate at all your attempts to override those goals by attempting to bribe me.

Regards,
John Ralls


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