Feature Bounties

Thomas John Vitolo tjvitolo at bu.edu
Mon Mar 28 18:54:05 EST 2005


A few folks have mentioned the idea of pledging money to gain some new
functionality, something I call a "feature bounty."

I propose that anybody who wants clear functionality write up a requirements
document.  Write exactly what functionality you are looking for, and exactly how
that functionality can be proven to work correctly.  This could be a bugfix, a
performance improvement, a new feature, improved documentation, whatever.

Generally speaking, writing this up takes a bit of hard work, since the
requirements have to be quite specific.  That being said, I suggest that folks
who want gnucash to improve in specific ways write up their requests.  If you've
got the cash, offer it up.  If you can pledge $0, that's OK... perhaps somebody
else will serve as a sponsor once they see the proposal.


Personally, the feature I'd pay $20 for is the following: upon starting gnucash,
charts should be generated immediately; they should not take more than .1
seconds per report to generate on my OS X 10.3.8 PowerBook.  Currently, my tabs
containing about 30 charts take 2-5 minutes to complete rendering.  That's my
wish.  If somebody else proposed a Feature Bounty that I'd find useful, I might
pledge money toward that, too.

Who's the judge?  Perhaps Derek, or some other reputable poster should Derek
hunt that bounty.  Ultimately, the patch must be approved by the current
benevolent gnucash dictator and migrated into the stable tree to be "official."
 If it doesn't end up in the stable version, it doesn't count.  How to hold the
money?  Let's see how the pledges work out, ie, if there are many persons
pledging small amounts or few persons pledging large amounts or whatever.


Those are my thoughts on the matter.  Comments?  Criticisms?  Thoughts?

 - stomv

Thomas John Vitolo
Ph D Systems Engineering Candidate,
Boston University

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