openAOS

A thought that partly springs from necessity. I was thinking it might be nice to start a feature-bounty programme.

How would that work? Users that want a special feature implemented within the openAOS ecosystem would pledge to pay some amount of money or would put some amount of money into a deposit/escrow. Then if someone implements this feature the person would receive this amount. People could also pool their money to make it more attractive to implement a feature.

Why the idea? Hackers are often selfish people. Most of the time they implement things they need for themselves or that give them personal pleasure for tackling them. This may not be what non-programmer users would like to have as new features. Also a feature might be nice but only useful for very few people or not useful for the people potentially implementing it.

So what would be the benefits?

• Features with popular demand would be implemented faster
• People who want features that might not be popular could raise the chance of those being implemented
• Features that may be harder to implement but more desirable than  others would get implemented faster
• Faster development due to the monetary incentive
• Developers may feel more rewarded for their work

I guess I should expand on the last one: the openAOS project has been around for more than half a year now, the openPMA project for much longer. We have done pretty nice things on many generations of Archos products. Many people have downloaded our alternative firmwares and our Linux builds. We spent weeks or months developing hacks, programs or just analyzing Archos hardware and software. But what did we get in return? A few people said ‘thanks’ or ‘great job’, but the majority of voices and feeback was “this doesn’t work!” or “But I want this [totally uncommon] feature, why didn’t you think of implementing it!” or other not very encouraging things.

We’d like to feel more appreciated!

And I mean it, if you can’t donate, but like what we did, just say ‘thanks’ it makes a day so much nicer! People of the ArchosFans forum, I’m looking at you! People with an genuine FOSS background already do. But back to the topic. I think – although not the ultimate solution – it would help both sides if there would be some transfer of monetary units involved. The users would get a feeling that TANSTAFL and the people working to make openAOS better could buy themselves a beer after a hard weekend of coding.

How is this different from commercial software you may ask or you might say that I’m trying to commercialize openAOS. Far from this, very very very far. Why? If a bounty is claimed a new feature is made available not only to the person who paid for it but to everyone who would like to use it, also the source code will be open – there is a reason this is called openAOS!

Thoughts? Critique? Rants? Praise? Flaming?- The comment section is open!

Thomas, your friendly neighbourhood Archdruid