You are using this "money thing" wrong. It is used to hire people to work on a task, not to bribe contributors into doing your bidding.
Has this "hire people to work on a task" ever worked in the OSS world?
A number of successful companies were either founded on or hit it out of the park based on that idea... like redhat and suse 
What a coincidence. A couple of hours ago I was chatting with a friend of mine who's really proud of his WRT1200AC with over 159 days of uptime. IMHO, it's just as silly to reboot for the sake of it as it is to strive for long uptimes while neglecting kernel bug fixes and security updates.
2 Likes
Ask Collabora and Pengutronics, they are literally mercenaries that live by doing that.
Or RedHat, SUSE and others.
On the FreeBSD side, the maintainers of ZFS filesystem are mostly iXsystems (FreeNAS parent company).
Thew whole gaming on linux sector is fueled by Valve throwing money at things and hiring developers. The developer of DXVK DirectX-to-Vulkan porting layer, for example.
The well-known Wine framework that allows to run many Windows applications in Linux is backed by Codeweavers and their Crossover paid software (which is using wine to do the leg work), and of course by Valve as it is used in their Proton "play windows games in SteamOS (linux)" endeavor.
There is a whole world between employing someone full time (like those companies you mentioned do), or supporting someone who is already following his passion (like Linus and company), and what is being proposed here.
However, I am willing to be proven wrong. The offer to pay for a better documentation is already on the table. Let's see how it works out.
Ever heard of crowdfundings? Projects like Krita basically live by doing yearly kickstarters and people donate enough to pay a couple developers (the lead developers I guess) to work full time on it.
Really, if you want a job done you need to do it yourself or hire someone, there is no way around it. Shaming others into doing it is very ineffective.
The offer of what amounts, over what infrastructure. OpenWrt does not have anything to collect monetary contributions so how is people going to pay people to add content to the wiki?
"Here, take $money, make the documentation better!" might lead to unexpected results.
Before spending a single cent, it should clarified what the goal / the task to do is.
Start by listing what documentation is
- missing
- incomplete
- outdated
- hard to understand
- ...<-- insert other criteria for improvement -->
What is the task?
What is the expected outcome?
What are the criteria for
- OK (job well done, documentation is better than before)?
- NOK (documentation is not better than before)?
Once you have a rough draft of that, you can start thinking of spending money.
For this kind of task it makes a lot of sense a "bounty" system, as the bounty's description will have to contain most of that information to be effective.
Multiple people can add money to the bounty.
There needs to be some infrastructure that collects and stores the money (for some time) and eventually decides when the bounty was executed well enough and pays the money to the contributor, or cancels the bounty and returns the money back if the bounty remains inactive for too long.
2 Likes
There are many ways to write good, cohesive documentation. Brief but repetitive examples that break apart the commands and then add them add together. In my experience good documentation is like an easy to follow recipe. List the components, throw in some word play, explain BRIEFLY & SIMPLY why we need or want an ingredient(s), cook it, serve the finish results.
Money has always been a motivator for most people. It can make things fun. I'm NOT saying use it to bribe, sway, or alter anyone or any project in a bad way. We should use it as a tool to make life a little easier. Wouldn't it be nice to have a light bill paid or win prize money in a contest? I'm sure most folks would agree. Keep it transparent and clean.
This topic was automatically closed 10 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.