Getting paid for work on OpenMW and its sub-projects

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psi29a
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Getting paid for work on OpenMW and its sub-projects

Post by psi29a »

In looking at ways to help OpenMW with its goals, I thought about how to allow developers and content creators to get paid for their work as yet another way to bring people on board.

This highly mercenary, but hear me out:

https://www.patreon.com/ - Allows people to sponser people for working generally on OpenMW. Scrawl works this way which works very well for him as it allows him to work on FOSS projects in general.

https://www.bountysource.com/ - Allows people to put monatory bounties on features or assets so those developers or creative types can take up the contracts for the work and be paid for them.

I see the last one there of being of importance to OpenMW-Example-Suite and Template. We can place bounties on assets to be created. They would have to be released under the CC-BY-SA license of course, but it would give yet another incentive to help the project.

This can also work for OpenMW proper, you want support for a specific feature, put a bounty on it so that a developer would have more incentive to work on it. :)


How do you guys feel about this? Are there other sites and possiblities?
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Getting paid for work on OpenMW and its sub-projects

Post by AnyOldName3 »

This is fairly sensible as long as bounties don't make developers fight over whose pull request gets merged. The only issue is that the money has to come from somewhere. This is a problem in a lot of situations, and as far as I know, there's no publicised solution for the general case.
GeorgeTheWarp
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Re: Getting paid for work on OpenMW and its sub-projects

Post by GeorgeTheWarp »

Great idea!

I'd invest in a bounty to make OpenMW multiplayer as a post 1.0 feature, and would of course patronize all of the good work of dem programmers. I'm not rolling in cash, but I can see how I could try to incentivise development.

However, the work done with incentives should be /really professional/, especially on the ES side of thing, as we have a lot of junior devs who would probably try to get paid, but IMO it should really be targeting people with experience. So we should cherrypick pretty much everything on the ES part of thing, also because it is not hard to make 3D models.
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Mistahtokyo
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Re: Getting paid for work on OpenMW and its sub-projects

Post by Mistahtokyo »

I could see myself investing in bounties for several graphical features, as well as another Patreon or two.
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DestinedToDie
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Re: Getting paid for work on OpenMW and its sub-projects

Post by DestinedToDie »

If people are interested in financing development then why not.
AnyOldName3 wrote:This is fairly sensible as long as bounties don't make developers fight over whose pull request gets merged.
I think in the case of the Example Suite this could be solved by a rule of only being allowed to assign one task to yourself at a time. That way 2 people wouldn´t be able to grab the same task and fight over it, nor could 1 developer hog multiple bounties.
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psi29a
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Re: Getting paid for work on OpenMW and its sub-projects

Post by psi29a »

That's the deal, one claim at a time and a deadline for delivery. Once the deadline is up, it can either be extended because it was more work than anticipated but clear progress was made, or the bounty goes back to being unclaimed.
aesylwinn
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Re: Getting paid for work on OpenMW and its sub-projects

Post by aesylwinn »

I'm compelled to mention that money could have a negative impact on this project.
1. I have the feeling that bounties would only reward people for implementing flashy features, everything else is less likely to receive much if any funding.
2. You really have to trust whoever is managing the funds. Any sort of scandal, real or merely perceived, is likely to disrupt development. Also, I can't speak for others, but I would probably stop working on this project if there was an excessive amount of drama since I can't deal with stress too well. I imagine others might feel the same way.
3. A lot of people have already done a great deal of work on this project. Any feature that gets implemented would be working off of this base. If a bounty system is going to be implemented, this raises some ethical concerns for me.

I'm a jobless college student, so I'm not really against this, but I'm also a bit wary of anything involving money.
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psi29a
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Re: Getting paid for work on OpenMW and its sub-projects

Post by psi29a »

aesylwinn wrote:If a bounty system is going to be implemented, this raises some ethical concerns for me.
Don't be vague, we can't discuss them if you don't talk about them. :)
aesylwinn
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Re: Getting paid for work on OpenMW and its sub-projects

Post by aesylwinn »

psi29a wrote:Don't be vague, we can't discuss them if you don't talk about them.
Good point. For some reason it's difficult for me to express ethics and morals in words. Anyway, here's my main concern.

This is an open source project with many contributions from a multitude of people. When implementing a feature (especially at this stage), usually it is adding on to what others have done. A bounty system concerns me because the person at the end of the chain is profiting off another persons work to some degree.

I can't really describe my other concern that well. I'll post it later if I can find the words, but no promises.
GeorgeTheWarp
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Re: Getting paid for work on OpenMW and its sub-projects

Post by GeorgeTheWarp »

DestinedToDie wrote:If people are interested in financing development then why not.
AnyOldName3 wrote:This is fairly sensible as long as bounties don't make developers fight over whose pull request gets merged.
I think in the case of the Example Suite this could be solved by a rule of only being allowed to assign one task to yourself at a time. That way 2 people wouldn´t be able to grab the same task and fight over it, nor could 1 developer hog multiple bounties.
Actually, wouldn't it be better if people tried to make the best possible model and compete over it? Yes, it would scare less time-efficient devs away, but in the end we'd get better results. I wouldn't want to be paid for my shit work, and we would probably prefer to encourage /competent/ 3D devs to join... in the arena of models.

I mean, if we're paying to make models, let's get something of excellent quality.

EDIT: @aeslwin: Isn't it fine to sell open source projects if the license specifically agrees to do? We must see open source as having economical benefits, if we want to bring companies to join in our bandwagon. We could also say "everybody stays unpaid", but in the end we'll just lose devs, and gain lesser competent junior devs. Sure, some people will stay, but not everybody will.
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