as it stands right now people contributing addons to vvvv do this either for free or they are being sponsored by single entities. at least i am not aware of any actual crowdfunding for an addon except people always talking about it. so it seems there is some demand but no supply in the form of someone who’d want to take on the effort of such a campaign.
in real life it would of course make sense for vvvv.org to channel all such activities and provide crowdfunding/marktetplace functionality in-site and charge 30% on all transactions…as you do. but you sure don’t want vvvv to follow a strictly economical sense (we try sometimes - and just in case you want to reply to exactly this please beware that this is a totally different discussion). however.
so it seems we have a crowd willing to give, some who would take and we should only agree on a way to do it.
gittip and flattr have been proposed and as of this writing thanks to the campaign of @fibo the vvvv community on gittip needs only 9 more members to be publicly visible and i should have probably uttered my concerns earlier: i think in the vvvv/addon world it would be smarter for everyone to use flattr instead of gittip. here is why:
for my understanding gittip works like this:
you subscribe to sponsor people
you pay each one a choosable amount every week
you can stop the subscriptions/payments anytime you like
the gittip communitiy page shows statistics of how money is moving between community members
i am not saying this is no good. this is great…
…but here comes flattr:
you subscribe to sponsor people or things
you can also do one time flattrs (ie. no subscription necessary)
you define a monthly budget you are willing to spend which is then automatically distributed among all the things/people you flattrd this month
everyone sees for each individual/thing the number of flattrs it received (ie. how popular a thing is)
so gittip focuses much more on the support of individuals where flattr allows both supporting individuals and specific ‘things’ (as they call it) which in vvvv speak would be an addon/contribution/pack. please read https://flattr.com/howflattrworks if you want more understanding of this. both gittip and flattr are not really replacing crowdfunding but with flattr we can at least express interest in and see the popularity of individual things which can help contributors to focus on the more popular stuff.
flattr definitely misses a community/group feature but if there is interest i think we could integrate this in vvvv.org ie. an option for everyone to add his flattr-name in his vvvv.org user-settings and a page that shows all vvvv-flattr users to get an overview.
i think noone has actually used gittip/vvvv yet (except joining the group) so it is probably not yet to late to propose flattr as a consistent alternativvvve.
and to answer ggmls questions:
v4 licensing <> contributions funding
the two are not related. tipping/flattring does not excuse for not buying vvvv licenses for commercial projects
risk of turning into marketplace
by adopting a tipping/flattring model we can probably gracefully work around the classic marketplace (which of course is not a bad thing per se)
technologies to implement funding
lets for now use whats there (flattr) instead of inventing our own
I just discovered gittip someway (maybe looking at John Resig, jQuery’s and Processingjs creator) and I thougth it could be a good way to boost development.
I did some contribution in my spare time, cause I really like vvvv as a way to keep studying math. So I will keep using it and adding contribution by my own, but, time is a limited resource. Consider also other people that, even if they work on vvvv (I unfortunatly do not) they get payd by their customers and they keep using vvvv for fun and contributing during their spare time (for example woei).
Now, if I do something for fun, I don’ t have priorities except following my joy. On the other hand there is some people that likes some works and would like to improve it or add change requests or customization.
For sure, getting payed in some way (even with a new device or a flying ticket) can incentivate, since also doing a single patch can take hours of spare time.
I also think that having one funding model is enough, so, I will stop asking new members in the Linkedin’s “vvvv users group” to join gittip when I send them the vvvvelcome message.
for now the buttons only link to the users flattr profiles where they then can be flattred. note that there you have the opportunity to create at flattr-subscription in order to automatically flattr people once a month. convenient.
it is planned to get a direct flattr button on that listing page for each user as well. and the next step would be making individual things/contributions flattrable…
