Adaptation for Free Software funding?

[Michael Allan]

> More specifically, it seems that the most troublesome bugs in bug databases are
> bugs for which some other project is responsible, and, even in the case that
> one particular user wished for a fix, it wouldn't be very obvious who that user
> should pay.  (This is the case even for small projects.)

Shouldn't you pay whoever fixes it?  You could attach an offer of
payment directly to the bug itself, as a kind of pledge.  The sum of
all the pledges for that bug would serve as bait/reward for whoever
could fix the bug.

In that case, you wouldn't need voting.  The steering medium would be
money and the social sphere would be a market - collective bid or
auction (not sure of the economic terms).

Feature requests are a different story.  I think that voting might be
useful here, because there's something to construct.  (Voting always
seems to be about constructing something.)  In this case, the thing to
construct is the technical description of the feature that is being
requested.  So it is much like a political norm, such as a planning
document, where the shifting of the votes has the effect of shaping
the evolution of the text:

  http://zelea.com/project/votorola/d/theory.xht#action-norm

The vote shifts might also shape the assembly of the development team.
The winner would become the team leader of course.  He might then pick
his team members from among the runners up.  (Does this make sense?)
It would then be like an electoral vote in which the issue was an
executive power structure:

  http://zelea.com/project/votorola/d/theory.xht#figure-8

Then there's the idea of attaching money to the votes.  I wonder how
that would play out?  (There is no political equivalent in this case,
or none that we would hope for!)

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/