Thorsten wrote in Tue Nov 13, 2012 1:30 pm:First, I'm not sure if that's true, we've had a fair number of users who have tried to conduct "bounties" over time.
Well, from a commercial point of view, that's a joke.
We actually agree here - like I said earlier, I also don't believe that 50-250 (or even 500 USD) are good incentive to make someone work on a particular feature.
There's just no way crowd funding will be able to offer me anything like a realistic incentive.
Okay, you are talking about yourself, so it's fair enough to say that directly - However, let's keep in mind that "crowd-funding" can be much bigger and more successful than just having 100 USD bounties. For example, see kickstarter.com - where OSS projects regularly get funding in the range of several 10k USD.
Similarly, nlnet.nl provide OSS funding in the range of >= 50k per project.
This is not to say that I disagree with your point - it's just to put things into perspective: Quite certainly, your own salary isn't necessarily representative of the usual salary of other contributors. We also have lots of students or teenagers contributing here, not just university graduates who already have one or more degrees
So different people may be motivated by different amounts of money actually, even if just as an incentive.
Coding for FLightgear is my hobby, I don't want payment for my hobby, I want to enjoy it, and to make payment a real incentive for me which I would even consider, it would way exceed what you can come up with.
Understood, and then there are other issues like taxes for example, once you start earning "real" money, these things become suddenly more important
So I'm not sure we would even want to convince the die-hard FSX user to switch to FG, because doing that would make FG into something we would probably no longer enjoy.
Yes, like I also said earlier - I completely agree that this is a real danger.
And once you're in the ecosystem and have invested your first 500$ into addons, switching becomes progressively harder - that's just basic psychology, you have to justify the decision you've made.
Yes, exactly.
My particular problem is - I know how to make Flightgear look good and to make the advertizing screenshots. But that helps only so much, because if user X then has a look and find it doesn't regularly look like that, he's disappointed.
That's another very good point.
Which is why I think we need to make sure that high quality planes and low quality planes are distinguished on the download page.
Personally, I have been thinking in terms of making some of our more advanced aircraft/airports more prominent. I think I read about this on the wiki:
For instance, we are currently having two releases per year. But we've been using KSFO/c172p as the standard startup settings for many years.
Personally, I would think that it would be a great incentive for aircraft and scenery developers if we could have polls prior to each release phase to determine which airport/aircraft is going to be the defaults for the next release.
For example, just look at all the fantastic work done for LOWI - or amazing aircraft like the Seneca.
I could imagine we could make such work more prominent by changing the defaults for each release accordingly.
And we could then also change our release naming accordingl: FlightGear 3.2 (LOWI/Seneca)
That would go a long way to demonstrate to NEW users that we really have AWESOME scenery and extremely well-developed airports.
The current situation works such that only the "insiders" know about such things, and know how to download/install/configure everything.
And the screen shot competitions that we've had also demonstrate that we have an active community interested in contributing to polls.
So why not use polls AFTER each release to directly determine which aircraft/airport will be featured in the upcoming release?
That would give us plenty of time to focus on the corresponding scenery/aircraft, and to give other contributors a chance to even improve things further.
Regarding the GUI, I have to agree but the way the canvas project is heading, I am 100% confident that we'll have a very flexible and appealing GUI based on the Canvas system