by Hooray » Thu Nov 19, 2015 2:25 pm
This has been previously suggested/discussed (do a search for "funding" or "non-profit" in the archives).
In summary, FlightGear tends to attract hackers, not business folks, and certainly not lawyers/tax experts.
Curt mentioned a few times that the website, and it using AdSense to make revenue, is already causing some irritation.
If you want to literally boost development, you'd need to ensure that patches/merge requests don't end up being unreviewed/uncommitted for months, and that core developers actually follow-up on seeing contributions they originally encouraged.
However, that is currently not possible because of the lack of manpower - which is to say, that you'd need to establish a procedure to ensure that there is a minimum number of active committers, who can help triage/review bug reports and commit bug fixes.
For the time being, the situation is extremely unfortunate from a manpower perspective, and two of the most active, and most experienced, core developers are working on heavily overlapping GUI functionality, using completely separate technology stacks that are not commonly used elsewhere in FlightGear, or even just in standard code paths, (Qt5, as well as HTML5/JavaScript).
So this is adding to the overall situation, i.e. lack of active core developers who can help with usual duties, such as reviewing merge requests, patches and bug reports.
You only need to look at the devel list to see that all core developers agree that they're fundamentally overstretched in terms what they can handle, and that they need more active core developers involved - for instance, you could look at the recent interview on sourceforge, the stated conclusion also was that more developers are needed.
And ideally, those new developers would be students, or even teenagers, not people with jobs families, because that is exactly how most of the remaining/active core developers ended up being extremely crucial to the project, i.e. when they were young and had plenty of time on their hands, while this is now no longer the case, and turning out to be the bottleneck because other things are taking precedence obviously.
Alternatively, you would need to get more professional users/developers involved, i.e. those who have a track record of doing related FG work, such as poweroftwo (osgEarth).
Absent that, FlightGear is inevitably going to be forked sooner or later - no matter if that is going to be successful or not (in fact, I have been approached on more than one occasion to see if I would be willing to help with such a fork).
Core development is a very real bottleneck, and if nothing is done to welcome/mentor new developers, those whose contributions/patches are not incorporated will move on and create their own "CommunityGear" at some point.
However, that does not necessarily have to be a bad thing, gcc faced the same situation that FlightGear is now facing, see the GCC/egcs split - so while such a development may be unfortunate, it may help the FlightGear project to get our act together and deal with some of the more pressing issues.