[Squeakfoundation]Funding Squeak Development Through the Foundation?

[Cees de Groot]

> Is an increased level of volunteer coordination sufficient to 
> accomplish such things or will money and dedicated people be necessary?
>
That will, of course, to a large extent depend on the amounts of money to be 
handled. Most volunteer-based organizations have volunteer treasurers up to a 
certain level, where they decide that the cost of a professional well 
outweighs the risk of a volunteer not being able to handle things correctly.

I think donations toward development could be handled outside SqF's books, 
with SqF playing at best the role of intermediary (for starters). We could use 
some existing infrastructure (are these "bidding for open source contract" 
websites still live? I don't have the URL handy, but you probably know what I 
mean).
 
> I think that it might be good to collectively support a core team of 
> developers outside the current Squeak Central team.
> 
> But how do you handle the civil unrest between the volunteer Squeakers and 
> the paid Squeakers?
>
Well, that seems to pose little problems in the Linux world, or in many many 
other open source projects. Python has a paid team, Squeak already has a paid 
team (SqC - at least I'm assuming they're getting paid ;-)), and it's probably 
not hard to find dozens of other examples.

Generally, "outside" volunteers welcome the paid people, because they almost 
by default take responsibility of lots of administrative tasks (sorting bug 
reports, making releases, etcetera) so that outside volunteers can concentrate 
on writing code.  So there's hardly any grounds for civil unrest here.
-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg@cdegroot.com>
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