@ lainz
If you think about it, the bounty system is a good idea, for sure, but sometimes newer Lazarus users, or younger people do not have a big budget to spend, but if there is a possibilty to share costs, it might be doable for them. Plus the Patreon system does allow you to do a 1 time donation or a subscription which you can stop at any time. The main goal of the system is to create an ongoing funding for creators. You can do even things like: when this amount of donations is reached, I will create ...
There are many things I can think of, just a few examples:
For example, you would like $100 for your new set of controls, which might be too much for a certain user to spend to develop.
But if there are 15 users who have interest, that is $6.7/person which makes the treshold to get on board a lot more interesting. Or if the user could spend this amount, he can now split it over several projects ... which is a good thing too of course.
- Your new controls : great idea
- LAMW : apps for mobile devices are hot at the moment
- Social Media : connection with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, ...
- Online storage : MS OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive, Gmail, ...
- Wiki : update, maintain, improve the Lazarus Wiki
- Lazarus examples : maintain and update the examples included with Lazarus
- ...
Of course these are just a few examples, and some (most) of these things already exist, but can be outdated, or will be at some point.
Now the Lazarus system is maintained by volunteers, which is great and they do a massive job (kudos to the team), but who says they and/or other people who are clever enough to do the things mentioned above would be harmed to get a little sponsoring for that ?
On the other hand, this might (and I say this carfully) take some developping work out of the hand of other main developpers so they get more time to do other things ...
It would be good for Lazarus in general too. The main goal of Lazarus should be maintained of course.