Sponsoring ports

[Adam Vande More]

On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Eitan Adler <lists at eitanadler.com> wrote:

> > Agree.
> > For contract/long term tasks sure.. jobs is the right place, but we
> should
> > have a place where people can "sponsor" short, specific, features in
> > FreeBSD. It may be more than just ports, it may also be functionally
> changes
> > to the OS.
>
> This often results in people offering very low sums of money for very
> large amounts of work.
> IMHO the comitters should set the price for the work and we should
> have a system to pool individual donations for such work.
> One such example is Doug Barton's portmaster work (see
> http://dougbarton.us/portmaster-proposal.html).
>

I don't know the deep details, but I've heard that the FreeBSD Foundation
cannot take escrow deposits like this for legal reasons.  I wonder if there
has been any thought by the Foundation to use some of it's funding to spin
off some type of legal and technical infrastructure that could handle such a
system. If the barrier to entry isn't too high, I suspect something like
this would be a great boon to base, ports, and freelance devs.


-- 
Adam Vande More