Preamble: Tiki currently has no budget and things are going fairly well. If we had extra financial resources, it is not efficient to pay for what we are currently getting for free (ex.: hosting). Extra financial resources should go towards things we do not have and would be very helpful to accelerate Tiki's overall development.


Ideas:



Objections from mose :

  • money management requires setup of a specific bureaucracy, which has a duty of transparency, then load of work and big responsibilities, which are usually reasons invoked by lamers (or call them bureaucrats) to control efficient workers that are only responsible for their code (poor guys).
  • including a money scheme inside tikiwiki development means changing the community totally. Why pay some bugs and not others ? who decides rewards ? what is the governance model ? So many questions that should be answered before thinking about money management.
  • only hosting fees should be concerned by money flow, and can be handled by hosting provider (or the one that pays for it), with a personnal donation system, without requiring collective management of money.
  • bring money, you'll have a fork (that's not a threaten, it's just a foreseeing).


From Marc to mose:
mose: Do you have any suggestions on where to spend money which would be very helpful to accelerate Tiki's overall development?

mose:

  • my (conceptual) concern is to keep work disconnected from money inside the community. Waged coders give no good work, or if they do, it's not because they are waged. Paying for tasks furthermore modifies the behaviour and profile of who applies to tasks. Then a gift or donation system is imho much better than a pay-for-something scheme.
  • if you wanna just spend money, participate to the gift economy that is the basis of collective intelligence which makes free software possible : make donations, give presents, sponsor hosting (like you already do), organize events and take the costs in charge.
  • try not to make internal community rely on fee-based services (like browsercam or other schemes), because this would not be necessarly sustainable.
  • if the amount you want to spend is huge, you could setup a specialized company or/and pay people to do business, and as a company contribute to the community with the results of your efforts (documentation, fixes, whatever). But the community can't be considered like a company (even a non-profit one). It's only a bunch of gathered individuals with very various motives and contexts.
  • remember than when coders don't scratch itches that touches them personnaly, produced code is disconnected from the natural ecosystem of contributions.
  • People can be motivated by money, but they can do stupid (comunity-wise) things with such a motivation, like avoiding to share home-made scripts, obfuscating code voluntarily to garantee further income by reducing the ability of others to work on it, considering the community as a competition ground rather than a collaboration space, spending time accounting or speculating rather than coding, etc.
  • I do not say money is evil, I just say market capitalism sucks and make things unsustainable. Free software is like environment, it's a public good, and global warming in the noosphere is possible.


From Marc to mose:
I took note of your concerns and I will make sure that any action in this direction is done to maximize the benefits for Tiki while reducing the potential risks/negative effects. If you have any other specific suggestions on where to spend money which would be very helpful to accelerate Tiki's overall development, please make sure to add here. If/when someone or an organization wants to give money to Tiki, it's a question to find the wisest way to invest it. Many other open source projects have succeeded here and I am sure we will as well. Let's be pragmatic.