I agree with everything Merlyn said.
If a company does not want to develop drivers for Linux, has never planned for it, and has no intention to do so, or even human resources to allocate for the tasks associated with it, then a one off payment will not change that. Not to mention: they will never accept a payment to carry on work they never planned to do in the first place. Companies decide how to invest their funds and time, it is not that we can turn at the door of a company and be like "we have a bag of money, please do XYZ": it doesn't quite work that way. In order for that to work, you need to enter into contractual, binding, agreements with a company ahead of the crowdfunding. In essence: funding starts after the project has been agreed, not afterwards, and the scope of the funding, the work that will be carried on, the timeline, the schedule, etc.. etc... all have to be defined.
alemusica wrote:Thanks Merlyn,
as you are a very old member of this forum, maybe you can help me to create a survey so the community can decide where to lead the work of the alsa devs and then start the crowdfund.
I definitely support donating to open source projects instead, as they often make already use of the crowdfunding model, or something along those lines (donations and all that jazz), although many projects are actually funded through the most common channels (e.g. agreements with partner companies). Still, much like a company, the developers of Open-Source projects have already a set of priorities they are working on, and we should not knock at their door with a bag of money pretending they stop doing what they do and focus on something else instead. ALSA is actually part of the Linux kernel so I would
guess that maintaining integration with the Linux kernel itself, following its release cycle, it's the biggest focus and missing the associated deadlines would be disastrous for the project as well as the Kernel development cycle,
perhaps. I have no idea how the ALSA project is funded, but given that it is now part of the Kernel I would guess it is funded by the Linux Foundation. This to say that one would need to have a good chat with the devs to see whether anything like this can work -at all-.
My gut feeling is that essentially nobody, either commercial or Open Source entities, will be in the position to be able to carry on some on-demand work on a short notice, as it is most probably going to be disruptive of the ordinary planned work for their project. I think it is not great to turn software developers into "on-demand service implementers" either: I do not see how this would help keeping the aim of a project consistent, but this is maybe too far away down the line...
Anyway, to create a poll, just create a new topic and in the tabs at the bottom just select "Poll creation" and fill in all the info.