Donations for Gideros now open!

john26 · April 2016

Dear All,

We've now set up a page where you can give donations to Gideros if you are so inclined! You can also let us know how you want Gideros to develop at the same time by using the sliders to put money into different categories:

http://giderosmobile.com/donate

(Please let us know if you want to see different category choices in future.)

We will respond to the amounts raised when it comes to prioritising development but, of course, you can continue to make requests here on the forum as well.

You will also see the donate page (optional) when you download a Gideros release. We'd be very grateful if you could give us a tip when you download a new version as it will allow us to put more work into Gideros ensuring more features, more releases, bug free code and better documentation!

Gideros 2016.4 will be out very soon with HTML5 and direct APK export among many exciting new features. Please consider a donation when you download it, to give us a "tip" for our hard work, and help us pay for essentials like new mobile devices, computers, web hosting... Oh yes, and food and rent! ;-) (in the short term, your donations will be the only source of income for Gideros)

Many thanks in advance for your contributions. With your help Gideros will get bigger and better!

pie · April 2016

Hi @john26 I just used the new donation page, I really like that one can prioritize improvement areas. Thank you.
I think that there are some more things needed ( "needed" as in "if you like"

)

I didn't saw a "download page link" in the "payment successfull" page from paypal, this means that I had to open a new browser window and go to github/releases (because I already knew the url)

On github/releases there is no link to the donation page, maybe could be worth to have an "info box" or "reminder" there too.

I would also mention Simple Interactive somewhere in the gideros website to ensure people that their donation is going on the right paypal account

ar2rsawseen · April 2016

@pie in payment successfull in paypal there should have been a link return to seller, that would take you to download. Unfortunately I don't think we can modify paypal successful payment page, but if you have any experiences with other donations, let us know and we will try to copy from them too

And great idea to put donation link on github too, probably John can do that.

pie · April 2016

I didn't see that link, however this may help to improve the donation page
http://stackoverflow.com/a/7708419

thank you

john26 · April 2016

Thanks @pie, I've followed these instructions and hopefully it will now return to the Gideros website to complete the download.

Yes, I will put a donate button near the GitHub release links as well. Good idea!

totebo · April 2016

Is there a way to see what people have voted for (with their wallets)? Or is there a public road map available?

john26 · April 2016

Well Gideros does have a roadmap but it goes back to pre-open source and it long out of date. I intend to improve it, perhaps reconciling it with the 7 donate categories

http://giderosmobile.com/roadmap

Is that sort of format suitable, do you think?

Regarding donations, I would like to have a page where people can see the total donations for the month/release, maybe like a thermometer display. I am also thinking about publishing a list of people who contributed, like a hall of fame, but not, of course, the amounts. As you say the amount given to each category could be mentioned.

And also, maybe we could a poll so people can choose new categories. What categories would people like to see on the sliders.

talis · April 2016

Just donated and downloaded the new version

@john26 looking forward to see new features and new releases , thanks again for the great job =D>

For the hall of fame and poll for the categories is really a good idea. In addition just not to over push donations in one month it will be really good to show the total amount of donations. For example if this month already lots of donations occurred i can save mine to next month and there will be more stable income.

MikeHart · April 2016

I hope that I will be able to donate something in the last half of the year.

john26 · April 2016

@talis, thanks very much for your donation! I'd also like to thank everyone who has donated so far. (I thought about thanking people individually here but considered some might want to remain anonymous)

Yes, I completely agree we should show a "thermometer" or similar to indicate graphic how much money was raised this month and give people a visual representation of how we are doing and if more is needed. That will help to smooth things out as you say.

In fact it's really better to think of your contribution as a tip/gratuity for our work rather than a donation. A donation has the idea of a one off contribution you make because you believe in something (and it's often associated with charity). A tip is something you give more often, whenever someone offers good service which I think that is closer to what is actually happening and gives us a chance of a stable income.

keszegh · April 2016

you could call it patronage. (as tip is on top of some price, but here there is no price)

totebo · April 2016

When I donated I felt the areas were a bit too generic, and would have preferred to vote for an actual feature instead. Maybe each area could be drilled down into planned features (or, indeed, a blank field to fill in your own feature)?

SinisterSoft · April 2016

You could use the paypal 'note' system to communicate that maybe?

antix · April 2016

Apart from the "Better Documentation" slider, nothing engaged me at all on the donation page. I agree with @totebo that it would be great to be able to vote for specific features

I suppose somebody would have to come up with a feature list however

rolfpancake · April 2016

I don't think that a more specific voting system would be a good idea. In this case the donation or patronage changes into a feeling that you pay for something, what you would like to see. This could lead to situations where users put money into one feature, see that the feature is top donated and wonder why it is not implemented in the next version.

Often people aren't able to understand that some features mean massive coding and are longterm wip before they can be released. I see this very often in open source projects and it makes me sad. Often the developers aren't experts in the specific field the feature requires knowledge from and so they put more effort into other issues which they are comfortable with.

IMHO
Donations are something to say: 'Hey you are doing a great job. Thank you and keep going.' You pay for keeping the project itself alive and maybe you could lead the discussion on the forum into the directions you want the development to take. But try to force someone to do something specific by spending money is not a donation, it's payment.

My suggestions
Donations for keeping the project alive. Forum and github discussions to decide which direction the development should take.
If you really whish the users to spend money on a specific feature then you should use Bountysource. This would keep away those feelings like 'I payed for it, why it is not done yet?' because you only loose money when an issue/feature is actually done. Also this could attract more developers from outside to invest some time in the codebase.

--[
Edit
I didn't consider the point that you maybe want this to be some kind of payment (or tip, like @jon26 said). In this case you should really introduce some kind of a more specific decision tree where the money should go to. This could lead to the point where users spend more money because they actually see that their 'investment' leads to specific features in the next version. But it will also raise their expectations - something I'm not comfortable with in the field of OSS.
]--

john26 · April 2016

@rolfpancake, thanks very much for your thoughts on this. I totally agree with what you say. We put the suggestion sliders up to act as a kind of survey of what people want not a direct way for people to fund particular new features. So it's definitely not meant to be like Bountysource. It's just a way of raising money while at the same time acting as a survey/opinion poll. We will take account of what people want but only indirectly and over a period of time. In a sense that's why the slider headings are fairly vague and generic. (of course the other reason is for space reasons, you can't have hundreds of sliders)

If people do want a specific feature, the best way it to tell us directly here on the forum and we will discuss it. And, if you are an expert in that functionality, you can get involved in the coding yourself and send us a pull request.

Of course another way to pay for specific features is during a Kickstarter campaign. We've had two of those so far but none are running at the moment.

So what are you paying for when you give a donation? You are paying for the binary version of Gideros 2016.4 (in this case). The source code is free but it takes a huge effort to create and test the binaries. Of course you are welcome to compile the code from sources yourself in which case you should not feel any obligation to pay a "tip". But compiling Gideros is a significant effort owing to its cross platform nature. Probably very few Github projects are as complex to build.

We got the idea of the sliders from the Ubuntu download page
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute/?version=14.04.4&architecture=amd64

I think it's pretty clear that these Ubuntu sliders act as a way to gauge public opinion and are not intended to be a commitment. They are also vaguely worded. I'm sure Canonical has its own roadmap which might be influenced over time by the donations, but it would be naive to expect Canonical programmers to switch projects rapidly based on recent donations. If I put $10 into one of the sliders, I don't really expect the next version of Ubuntu to reflect that choice immediately.

@antix, @totebo, I'd be happy to change the headings of some of the sliders if people can give alternate suggestions. Each heading should be a few words with a subtitle giving a few more details.

totebo · April 2016

@john26, To me it would be great to have one long list of requested features. The voting would then be a more precise tool to know what the "community wants".

Accepting the risk of this spiralling out of control, here are my most wanted features:

- Support for an animation system such as Spine or Spriter
- Improved MovieClip: getFrame(), manual stepping and other features mentioned in this thread: http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/6339/movieclip-or-roll-your-own/p1, also on Github: https://github.com/gideros/gideros/issues/214
- Improved SoundChannel (control for left and right channels. https://github.com/gideros/gideros/issues/112
- Lua 5.3 https://github.com/gideros/gideros/issues/95

john26 · April 2016

Thanks very much for those suggestions and very helpful links. I think we could incorporate some of these to the sliders without increasing their number. The SoundChannel could come under "Better Sound system" and Lua 5.3 could be under another slider I thought entitled "optimsation" which might also include things like LuaJIT, using official ARM, Intel compilers (currently we use gcc mostly), multicore support etc.

(Speaking of LuaJIT, it is currently stuck on Lua 5.1 so upgrading to 5.3 might be difficult if we wish to embrace LuaJIT)

However, I think the purpose of the sliders is really to gauge opinion rather than act as a way to pay for "bounties" for features so would prefer to keep them rather generic for now, IMO.

However, if people want us to implement specific features, including requests on Github, they could consider approaching us and paying us directly for this. We would certainly welcome sponsorship from companies looking for new features. In fact, this might be a better way to make money from Gideros as the donations have been rather limited so far... (it seems only 1% of people who downloaded Gideros 2016.4 have made a donation)

SinisterSoft · April 2016

LuaJIT can't be used on all formats ever - as LuaJIT can't be exported to Bitcode - a road that Apple seem to be heading down.

Lua 5.3 is a good move maybe, I don't know if it's slightly slower than the version we are used to though.

Maybe Lua 5.3 in combination with LuaProc - but some kind of 'scratchpad' system will have to be made to make communication between parallel processes easier. Eg an area of memory that can be written to by any of the processes.

SinisterSoft · April 2016

Or maybe Lua 5.3 and LuaLanes ? I just read that LuaLanes works with 5.3...

http://lualanes.github.io/lanes/

updated to 5.3:
https://github.com/LuaLanes/lanes

The memory allocation/deallocation will have to be checked to make sure it's threadsafe - I don't think Gideros uses the normal memory allocation routines.

pie · April 2016

@john26 only 1% of people made a donation?

That's not cool 99%.. please help us for the sake of gideros!

Another way to get funds could be Patreon, take a look at Tiled website to see it in action. www.mapeditor.org

john26 · April 2016

Thanks very much @pie. Well, we are not really sure how many people download Gideros. We currently only have Github's statistics to go on. According to that we've had over 1000 downloads for 2016.4 alone but it may be that people are downloading multiple times so the true number of unique users is less. In future we hope to gather more info, perhaps through sending out surveys.

But overall it does look like the percentage of donors is low, around 1%. I was hoping for closer to 10% which is what we need to employ someone (ie me!).

I think you may be right about Patreon. Arturs recommended this from the beginning. Patreon seems to be about individuals rather than companies so I would be there as an individual. But Thorbjørn Lindeijer seems to do well, as you say. Let me look into this.

What do other people think about about Patreon versus Ubuntu style donations?

pie · April 2016

...it may be that people are downloading multiple times so the true number of unique users is less.

Of course, at least 10 downloads could be mine.. I've had some problems finishing the download and I had to retry some times.
I think that the same thing happened to @simwhi

simwhi · April 2016

@pie 4 are mine. By the way we haven't made a donation yet, but we will soon.

SinisterSoft · April 2016

About 10 are mine, maybe more.

john26 · April 2016

OK. well definitely we need better analytics to find out how many users we really have! We will work on this by the next release. Thanks for the feedback.

talis · April 2016

Count me something like 8 times. (5 from work computer, hate checkpoint) And others from my home and mother's .

PaulH · May 2016

Just donated. Keep up the fantastic work!

john26 · May 2016

Thanks very much, @PaulH, very kind of you! Your donation will us pay the bills so we can spend more time on what we love best, developing Gideros! Version 2016.5 is already underway with many exciting new features including ad support in Windows Phone/Store and many more features and bug fixes. No release date yet but we'll let you know when we are closer. Thanks again!

simwhi · May 2016

@john26 We really appreciate the effort you guys put into Gideros. Many thanks.

Ninjadoodle · May 2016

Hi @john26

Like others have suggested, I thing it would be a really cool idea to have "bonus donations" for specific features. For example right now I would be really happy to donate money towards this specific feature (HTML5 loading assets love to level, instead of all at once on startup) ...

http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/comment/48016#Comment_48016

The donations for downloading a new version should definitely stay as well

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