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!
Comments
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
And great idea to put donation link on github too, probably John can do that.
http://stackoverflow.com/a/7708419
thank you
Yes, I will put a donate button near the GitHub release links as well. Good idea!
https://github.com/gideros/gideros
https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnBlackburn1975
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.
Likes: simwhi, antix, talis
https://github.com/gideros/gideros
https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnBlackburn1975
@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.
Likes: john26, uzubari
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.
Likes: talis
https://github.com/gideros/gideros
https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnBlackburn1975
Likes: SinisterSoft
Fragmenter - animated loop machine and IKONOMIKON - the memory game
Likes: antix, john26
Likes: rolfpancake
https://deluxepixel.com
I suppose somebody would have to come up with a feature list however
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.
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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.
]--
Likes: talis, antix
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.
Likes: rolfpancake
https://github.com/gideros/gideros
https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnBlackburn1975
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
(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)
Likes: totebo
https://github.com/gideros/gideros
https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnBlackburn1975
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.
https://deluxepixel.com
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.
https://deluxepixel.com
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
Likes: john26
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?
https://github.com/gideros/gideros
https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnBlackburn1975
I think that the same thing happened to @simwhi
https://deluxepixel.com
https://github.com/gideros/gideros
https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnBlackburn1975
Likes: john26
Likes: antix, john26
Likes: simwhi, greengeek, antix, talis, rolfpancake, Ninjadoodle, MobAmuse
https://github.com/gideros/gideros
https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnBlackburn1975
Likes: talis, antix, john26, MobAmuse
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