At what donation goal would Ardour get more developers

As far as I know Paul is the only full time developer.
To what amount must donations rise to increase the full time developers.
If I look at market related salaries a professional developer’s salary is about $100 000 per year. So it seems donations would have to double at the current level.

I don’t think it’s a matter of donations. There’s a thread here called Is Open Source a diversion from what users really want? which spent quite a long time discussing the lack of developers. A big part of the problem is that young people often don’t want to get involved in stuff that takes up a lot of time. James Taylor (the musician) was once asked about young people and music and here’s (roughly) what he said:-

And (to me…) that pretty much sums up the problem. Ardour is a complicated project written in a complicated programming language. Attracting new developers (esp. young developers) is immensely difficult.

The level of complexity is the reason why these guys deserve six figure salaries. Most people these days start of with scripting languages like Javascript while those specialising in C++ are a minority.

I have been working full time on Ardour since around 2012 (started contributing around 2007/8), and do contract work for Harrison Mixbus.

There are also many other contributors, who in total may sum up to a 3rd full time dev.

4 Likes

Hello Robin

That’s awesome. Thank you for telling me.

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.