Several people have started to add sponsorships to various outstanding issues (see the “Popular Issues” over on the right). I just want to clarify a couple of rather important points about this system. First of all, everyone participating should be aware that it is a pure honor system - we expect and hope that you will pay up once a bug that you have sponsored is fixed for you. The money you pay will be routed (minus the usual PayPal fees) to the developer(s) who actually fixes the bug.
Secondly, and more generally, I’d like people to understand the scale of things. Right now, 6 people are sponsoring “MIDI editing/sequencing functionality in Ardour”. The current total is $220. The current implementation of MIDI editing and sequencing in Ardour 3.0 was basically sponsored by Google’s Summer of Code over 2 summers. That means that Google has already put more than US$10000 into this functionality. Dave Robillard, the primary developer working on MIDI stuff, has continued working on this and related matters between the two summers that Google was paying him.The work that remains, while probably not on the same scale as the work Dave has already put in, is still substantial. I don’t want to disappoint people, and I don’t want to sound ungrateful or dismissive of the sponsorship associated with this issue. But people need to realize that amounts on the order of a few hundred dollars in connection with such broad issues just isn’t realistic. Now fortunately, Dave and the rest of us seem fairly motivated to get this task done regardless of the specific financial renumeration involved. But people need to be clear about realistic levels of financial support. We are talking about at least a couple of man-months of work, and possibly a lot more than that, and for sponsorship to accelerate that it would need to be much more substantial.
This applies to smaller bugs too. Most bugs in the Ardour bug tracker require a minimum of two hours of work. Often the majority of that time is spent investigating and debugging the problem - the actual fix is often much quicker. We do have some developers who work in parts of the world where US$50 for at least a couple of hours work is an attractive offer. But in general, people need to understand that, as with MIDI, the scale of financial incentive necessary to get people to specifically work on a bug is likely to be larger than most issues are currently listed with.
Please continue sponsoring bugs and features. Its very welcome and sometimes motivates developers when they might otherwise watch a movie. But also please understand the scale of the work involved, and the way incentives are likely to work.