(first up your welcome to share or create this idea if you really want to :))
Anyway, I had this idea when talking about a scheme to "reward" people for contributions to an FOSS project. Actually paying people is a bit against the grain (and most FOSS has no financial backing anyway) but it seemed like a good suggestion to have a method to personally reward someone in a serious way.
This was also prompted somewhat by a recent link to http://fairsoftware, who's model I quite like :)
So here's the idea. A combination of Twollars and Fairsoftware (and a bit of Tipjoy in there too).
You register your project and get X "shares". As people contribute to the project they can be awarded some of the shares (perhaps there could be SCM integration to give bit-y rewards to lines commited, or perhaps there could be a crowd sourced vote system to decide how much a contribution is "worth" plus, ofc, the ability just to gift shares as and when). These shares have NO money worth - until someone donates to the project.
At which point the owner can set aside a percentage (perhaps that he/she can limit to a certain total amount) for running costs (servers etc.). The rest gets spread out amongst the "share holders".
Instead of actually payiong out the money each holder can select a charity (from a list, or eventually maybe their own) to donate their share too. Their user page shows off how much they have "raised" for the charity.
The contributors get a meaningful reward for their work
The FOSS project gets linked to charity work (always good for the image :))
The donators know their money went to worthwhile places (whilst still showing appreciation to the project)
The project owner still gets running costs
Thoughts? Is this just an over complicated idea or does it have merit? Are there any FOSS contributors, donators or "owners" out there who might have interest in such a setup?
Go!
