[Ffmpeg-devel] donations

[Måns Rullgård]

Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> writes:

> Hi
>
> currently it isnt possible to donate to the project itself instead anyone who 
> wishes to donate something has to do so to individual developers, i belive 
> thats a problem as many who would want to donate would prefer to be able to 
> donate to the project, one reason why is that most people dont know the 
> individual developers and how much or little they did for ffmpeg ...
>
> there are 2 problems
> 1. legal, tax, ...
> 2. how to split the money between the devels
>
> for 1. i have no faint clue but i suspect some readers will know

Many jurisdictions allow a person to receive a certain amount per year
in gifts, counted per giver, free of tax.  This is typically in the
order of 1000 euros.  I'm not sure how the distinction is made between
gifts and payment for work.

> for 2. i would suggest the following:
> let every developer split 1.0 virtual cash onto all developers including 
> himself and then give each developer an amount propotional to the median of 
> the amounts which where given to him
> this appears quite cheat proof to me ...
> 2b. who is a developer? thouse with >X line of code in cvs maybe?

IMHO, not only the line count should count, but also how active the
person is.  Some combination of total lines of code in HEAD, and total
lines changed over some period of time seems like a better measure.

-- 
M?ns Rullg?rd
mru at inprovide.com