[FFmpeg-devel] Sponsoring and generating money in general (IRC meeting follow-up)

[Peter B.]

Quoting Stefano Sabatini <stefasab at gmail.com>:
> Funding development is a bit more complicated. As I wrote during the
> meeting, if one or more companies/individuals want a feature and they
> do a donation, we can't guarantee that the expense will be approved by
> SPI, so for such form of sponsoring maybe some different system is
> needed, for example a crowdfunding/bounty platform.

For individuals, I think that crowdfunding/bounty could be a good  
thing to try. At the "ardour" project [1] for example, I saw that the  
simple display of ongoing "feature requests paid-by-bounty", and the  
currently collected amount seemed to raise awareness among users that  
these things could be paid for. I guess this transparency might have  
encouraged users to think about paying development improvements. Maybe?

However, there is a huge difference between individuals and companies  
when requesting a paid development: I've had the concrete case already  
that a company refused to pay ffmpeg improvements, because they  
wanted/had to book that as proper expense - not as donation.

I'm not too familiar with taxation laws, but companies seem to require  
some legal entity to "make the deal with".


Pb


== References:
[1] http://ardour.org/