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Commercial Improvement System

Most contributors of Kontact do their work in their free time without getting paid for it. This inevitably leads to conflicts with other engagements, be it the job, studying, or social activities. Getting paid for working on Kontact might alleviate these conflicts. In addition to that there are often people who would like to contribute to Free Software projects by spending some money. This is often difficult, because there is no infrastructure for receiving and distributing money.

For Kontact there is an attempt to provide a solution for this problem by offering a commercial improvement system [34]. This could be seen as continuation of the voting system of Bugzilla [33]. The concept is that people willing to spend some money for implementation of certain features in Kontact pledge an amount of money on the specific feature they would like to see implemented. Developers prioritize their work oriented at the accumulated amount of money per feature and work on the features with the highest amount. Once the feature is completed and the people pledging the money are satisfied with the result, they actually transfer the money to the developers having implemented the feature.


next up previous
Next: Availability Up: Kontact as Project Previous: The Inner Workings of
Cornelius Schumacher 2004-04-06