Democratic vs Alternative software development funding

[prehabitat]

Not strictly speaking octane or Rhibo related: but it's a conversation/idea that started in the Mcneel forums with Micha and vCube from here...

I made an absentminded comment about crowd funding a periferal feature (to some) that a few felt passionately about...

It seems that currently software development is funded via a democratic process (it's the best analogy I could make; economics isn't my thing). Software developer invests time into proof of concept after having an idea: promotes that idea to all, and people vote for it with their licence fee. After that point paid updates and new business (based on expanded features) are planned and executed to 'keep all of the customers happy most of the time'...

what if after version 1 features were floated like a crowd funding idea: people buy into it (maybe at a reduced rate) then get access to that feature once it's reached its goal, funded, produced, tested & released... No funding? Feature doesn't get off the ground.


In some was this idea applies more to an ecosystem like Rhino where native rhino functions are all like little plugins... But there seem to be a lot of parallels to tensions between some vocal user groups and the Devs on all software platforms...

I'd love to direct my 10k/p.a for 'revit' to what I want rather than 'what most people want today & tomorrow'. Not anti progress: just only earn money from revit; and my pipeline for VR (the most out there thing I do with models) doesn't involve any other Building Desigb Suite software...

[v-cube]

I think this is an interesting idea and I have had similar thoughts in the past.
It might especially be a good thing to add extra additional resourced to solve a problem.
Maybe an additional thing to prevent license owners with less money from being ignored, could be that each license owner has lets say 10 voting points which he can spend on lets say 15 different topics topics like e.g. 2 points for render speed improvements, 4 points for backdrop / environment images and 4 points for render node licenses...

Andreas

[face_off]

So are you saying I don't need to do any more unfunded enhancements to the Rhino plugin? I like the idea

Paul

[v-cube]

NO way! You have to keep on coding of course !

We were thinking about a little mignon to whom you could assign programming work that is not high in the secret priority list but what we (the guys with the big cash...) would love to see being done ...

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