(02-18-2018, 11:26 AM)biomedical1010 Wrote: Also what if Dolphin guys set up a patreon or go fund me, they can turn it from volunteer job to full time job if enough people pay up.
Or better yet, make Dolphin a paid app. And a free version with ads and limited features.
This way they can really let loose all their brain power on optimizations, and workarounds for the horrible drivers.
I'm generally against this for a number of reasons:
- There are a large number of *extremely* good devs that work on dolphin. They do it for fun. Many have extremely well paying day jobs. Replacing this would take an extremely high level of donations
- For some people, money isn't the driving goal. Instead, it's a fun hobby. If you want to suck all the fun out of something, introducing money and deadlines implied by that is a pretty good method.
- There's always friction about why DEV_A gets $whatever, and DEV_B gets a different amount. Who decides?
- It can effectively drive away possible new devs - "why should I, a new dev, work on a feature if I'm not getting paid to do it?" "Why should the project risk paying a new, unproven dev for a feature that may never be of merge-able quality?"
- It's a moral/legal gray area - should some of that money go to Nintendo? Are the paid dolphin devs benefiting from their work?
I personally can't speak for others here, but I doubt I'll be hanging around here if some devs got paid to work on dolphin... This is a "fun" project, that I occasionally put a bit of time into something that interests me. I don't have any deadlines, and I can assure you I'd have been fired ages ago if I was paid to work on dolphin from all that
I find that projects tend to work well as *either* volunteer projects, or paid for software. Mixing the two in any way makes it extremely difficult