[FFmpeg-user] Using Kickstarter to gather funding

[Robert Krüger]

Hi,

it has happened many times that people have publicly voiced their interest in paying for features to be implemented. What has also happened is that they either didn't offer enough money to be taken seriously or they didn't make a concrete offer at all asking for a price which wasn't named by any dev, at least not publicly. I also got the impression that there are some features that would have enough interested lurkers out there to come up with a sum that would indeed be a fair price for a dev to implement that feature (I might be wrong though).

I came across the kickstarter.com platform when I read about a few guys developing a pinhole "lense" for a camera that I own and they did that by registering it as a kickstarter project and that worked surprisingly well. They named an amount which must be collected until they could finance their development & production efforts and interested people got to commit to money they would pay into the fund (I think I payed via Amazon but I guess they also accept other payment methods, not sure). If the amount is not reached, nobody pays anything. If it is reached, people are literally forced to put their money where their mouth is, i.e. they can not get back the money they committed to. In the case mentioned above the result was that a few months after paying, I got the lense for a really low price and everyone was happy. The simplicity of the concept was indeed convincing to me.

So the concept would be, someone capable of implementing a feature (a dev or a group of devs or the foundation or whatever) would enter projects like:
- bring aac encoding to the level of libfaac but with LGPL compatibility
- implement frame interpolation/blending filter
- ...

and then name a price and if funding reaches their price, they deliver. 

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with kickstarter. It just appears that some ffmpeg devs are open to doing stuff for money if the price is fair (at least that's the impression I got) and there are many people out there willing to pay something but very few of them can afford to finance a given feature alone (I also fit into that category). I also haven't checked all the details of the kickstarter platform. There might be reasons not to use it, I don't see now.

Thoughts on this, anyone?

Best regards,

Robert