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Discouraging contributions in exchange for getting paid

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Jan Braun

16 Jan, 2013 12:12 PM

Hi,
I wanted to make sure you know what kind of message your "There's a preview of GPGMail available which works on Mountain Lion and quite well if we may say so. To get it right away, please support development by donating [money]" stance conveys, particularly by people caring about Free Software.

Reading this statement immediately says "don't bother contributing code to this project (at the moment)", because the published version is probably severely out-of-date. In particular, anyone who's not you and wants to make gpgtools on ML happen would be forced to start on their own and hence necessarily recreate everything you've achieved so far. Not a good use of programmer time. You have thus reduced the pool of people realistically capable of completing gpgtools on ML to the project team and anyone dedicated enough to port it completely on their own.

This means you traded away the possible code contributions of everyone else in exchange for the team possibly getting paid. To me, this says "we care more about getting paid than about getting the code to work". (I don't expect that to actually be true, which is why I'm writing this rather than just ignoring you.)

I realize withholding code to incite people to contribute money may seem tempting, especially if you had few outside contributors in the past, but please consider other ways, e.g. feature bounties, that are less likely to alienate new contributors.

If you are unconvinced but want a more substantiated opinon, consider asking the core Dillo developers. I have no idea what their feelings about the matter are, but they withheld the fltk2 port-in-progress of Dillo for ~2 years (iirc) in the hopes of getting funded to work on it.

Thanks for considering, and good luck with your work,
Jan

Disclaimer: I'm not using Mac OS, and thus have no direct interest in gpgtools. I came here because a friend asked me to re-send an encrypted email in unencrypted form because he has no working gpg on Mountain Lion. I care strongly about Free Software and wide availability of empowering technologies like strong crypto, however.

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Luke Le on 16 Jan, 2013 12:28 PM

   

   Hi Jan,

   thanks for your input.
   We've already been having numerous discussions about this topic in various threads on this platform.
   The full source code for the version available via donation is on our github repository, branch experimental and anyone capable can build it themselves, correct it, work on it and so forth.

   The message is primarily meant for the people who don't know how to compile from source.

   As you correctly mention, we haven't had any serious contributions in the last 2 years and have decided, after very active attempts to lure developers in to help us, to no longer actively promote the fact that GPGTools are open source. We still love the idea of open source and our tools will remain open source, but it's not something anyone using them is really profiting from at the moment.

   As for your friend, we'll be more than glad to guide them through the steps of building GPGMail for Mountain Lion if they're interested in that. They can either contact us via a new discussion here or via email to team @ gpgtools.org

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2. Support Staff 2 Posted by Luke Le on 16 Jan, 2013 12:33 PM

   

   Also I'd like to add that from experience I've learned that people who really care about a project are typically not thrown off by such a message, but simply grab the code and start working on it. Once they have something worth sharing and they still care they'll definitely contact the dev team behind it.

   We've had one contributor who did exactly that and it worked pretty well for a while, till unfortunately he had no more time to contribute.

   P.S.: Aus Interesse, sprichst du Deutsch?

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3. 3 Posted by Jan Braun on 16 Jan, 2013 01:10 PM

   

   Oh, sorry. My (extremely limited) git-fu failed me then. Again. I hate its UI. :(

   Anyway, in that case, I completely agree your current course of action is reasonable.

   Sorry for the noise,

   Jan
   

   P.S.: Ja, warum? :)

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4. Support Staff 4 Posted by Luke Le on 16 Jan, 2013 01:21 PM

   

   I couldn't agree more, git has a terrible UI. Such an extremely powerful tool, yet so frustrating at times. It's a pity.

   Folgend sind evtl. die build schritte für deinen Bekannten:

   # Checkout the GPGMail source code
   git clone --recursive https://github.com/GPGTools/GPGMail
   # Switch to Mountain Lion (experimental) branch
   git checkout experimental
   # Build GPGMail and install
   make install
   

   Voraussetzung ist entweder Xcode oder Command Line Tools von Apple (http://developer.apple.com/downloads)

   Sollte was nicht klappen helfen wir wie gesagt gern weiter :)

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5. Steve closed this discussion on 31 Jan, 2013 03:06 PM.