On Mar 9, 10:39 pm, Tom Cloyd <tomcl...@comcast.net> wrote:
> FWIT, I've seen python sites which list programmers wanting to do
> specific things, and will, if people wish to fund them. I believe people
> with specific projects also show up there. It's been a while, so I can't
> tell you more than this. I HAVE see the idea working, though. The trick
> seems to be that someone says "I can do this cool thing, but not for
> free", and the "thing" sells itself to a community of interest. Enough
> people buy in, and it's launched.

That's certainly what I'm hoping for here.

As one of the lead devs of Ruby Reports[0], I've had literally 100s of
people tell me about their difficulties with PDF::Writer. So one of
the cool things I'm suggesting is to give the library a clean
rewrite. Currently Mike Milner and myself have taken over maintenance
on that project, because Austin is too busy these days. While we can
manage to fix bugs here and there, we don't have the time to rewrite
it for free. That's one thing this could fund.

Also, we want to get Ruport running on 1.9, and there are a ton of
projects I use I'd love to see 1.9 compatible. That's another idea.

Finally, as a RubyForge staffer monitoring the support forums, I know
there are a lot of problems with RubyForge that need fixing. So I'm
throwing that up as an idea as well. Basically, I've tried to target
things I feel already affect a lot of people, in the hopes that having
a reasonably well known Ruby hacker work on them for some dedicated
period of time sounds attractive.

However, if I've missed the mark with these projects, I'd basically be
willing to work on whatever people suggested, so long as it's
something I find cool.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, and keep an eye on the
project ideas[1] page to see what folks cook up.

-greg

[0] http://rubyreports.org
[1] http://rubymendicant.wikidot.com/project-ideas