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Re: [platform-dev] Article highlighting strengths of Eclipse IDE over IJ



On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 8:26 AM, Peter Kriens <peter.kriens@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Would this not be a great role for the Eclipse Foundation? Running a kickstarter site for Eclipse plugins?
In my experience thinks only really work well when there is a bigger entity involved for the financial and trust aspects.

It's more or less what FEEP was about: https://eclipse.org/contribute/dev_program.php . Unfortunately, this wasn't successful enough to be continued.
Having an intermediary actor such as the Eclipse Foundation, although it can improve the overall results, slows down and makes the process more complex - and is not something trivial and free to set up from the Foundation side.
Some existing sites such as BountySource, KickStarter or Patreon already cover the financial aspects in sponsoring. So as a sponsor on those sites, you get nothing to worry about, except picking the proposal that you like and trust enough. About the trust, even with an intermediary actor, I don't think it fixes all possible problems, it can be even worse: can the Foundation really commit that what was founded by users can be realized in time and in the amount of money announced by the developers on a bid? What if it fails, who's responsible? I don't think the Foundation can safely take the responsibility for a developer failing to deliver a sponsored feature.
The peer-to-peer funding via external platforms makes the funding workflow simpler for everyone and already realizable, whereas adding such a big item as Eclipse kickstarter or billing on marketplace would take a lot of time to happen, if it ever gets started.

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