New system for releasing Drupal contributions

Cool.

"You can always find the storm by listening for the Thunder."

I am utterly convinced we need a proper dependency system in core before we can (more easily) accomplish a lot of these things.

This has already started being tackled with earl's module screen re-organization, and nickl's dependency stuff. We have chosen simple text metadata files for precisely the reason that they will easily be parsed, and generated by drupal.org.

Another thing i'd like to see is install profiles becoming directories in their own right, and their requirements also configured via these .meta files. This would make it a lot simpler to find out what the modules require to operate and help drupal.org package these things.

Another small nitpick I have is regarding the $400 cost of an RSS feed. It should be fairly simple to just tag the modules correctly using taxonomy, and use simple aliases to mimic the different url combinations the taxonomy module already respects. The cost might be more realistic if you take into account the creation of the taxonomy terms etc. (although I really believe that should be a base requirement of the spec)

What I do see a good use for that money however (and is probably worth more in both value to the community and cost to develop), is building a block or some such into system.module that regularly gets the latest releases and processes the new releases. Including respecting such things as a new properties added for things such as 'security releases' and the like.

All in all though, I am very happy to see this proposal put forward, and you have my utmost support.
--
The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.

Where does this money go? To the drupal project? To the company/person implementing this? If I want to write something, can I also just ask money for it on the front page? That last question was to point out that it would be nice to have some context about asking money for development.

If Derek, Dries, Steven Wittens (steven), Gerhard Killesreiter (killes), Neil Drumm (drumm), and other Drupal leaders believe we need a "new system for releasing Drupal contributions," I trust them. I trust they will continue to lead Drupal in the best possible way and direction. They have all done an excellent job thus far and the collective contributions of ALL Drupal leaders to the community deserve very high praise!

Perhaps with the new system we can close out this open issue titled "Download latest release" often misleading?

As for me, I'm not a developer so I decided to make a financial donation, checked my DreamHost Rewards payouts, and saw I had a web hosting purchase attributed to Drupal (I track the purchases). Since I always give a bit of my DreamHost Rewards proceeds back to the community that made that purchase possible, I made a small financial donation to the "new system" described above via the PayPal button. Depending on how things go, I might make another donation later on. After all, the forum post above is not only to publicize the "new system" but a call for donations as well.

On a related topic to funding projects for developers, I created the new Projects Needing Financing group in July 2006 and also posted a related project financing article on the forum because I saw the need to better centralize a way for developers to post their projects needing financing. In the past, I've donated a portion of the proceeds attributed to Drupal back to Drupal as well as CivicSpace in order to help out on various projects (e.g., organic groups and og2list).

The first paragraph of the new Projects Needing Financing group states:

This group was created because a need exists to match financial donors with Drupal projects being worked on by developers needing financial assistance* in order to enhance and add to Drupal contributed modules. Financial donors can help the Drupal community, and themselves, by making financial contributions to specific projects. This will help Drupal projects receive the necessary funding to get them finished and donated as contributed modules. It's a win-win situation where both the Drupal community and the developer(s) hoping to complete a project all benefit!

So...if you know of any developers needing funding, please send them to the new Projects Needing Financing group where they can set up reverse bounties if desired. For example, I would encourage someone to crosspost the "new system" info above to the Projects Needing Financing group. As the group owner, I can change the wording to not just "Drupal contributed modules" but to also include "core", "themes", etc. I just need someone to work with me and to provide me the desired wording so I can make the desired updates.

In addition, folks/companies desiring/needing work to be done on specific projects by Drupal developers can post their needs at the new group in an open request for developers to contact them privately with the hope that some of the money saved by folks/companies using OSS will be recycled back into the Drupal developer community and other Drupal projects so that everyone benefits.

Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing

*Developers are hereby notified that any project(s) posted to the "Projects Needing Financing" group must be donated back to the Drupal community and included in Drupal contributed modules. This will be on the honor system.

That sounds like a long overdue enhancement to the contributions repository. The one thing which I don't see and would very much like to is some way of displaying in the Drupal application itself what versions of things you are running - perhaps on the modules page would be appropriate.

This effort solves one part of the problem but another very real part of the problem is not knowing exactly what version of things you have installed at any one time. You might get a security announcement for a specific version but right now you don't have an easy way to determine whether it impacts you or not.
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BuyBlue.org

these rates seem very reasonable to me. Thank you Derek. I think we should set it upon bountyforge or something. Maybe it'll come in as a lot of $25 contributions along with some big ones. I'll put in something, but how do I do it? You haven't told us (unless I missed it)

Some of you might have missed it, but there`s a link to a digg story concerning this beside the donate button. So at least if you're not gonna contribute, give 2 seconds of your free time to raise awareness about this!

I don't have a lot of money, but I donated a little bit of it! Rock on, dww!

If $6500 is all that's needed to overcome one of the most confusing aspects of the Drupal Community, I'm all for it. Now that most modules are 4.7 compatible, the problem isn't as noticable as it was 6 months ago. Many modules were one foot in 4.6 and the other half-way to 4.7. CVS versions had no clear delimiter as to which they were compatible with, causing newcomers to Drupal frustration with trying to put together a basic feature set (trying to get a working combination of the image, img_assist, and tinyMCE modules comes to mind). Once 4.8/5.0 modules start become more prevelant, we're going to meet the same problem all over again.

The module dependency checking system isn't too far away. Combined with removing the version chaos, I'm looking forward to an easier install for everyone. I'm glad dww has made the offer to make the needed improvements.

Nathan Haug
_{creative graphic design        w: quicksketch.org
& software development       e: nate@quicksketch.org}

I don't have paypal nor do I want it. Are there other ways to donate?

Great idea and I will donate.

Is there a way to track how much has been donated?

Why not throw up a thank you page linking to folks sites who donate?

Thanks.

Hello, just asking - because we would like to contribute some money at the end of August, but we don't use PayPal or any other service of that kind. Just a plain bank transfer. Is there a page with bank details somewhere? I searched for IBAN and found nothing relevant. Thanks.

Roman Dergam

My little startup doesn't have hardly any money at the moment, but we chipped in a few dollars because this feature would be massively useful to us.

Is there any chance of an update on the amount of money raised thus far?

Good luck!
Alex Markley--
--A warehouse is just like any other house, except it turns EVIL under the light of a full moon.

Servus.

I'd like to donate, but sadly I would have to pay income tax for every donation I make. I'm going to use Drupal in commercial projects and I'd be happy to charge my clients for using Drupal as their working horse. But...
I would need some receipt for the money I transfer to deduct from tax. I think there are a lot more commercial developers whose clients wouldn't even ask about a several hundred bucks invoice, but sure enough I don't want to pay the tax for this.

This problem could be solved by charging the client donation + tax, but it seems strange to me to charge the client let's say 300 to donate only 200...

It shouldn't be a big problem to set up a charging site using PayPal or Kagi which emits an invoice saying "software consultant services" or the like with the amount "donated" filled in. Drupal.org should receive an invoice from the programmer(s) and everybody will be fine.

As I said programmers: I sure would like to donate to the authors of various modules as well -- what about a "hitlist" of downloads as a means to spread the money? Most likely will Drupal get the most downloads, hence most of the money. But modules are more than important to Drupal, as they extend its functionality and are mostly the reason to use Drupal. Hence I'd like to see contributed modules to get their share as well as being able to sent a module's contributor money directly using this system, by filling in appropriate fields in that invoice-creation-form. F.e. donating 400 to the project plus 300 to the author of xy.module.

To prevent well described but technically challenged modules to score high at this "download hitlist", I'd add a rating system at the download page -- Drupal included. Multiplying downloads with average voted satisfaction may be a valid key for the process. Once a single contributor's account holds more than 100 US$ a check will be sent -- like Google AdSense works.

I'd put the same model on contributed themes as well to get more designers involved.

Just to give you an idea of the figures involved, I'm planning to release six sites until end of October and I'd charge my clients some 400 per standard installation, even more if special modules are used. These figures come from the CMS I used before and I think they should work well for everybody. Anyway, that'd be some 2400 I could easily contribute if I'd get an invoice. If I don't get a regular invoice I would have to put 800 at side for at least one year until I know exactly how much income tax has to be paid...

With this invoicing system everybody will be happy -- clients, who get a perfectly running and well maintained software, website-creators who don't have to feel guilty to take advantage from other people's work, and programmers who get some payment from the time they put into their projects.

Just in case: I too offer some software and manuals I wrote for download and I had some 40000 downloads last year. So far I received 6 donations, totaling 21 US$. Now figure... I spent some four days on this software and some seven on the manuals, plus countless hours answering questions, but the return from that project didn't even allow me to pay a single month of my ISP's fees. Sure I'm tempted to say "If I had received one dollar per download", but that's just a pipe-dream. But eleven days of development cost me 5500 US$ and I hoped for that amount to roll in from 40000 downloads. As it is now, I simply can't afford to write updates as I have to keep my bank happy. I rather take my kids for a hike instead of working for vampires. And I have the strong feeling most open source developers feel the same...

So much for my background, and I really hope there's some smart decision in this case to allow me and other commercial users to roll some dough to Drupal. If only 5000 commercial projects pay 400 each, it would roll in some 2 000 000 US$ (that's at least 50 000 programming hours!) per year -- enough money to guarrantee continuos development, great DrupalCONs and what more might be needed to make this an outstanding web development system.

My clients won't notice, that's for sure, and some contributers could make a living from working for the public. Drupal could become "best of the breed" with more developers joining the pool, and Drupal could remain free for everybody by such a "donation" system which allows businesses to deduct "donations" from tax.

My 2%,

Norbert

-- form follows function

On how much has been raised so far?

what an interesting discussion.

i have a question about tax implications. is derek u.s. based? I also want to give some money to various Drupal developers in London (lm, who just released the lm_paypal modules including the long-awaited paid memberships and pay per listing modules at http://drupal.org/node/78002), Netherlands, Australia, and the U.S.

I have not read the U.S. tax law closely, but I believe this is what the tax guides say:
(A) I can give a supplier $25 as a gift. I can include it as a $25 expense. The supplier does not have to pay tax on it. I can give a supplier some some $x as a separate check from the gift. This check can be a bounty payment say of $x. I can include it as a $x expense. In the U.S., the supplier would have to treat $x as income and pay tax on it.

However, it is possible that the law says something different. I am not a lawyer and I would like to make sure
(b) the bounty payment of $x would be considered a gift rather than payment for services. And since I've already given the maximum gift allowed of $25, I cannot count $x as an expense.

I'm sure this affects others. if anyone can clarify the tax implications that would be very useful.

in the meantime, my problems with the current system would be solved if all module authors/maintainers simply put one line at the top of the .module file which said,

"this works with version 4.x"

When this page will sink from the homepage, 90% of new people visiting this site will miss it.

There should be an obvious "Ongoing project, Donation page" directly accessible from fontpage.
This page would list ongoing major projects such as this one, so people know what their money is going for.

Drupal is a great project, and it deserves a better donation show off.

Brakkar

Too bad that digg does not support Drupal IDs. ;)

I'd like to propose the use of www.donorge.org for donations. I like the idea and realization of Donorge very much.

Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind

I just donated!

Go on with this project!

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www.varesano.net - Fabio Varesano Personal Homepage

Hello,
I do not support the idea of full rewrite of project module:
in my humble opinion, it is a lot better to do step-by-step modifications:
1. move releases to nodes. I consider this is the most important: at least it is very required for me. The procedure behind moving releases to nodes seems relatively easy: it is a lot similar to what you've done when you've moved issues to nodes.
2. next little change

p.s.
I do not support the idea of full rewrites at all -- from my experience it is a lot better to do little modifications every time.

Thank You
Kind Regards,
Andriy Gerasika

I donated.
sorry for the delay.

Perhaps we can put donation buttons near the top of drupal.org for this and other things drupal needs. I'm sure most people don't even know about this.

It's a huge task, I'm proud to provide a financial help!

TheClue/Nash of Subsystem

I have agreed with Derek that we IO1 will fund the outstanding balance for the infrastructure and the first two items of additional functionality, we will look at the others once this is done.

This is being sponsored by one of our projects Mailfriends The original Penpal community which is currently being migrated to Drupal, we hope to launch in the next couple of weeks once we have sorted the performance issues we are experiencing (major progress made today on this and we will be releasing details of our performance testing as well for people to cast an eye over). It looks an awful lot better in Drupal :-)

Good luck
Fintan

Beware the eagle

The Drupal contributions/modules and the system to manage them is one of the many reasons why Drupal is so nice to work with. I hope that more donations can be made to get all of this done quickly!

It would also be great to have a couple small additions to the Modules section as well. Adding a "Most Popular" or "Most Downloaded" and a "Most Active" (maybe by number of commits or patches in a month?) would help to see trends and get a better idea of the state of modules and what the whole community is finding useful.

The other would be to have the option to have the category list expand/collapse listing the module names. It seems that the main modules page is now defaulted to the categories list so this would be a nice little addition.

Thank you for everything you have done towards the Drupal contributions system.
Chris

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