[Foundation-l] Fundraising "Bugging for Dollars" (request for comment form WMF)

[Domas Mituzas]

Hi!

> Hmm. What about beg notices all over Bugzilla? "Support MediaWiki
> development: give us MONEY!" or similar. Just for a single dev pool.

Well, foundation doesn't really _own_ mediawiki, nor its development  
- it is GPL project, and no external contributors have their rights  
assigned. It has few major committers who do great work on mediawiki  
to support the live sites.
Who would operate that pool? Would that pool be used to pay for WMF  
developers, or for 3rd party contributors only? Should WMF sponsor MW  
development in any way, if there is separate dev pool, etc :)

And of course, we can put "support mediawiki development by donating  
to wikimedia foundation" links everywhere. actually, every time  
someone wants to donate for mediawiki help/development/.. we already  
did redirect to foundation.
Sometimes people go with "But I want to thank you directly guys", and  
get the answer "So donate to WMF" :)

Volunteer developers do it because it provides value to WMF anyway.  
It is WMF role to decide if it wants to pay back in any way.

-- 
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]