Hallo,
first, please don't miss Cedrik's response to Emery's posting:
http://genodians.org/ttcoder/2019-03-26-hog-bounties
Emery, you seem to hit a nerve. ;-) Thanks for raising this topic.
Is there an interest in organizing a list of small projects and tasks that can be prioritized somehow? This would be applications to port or new langauges to support, projects that are orthoginal to the Genode base system and don't belong in that issue tracker.
The idea and also the question for a donation scheme is not entirely new. In fact, Genode Labs got repeatedly approached by individuals who wanted to donate to the project. This honors us. But since we are a company, we would feel uncomfortable with the role of an escrow for such community funds. I would very much like to see someone from outside of Genode Labs step forward with organizing such a list, and coordinating bounties.
I would like this because I have a number of side projects and I have to take a guess at which of them would be useful to more than just me. For example, the 9P server was ready in december, but I forgot I was using it until the subject came up in IRC last week.
If this is something we want, what is the right platform? Bountysource, Librepay, Reddit, a Git repo, a wiki? Do we really need bounties or is social credit enough?
From my perspective, any form of such interaction between developers and
users is laudable. E.g., if anyone of our team wants to accept donations individually to accommodate user wishes as side projects, please go for it!
At the other end, bounties may encourage new contributors. So maybe we existing developers could ponder about bounty topics that are suitable for beginners, in the spirit of the "easy hacks" [1] of the Libreoffice project?
[1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/EasyHacks
Cheers Norman