Is there a method to sponsor specific GNOME changes to be included in a future release.
General:
There is a strong feeling amongst many GNOME users that feedback is ignored. There is some evidence of this in recent history. I understand that collecting, filtering, and managing feedback is very difficult, and decisions have to be made. So I want to “pay for the product”, so to speak. Donating or becoming a “Friend of GNOME” doesn’t sound like it will make my feedback any more relevant. I want to be able to sponsor specific development since I don’t have the skill level to contribute myself.
Specific:
I dislike the change to to primary-paste, but I can accept the change to the default. I strongly dislike the fact that the setting to restore functionality is “hidden” behind gsettings, dconf-editor, or tweaks.
I want to sponsor development to add the setting to the primary Settings application.
As a general rule: no. The Foundation, which is the legal entity that would receive the donation, is a registered non-profit which cannot receive donated money and provide specific services. On top of that, the Foundation is not responsible for the technical direction of the GNOME project.
The only thing the Foundation can do is sponsor the GNOME project, or developers affiliated with the project, but it cannot direct them to do things.
This is precisely what the Foundation cannot do, lest it loses the non-profit status.
You can reach out to some developer and designer that can work on it, but you have no guarantee that the change will be integrated.
Problem with this is that middle click paste drama was fully overblown and abusive. It’s very hard to take feedback seriously from people who refuse to look further than their own nose. You can read that whole thread and please tell me, do you genuinely think such “feedback” would convince you?
And one big thing here: even if some developers rejects community suggestion it doesn’t mean the user feedback is ignored. Trust me, it’s not how general thought process works here in GNOME.
Thanks for responding, and so quickly.
It’s interesting that it’s coming from you, since it’s your own advice I’m trying to follow.
“The only way for you to have actual influence in the decision making process is to become a GNOME developer.”
Since spamming a list of developers with a request to do some work feels invasive and rude. Is there a GNOME mailing list that might accept a bug bounty like this? I’m trying to get involved without offending people, or spending 6 months digging through communications/commit logs to understand the community culture. I am looking for advice.
If you’re serious about it, I recommend joining Matrix (if you’re not already there) Matrix - GNOME Project Handbook and join #design:gnome.org room and ask designers if they’re fine with it. If you hear an OK response, you can then start with planning. GNOME doesn’t have mailing lists anymore and there is no bug bounty. You would have to yourself find people and ask if they’re interested. You could join Settings room on matrix (after you ask designers) if someone would be interested in a job. Keep in mind I’m not a lawyer, you will probably pay taxes or something.
Whoa, slow down. I’m not looking to start that argument back up, I did read the entire thread multiple times actually.
I was not part of that and your response is starting to scare me off completely.
There were some rude comments in that thread, but there were many others that were just expressing feedback politely, let’s not paint them all with the same brush.
Sorry, I am not trying to scare you off or anything, but ebassi’s message you linked was talking about exactly those type of people. And we got thrown A LOT OF shit, so while there could have been nice people there (i honestly dont remember that thread), there were also tons of trolls and bad faith actors. That wasn’t a nice experience for us.
I understand, textual communication is hard in general which can cause misunderstandings easily. Add to that a couple of intentionally bad actors, and I can understand that it felt horrible and that you were being attacked. I’m sorry that whole thing happened.
On the other side, those users seemed to feel their feedback was dismissed and not valued, both the rude and polite commenters. I felt that way myself after reading some of ebassi’s comments. I guess the difference is that I started this thread to follow his stated advice. To be honest with myself, partly through “malicious compliance” since my feelings were hurt.
Though as I was researching the donation details and rereading the comments in the thread more carefully, trying to read the best of intentions into each comment possible. I came away with the opinion that feedback is hard on both sides (giver and receiver). Givers were frustrated and felt ignored, receivers felt attacked. And the feelings of each were leading to worse communication in both directions. So I added a second motivation to this post, honest attempt to work with a bad system of feedback collection to make good changes.
Thank you for the advice on how to contribute in another way.
Developers are weird. We’ll do a task that interests us for free, but a task that doesn’t interest us will be expensive. You only need bounties for the tasks that don’t interest us; therefore, you’re going to need a moderately high amount of money to attract a developer to a bounty. We used to use Bountysource for bounties, but that was quite unsuccessful. People would post maybe $100 for a bounty, but developers are unlikely to work for that amount.
Your specific objective in this case is controversial, which makes everything much harder. The bar for adding settings to gnome-control-center is simply rather high.
In this case: adding a toggle somewhere is trivial for a developer, so your actual challenge is going to be convincing designers that the setting should be user-visible, and where specifically it should go. This might be impossible. If you can manage that successfully, almost certainly some developer will be willing to submit a merge request for free. So a bounty doesn’t seem like a good fit for this issue.
Silver lining: even if you fail in this particular goal, the middle click paste feature will probably live on behind that hidden setting indefinitely, and possibly forever.