Well I was just thinking out loud,
a well-crafted Kickstarter Campaign might generate enough cash to actually pay a Vassal 4.0 developer.
If it could kick up to say, $5,000 USD, would that be enough for a diligent coder to make a deliverable?
Thus spake markind:
Well I was just thinking out loud,
a well-crafted Kickstarter Campaign might generate enough cash to
actually pay a Vassal 4.0 developer.If it could kick up to say, $5,000 USD, would that be enough for a
diligent coder to make a deliverable?
No, not even remotely close. You couldn’t even get to the point of
a technology demo for that much, let alone anything usable.
Openhub.net (formerly oholo.net) estimates that our current codebase
of 173k lines represents about 44-person-years of effort. I think
that’s a higher than what it actually took to get to this point, but
just knowing how much effort I’ve contributed personally, I know it
can’t be high by more than a factor of five, and maybe even only by
a factor of two or three.
openhub.net/p/vassalengine/estimated_cost
I’ve thought about this approach several times, but that’s just too
little to make a difference. You’ll already have my full attention
outside my working hours for VASSAL 4 in a few months when I’m free
again. Don’t underestimate how much that is—it’s what I was doing
during the 2.9-3.2 development cycles, when we were moving very rapidly.
To get me working on VASSAL 4 more than that, I’d have to be able to
do it as a day job, and not just for a little while, but for the
forseeable future. $5k isn’t even remotely close to making that happen,
and $5k won’t buy you much time from a contract developer, who would in
any case require a lot of input form us to produce anything suitable.
So, it’s a suggesion worth consideration, but I can’t see how to make
it work.
–
J.