Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 6:32 pm Post subject: Respectfully submitted: feature voting site
I really just wanted to submit a couple of minor default setting changes that came up over on Edward Tufte's site (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003P3), but thought I'd throw this voting site up as a quick demo of a more general way to do it. If you like it, keep it. Slinkset will set up DNS forwarding for you too.
While that is a neat website, implementing our users' many feature requests is not something we can even reasonably consider.
There has been a constant stream of new feature requests throughout this site since we started the NeoOffice project yet the reality is that our donation levels have always never been more than enough to pay for the costs of fixing crashing bugs, answering the large volume of user support posts, and the occasional small Mac OS X addon feature.
Even if donations quadrupled and we were able to take that money and hire a couple of full-time developers, we could easily saturate those developers with fixing the couple thousand OpenOffice.org feature bugs that our users have reported to us over the years.
This is why we keep a very clear and limited scope in the NeoOffice.org project: our users donate enough for us to perform our existing scope really well. But we neither Fran, I, or Ed have the money or spare time (we already 7 days a week on NeoOffice) to handle new feature requests.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 9:40 pm Post subject:
We also did try a variant of this in the past with the New Features Program. Essentially we tried to take the most requested features, come up with engineering & support estimates, and then allow people to direct donations towards filling our estimated goals. In general, we found that while there were many great ideas for new features, there wasn't enough interest from multiple donors in those specific features to support their implementation.
Instead we've focused back on our core mission of bug fixing and developing Mac features that we've seen requested as time permits (depending on ease of implementation). Each time we see a functionality request it gets filed in the back of our minds and ruminates...sometimes, a year later or so, if we think we have a solution and the bug tempest has died down, sometimes it gets in there. I think it's been an effective use of our limited resources over the last few years since our primary goal is to make sure we fix as many Mac-specific bugs as we can to keep our code stable and solid
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