Hello all. I'm new here, new to the N810 and new to the tablet scene in general. It's a great device, and mostly that's due to the Free software community supporting it. I love using Free software, and I have a great respect for those who create, maintain and package it. However, I myself possess a thorough and complete lack of programing knowledge. I would like to offer a small bounty for a port of a GPL game that I really enjoy. Is it OK to do that here? If so should it be in the "games" thread, or the general thread?

First, welcome to the community.

There's nothing in the rules against offering a bounty, as far as I know. I would post it to either the games or development portion of the forum. Good luck.

Thanks!

I think it might be kinda neat for maemo.org to sponsor some sort of voluntary fund for this sort of thing.... thoughts?

How about getting Nokia to direct some funds for this sort of thing? Community voting determines the fund's allocation

...and bounty schemes (especially on small platforms with a limited set of developers) have proven pretty much ineffective in the past :-(

Maemo developers, at the moment, aren't going to do something for $20; they're going to do it because they want it. You've just got to hope that the thing you've found is a) realistic and b) something they hadn't realised they wanted yet ;-)

Some development incurs cost.

When jolouis and I were testing network adapters on the tablets, we both put out some cash just for that purpose. I bought a few of different kinds just so I could document what chipsets/configurations worked and what didn't. I had the cash to spend at the time, but others might not... so some sort of pool *might* help.

in fact... offer a bounty works more like a symbolic act to say "HEY, I REALLY WOULD LIKE SOMEONE DO IT"... it's a good way to catch the dev's attention (and maybe sympathy for your request)

There is a website called arimaa.com that runs a very interesting board game. Many people there are actually researchers, studying this game, and we like people to play so we can build a large database of games to analyze.

The managers there set up a small prize given each month to the player that plays the most that month. I even got the prize a couple of times, it was very nice.

Of course it's something very different, but it serves as a success story for prizes inside an Internet community.

I reckon a simple list of things that people want, that others can vote on, so that then a wandering bored developer can go and take a look and see what to hack on (and something that's interesting *and* wanted by other people is the sort of thing they will want to do).

When I say list, the onus should be on the requester to make sure there is sufficient information about the app, screenshots, links to source etc., as there's nothing worse than someone asking for an app to be ported and just giving a name which returns lots of unrelated hits on Google.