Here comes another long one, sorry! - As responses get exponentially longer, I'd recommend moving this to a fast paced medium / IM to clear up anything if you feel this matter still isn't resolved.
(However, I feel we are starting to agree on most things now)
Fair enough. I feel like a elaborate response about complicated topics is reasonable to disprove a personal attack.
Okay, this is also what currently happens.
I dislike it because it's a system where money (potentially lots of it) could get lost or be stolen (hostile developer or just an attack without insurance).
I don't. I'm interested why people think that the cemu business model is good.
Which, from my understanding, you were proposing.
I still appreciate you responding
While this sounds good in theory, this probably doesn't work.
First of all: I'm barely making the Top-10 in the list of top-contributors.
But let's assume I was in charge: with ~20 active coders and a lot of PRs, a blog to write and whatnot, it is already hard enough to maintain the emulator.
Also organizing this would mean exchanging bank details, checking validity of money requests, keeping receipts, evaluating each incoming request etc.
For example: I only have an overview of the GPU emulation. I *hear* about most of the stuff wwylele, jroweboy, Subv and co. are working on, but I could not label it with a monetary value.
Even less so I could evaluate how much time they spend on it.
A single contribution / feature is also often made by up to 100 people. There'll be people who crack the 3DS, others who document their findings how the now accessible aspects of a 3DS works.
Then someone else goes and implements a prototype for Citra. Another person comes in and works on it some more etc.
There'll be a lot of people reviewing the code and one person later takes responsibility for including the final feature in the emulator (which is not the one who wrote it, for security etc. reasons).
Also the Top-3 developers can be inactive for a long time (Even all at once as new generations of developers take over).
bunnei for example is very busy with life. He barely works on features himself anymore.
Most of his Citra-time is spent reviewing other peoples code (which does not necessarily mean he'll understand who wrote it or what exactly it does - consider it like spellchecking = he might not be able to decide who deserves money).
It's also possible that he'll be gone for weeks due to personal life.
This is also true for me - most of my contributions were in early 2016, since then I've mostly moved to organizing the community.
So what if people worked on the project, expecting monetary rewards, but then nobody has any clue what they actually did or is responsible for sending them money?
I certainly wouldn't be able to help them or cash them out - it would only lead to anger (rightfully).
Even if this approach would work then you are still leaving out people like
@LG_ or
@Miguel Gomez or hundreds of other people I've talked to on Discord or the forums who continue to push the community forward.
They might not contribute code, but they are helping users and take a lot of time to learn and communicate what emulation should be and how it works.
If you ever visited our forums or discord, you'll realize that those things are as important.
I'd personally feel uneasy not giving them money from a pool of money if we are cashing out. - I think such work should also not be left unrecognized.
However: Other people might have different views about this.
If you don't want any special backer treatment you can feel free to donate through the existing channel:
https://citra-emu.org/donate/
If you want to do a monthly donation I'm sure bunnei will work something out with you.
Again: I *personally* would not recommend donating money to Citra - rather give it to EFF / medical research which probably also benefits us (as human beings / or attack helicopters).
Citra already does have an official blog.
I have a private Patreon and know that the Patreon blog system is very lacking in features.
So at best you'd get a link back to our official blog - I consider the Patreon blogs to be impractical.
However: Even with a good blog software in place, it's very hard to find enough people willing to actively maintain a blog - if you have an article you can just submit it through GitHub:
https://github.com/citra-emu/citra-web/tree/master/site/content/entry
You should realize that writing a good article takes a lot of time: I've been working on one myself and it's already more than a week in the making.
Our past progress reports took so long to write, that by the time they were finished the features were replaced or months old already.
So we even have some remaining drafts we never released.
Dolphin even has dedicated technical minded people as blog writers.
They've also written for Citra in the past, however, it's nearly impossible to write 2 blog posts (one for Citra, one for Dolphin) per month, even for a dedicated and experienced writing staff.
(This would be easier if Citra wasn't as rapidly changing / open-source)
I'll *hopefully* publish my own articles which don't fit on the project blogs on my own blog (currently Patreon but in the future my website).
In fact, nobody stops anyone from making even a paid blog about Citra. I'd personally like to see this way of monetizing emulation more often (that's a business model / not a donation model though, and it's beneficial for one person only).
However: as of now, nobody volunteered for this either, despite possible monetary rewards.
(It's also what I had planned for xqemu: work on the emu for free, but sell articles about ongoing development)
One way which *is* often monetized and is very similar are YouTube channels.
Citra does *also* maintain a YouTube channel. However, producing (good) videos takes even longer.
However, the community is fortunately present to fix this issue on unofficial channels. I personally recommend John 'pcmaker' Godgames: Having worked with him for a long time I feel he is not exploiting Citra to make money, but rather found a good way of monetizing it.
He is actively supporting development through testing / bug reports and documenting different versions of Citra.
He also understands that he depends on our work and supports emulation projects and developers (me) via Patreon.
I agree, I love progress reports (Shoutouts to JMC and the crew).
So if you are asking for a more active blog: I get that, I also want that.
However, having Patreon doesn't make this magically happen.
We have our own infrastructure for everything which Patreon provides (except rewards): We do accept donations and we do have a blog.
What's lacking is workforce and organization, not money.
Note that I'm personally responsible that there is a list of merged experimental PRs in the Bleeding Edge README.
So adjusting these READMEs seemed logical: at least you don't have to click through GitHub anymore.
I honestly care about the community knowing the current state of development and I'm all for putting stuff in laymans terms.
As we usually don't have time to flesh things out for a blog article, I'll usually end up explaining various technical topics on Discord (also on request).
Some people are now starting to write these things down and I hope some of those might become blog writers in the future.
For now: If you want to know something, join us on the official IRC (recommended if you want to help development) or Discord (recommended if you want things in laymans terms).
Fair enough, I'm bad at being short and precise.
My understanding was that you proposed the cemu business model / Patreon to earn money (Donations / Payment, whatever you want to call it).
I'll repeat: If you want a Patreon without rewards, we already have all of that (just not called Patreon).
My intention is not to "make shit up" - I'm starting to think this is mostly a misunderstanding about what you have been proposing.
Money is not necessarily appreciation. It can be, but it doesn't have to.
Take one of the other devs for example: I'v been coding for hours with him the last couple of days. He currently needs money.
I'm offering 10 bucks to him so he can replace his broken laptop battery / charger. It's a show of appreciation.
Regardless of wether I'll give this money to him or not, he'd still continue to work on Citra.
That dev also recently aquired hardware for Citra which was not paid for by the project.
Now you might ask: why wasn't it paid for?
I think this comes down to a handfull of reasons:
- He'd buy it regardless of the projects financial backing, because it's a passion for him.
- Why would you ask for money if you can afford it yourself?
If you wanted it to get some kind of appreciation you'd suddenly be asking for that money / appreciation.
It defeats the point of being a symbol of appreciation.
- If money was offered to him, where does it stop?
Will we buy a new gaming PC for each contributor who asks?
Would the people who donated for us be fine with this?
Would the other developers be fine with it?
It would also need oversight so people don't request money for something they don't end up getting.
- Who tells us they'll continue to contribute after receiving money or hardware the first time?
This would be bad for the project as we have to show new developers around the codebase, so introducing a new developer takes time and effort from at least one other developer.
However, ongoing financial support is not easily possible. We'd probably also need an entire HR department to manage the cashflow.
In February alone, we had 12 different people working on Citra.
In January it was 15 different people. (And currently development is rather slow)
Even if we earned 20k a month (like cemu) with donations, we'd barely be able to pay $1000 per person (that is, without a HR department, forum and website admins taking a cut).
At that point we'd have to worry about taxes and other legal mumbo jumbo.
Aside from these legal hurdles, it still wouldn't be enough for anyone to stop their day jobs to pay for rent, food, ...
They'd probably still devote the same time to Citra as they do now.
- Why would you ask to be paid for something, which is a hobby?
If you get paid for it, it stops being a hobby - it becomes work.
Especially if you are being paid for hardware, you feel obligated to work with it.
I've talked to a handful of developers who could not handle this. It adds stress to an already stressful hobby.
We are literally taking 10 hours of our day to work on this project - it's fun, but it's also tiring.
Why add another stress factor to it?
(pewdiepie actually made a couple of excellent videos about this)
I get this. Still no reason to claim that I'm anal about this.
I'm certainly anal about certain things, but I think here you are just misinterpreting my intentions:
In *my* posts I state *my* motivation and *my* perception of the situation.
I'm by no means setting standards anyone else has to adhere to.
---
Concluding all of the above, hopefully you can understand why I say: donate to people, not to projects.
Please use *your* time to follow the project a bit and offload the organizational work of distributing money from us.
You can decide who works on features *you* care about. You know *who* does work you are interested in.
You can also decide if you want to pay for acutal work happening, or if you are looking for social donations for people in financial needs (those you mentioned).
Even if the money arrives at the wrong person or they don't want any, they'll likely know who to give the money to.
They also know whose work they depend on, so they can themselves decide to split the money fairly.
You'll also be able to have a more direction connection to show emotional support:
There's a difference between getting a monthly paycheck from a project OR receiving a handful of them, possibly with personal messages attached.
- This is a working approach which should be common sense. Unfortunately it isn't (yet).
The only risk with it, is that some people are more public (like me) or even deceiving and hence will receive more money.
Hence it also needs a strong community to call out on bullshit (which is what I'm doing with cemu by the way).
So please also try to look behind the facade and figure out who deserves money and who doesn't (I can certainly think of names here, even within Citra).
I'll add some closing words about cemu: I'd totally be fine with him earning > $20k a month if he just opened up the source code.
I'd even be fine with it if we had a guarantee that the source code will be public: exzap could give the source code to a trusted third party to release it if he disappears for whatever reasons.
- I still wouldn't like the project or it's business model, but I could at least tolerate it.
