OK. And how many sales ?
If 1,000 sales, it start to be OK;-
[quote=255477:@Christian Schmitz]A non trivial control may take at least 10 hours to code. plus testing, examples and documentation.[/quote][quote=255570:@Loannis Kolliageorgas]At last for my country(Greece),i know developers with salary per hour 15 euro without insurance, just part time.[/quote]Given that time and rate it wouldn’t take many backers at $20 a pop to make it a viable proposition. If it were a control I was interested I’d take a punt for $20.
[quote=255550:@Bob Keeney]For me, the real deal with a control is a) can I get the source if the developer disappears (happened before multiple times) ? and b) are they going to support it both short term and long term?[/quote]If it was a community sponsored control then surely the source would have to be available to all. As for support I’d suggest once the control performs it’s specified function that’s it, job done. Anything more would either have to be done via more sponsorship of the original developer or alternatively in the manner of other open source software.
[quote=255556:@Norman Palardy]4) who decides “the spec” and who gets to sign off when “done” ?[/quote]For me that’s the trickiest bit. The spec has to be quite precise so the backers can say: “Yes, job done” or “No, you’ve missed x which was clearly in the spec.”
To give you an idea, I can tell that I just made a TaskDialogMBS class.
Total time close to 20 hours of work to get all things right:
http://monkeybreadsoftware.net/class-taskdialogmbs.shtml
Multiply that by a hourly rate to get a price for this class. Please also calculate that I’m doing 15 years of development already, so I’m not a C++ beginner.
Also calculate probably a few hours in the rest of year for support.
and I’m curious to see what offers are made in future and maybe I take a few 
Not necessarily. Crowd funding often starts with a sponsored version for people who participated, then the product becomes commercial. It does not have to be open sourced. Actually, that may ease the burden on crowd funding.
The crowd funding thing could work as some other projects financed the same way :
- Crystal Reports for Xojo will start development when funding reaches X amount of dollars.
Then the issue is, will there be enough people to vote with their credit cards, and what happens if the threshold is not reached ? Refund ?
[quote=255619:@jean-paul devulder]the crownd funding are have just moral obligation of result, not legal
i can ask 10 000$ for Crystal Reports xojo port, and 6 months after say sorry it’s to hard to develop and keep money
(i have buy my 2 first houses and my three ferrari with this method ;))[/quote]
$10.000 will never buy you a house or a Ferrari 
A vote system or Survey will be more interactive to all this questions and answer i think.
At last for xojo community.
Like…
How much people will spend for plugin…
What plugin the need.
If is encrypt or not.
If is cross platform etc…
[quote=255610:@Michel Bujardet]Not necessarily.[/quote]Make access to the source a condition of the bounty.
[quote=255610:@Michel Bujardet]Then the issue is, will there be enough people to vote with their credit cards, and what happens if the threshold is not reached ? Refund ?[/quote]Have a system like escrow where the funds are held by a third party until both sides are happy. If insufficient funds are raised backers just get a refund.
These don’t strike me as big obstacles.
If some quality controls were produced through this process who knows Xojo Inc may even want to adopt some of them and make them part of the official offering.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a thread where people say “I would like to have this”, so others can (a) see how much interest there is, (b) what it is supposed to do, and most importantly, © if they already have something like it can make it available?
I believe the original idea is for control developers to make the offer.
Like: “I’ve got a proposal for a plugin that reads your mind, and I can make it a reality for $15,000”
This is where the reputation thing comes into play.
The biggest problem is abuse; like with everything else.
If a dev punts his idea and it gains interest, then another developer will come along with a quick dirty hacky solution, before the first developer has even finished designing the solution.
Just like Samsung, LG, Moto all shipped a smart watch based upon rumors that Apple was making a smart watch.
Personally, I would suggest that it’s a place where people can register feature requests. Then developers can decide if they feel it’s worth it. Once they’ve completed their version (as multiple developers can all vie for the same request), then the requestees are notified that a solution is available.
Maybe the requestees can also vote on which solution they prefer? So, solution A) was easy to implement, but way too limited. solution b) was perfect.
I’d do it like kick starter so people commit something up front to someone - a show of good faith
And have many of the same “rules” - complete it or refund the money
How you enforce that I have no idea
Heck - just USE kickstarter or gofundme or one of those and lets go
[quote=255704:@Sam Rowlands]The biggest problem is abuse; like with everything else.
If a dev punts his idea and it gains interest, then another developer will come along with a quick dirty hacky solution, before the first developer has even finished designing the solution.
Just like Samsung, LG, Moto all shipped a smart watch based upon rumors that Apple was making a smart watch.[/quote]Which is the ‘quick dirty hacky solution’, Samsung’s elegant rotating bezel or Apple’s ludicrous giant hand impaling knob? If it prompts another party to design a better, more elegant alternative I don’t see that as a negative either.
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[quote=255707:@Norman Palardy]I’d do it like kick starter so people commit something up front to someone - a show of good faith
And have many of the same “rules” - complete it or refund the money[/quote]I agree. Of course the whole idea would probably die a death if the first dev to get a gig turns out to be disappointment but if we’re each only in for $20 I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
The first Samsung smart watch they rushed out, had a 30% return rate Samsung Galaxy Gear - Wikipedia
The smart watch was just an example; imagine if you’d taken the time to design and build a really good software product, only to find that a competitor had gotten wind of your product and created a much cheaper version first? Especially when we’re talking about a limited market here.
My point is; would you tell your competitors what your next application is in advance and let them see how many people have pre-ordered?
This topic has sure gone off on a bend. We started talking about custom controls… and end up talking about Kickstarter projects?
The XOJO market for custom controls is pizza-money in my opinion. You (we/I) do it because we need it ourself, or we do it as a challenge to our our skillset. A Kickstarter project (to me), is something akin to XOJO itself… a product that requires a large amount of resource and capital to sustain it until it can be put to market…
As Bob mentioned, an Xojo Crystal Reports COULD fall into that category in terms of effort required… but would it give a return on investment? It sells for about $500 in a MUCH bigger market. It would need to cost significantly more in this market to be as profitable
- Karen
[quote=255736:@Karen Atkocius]As Bob mentioned, an Xojo Crystal Reports COULD fall into that category in terms of effort required… but would it give a return on investment? It sells for about $500 in a MUCH bigger market. It would need to cost significantly more in this market to be as profitable
- Karen[/quote]
And there in lies the problem (and why custom controls will remain “pizza money”). People complain about the price of XOJO itself, and there already IS a level of report writer. So the correct statement is “it would need to cost significantly with adequate sales in this market to be profitiable” … Now I don’t have a need for any level of report writer myself, and writing custom code to produce a report to fit a specific application (again to me), doesn’t warrant trying to integrate a $500 3rd party control into a $299 programming environment. If such a Kickstarter were to be started, I’m betting 90% of the “sales” would be from the backers…
In previous posts it was said that would have to be open source. So if that was the case, it would have to be entirely financed by backers.
Then further down, several times the price of $20 per backer came around.
How many people would participate ? 100 ? 200 ? lets get crazy and say 300 ?
Now, let us be realistic. To create such a complex report writer as Crystal Report, how many hours of programming would be necessary ?
Does anybody seriously think Crystal Report can be written for $6000 only ?
which is the reason for my statement [quote]You (we/I) do it because we need it ourself, or we do it as a challenge to our own skillset.[/quote]. Our ego out strips the wallet :), or someone says “For MY programming situation, I NEED a “Crystal Reports” like control, so I will write it for ME, and if others can benefit, so be it”. And this negates Normans comment about “who defines the specs”, as the specs are arrived at solely by the developer.
Who writes the MBS specs? (for example). Sure Christian listens to input from his customers, but the actual functional and/or technical specs are provided BY him not TO him (assuming he writes them at all )
I wouldn’t foresee anything as complex as a report designer / renderer resulting from what’s being proposed here