KjellMorgenstern
commented
4 years ago We consider #3435 solved and closed, I think it should answer those questions already. However, the complete ticket is quite tedious to read and understand, so I try to summarize it here.
Fritzing development had ceased for three years, until I became maintainer. I understand you want to know about the usage of the payments. I believe the best way to answer this is to deliver a perfect and up to date software. Unfortunately, we inherited quite a backlog of technical and non-technical issues. Development is slower than I wish it were, but with the CI and the new website, I think we are on the right track and increasing speed. Ups, sounds like one of those manager reports from my former employer :-)
The problem of Fritzing was that there were simply no developers anymore, also due to a lack of money. The payments go to the development of Fritzing. Although many still consider it a donation due to the open-source nature, the payments are not donations; tax is paid. A lot has happened since I became maintainer and primary developer. To name a few things, only listing technical aspects, not legal or business: Repair the builds, setup a continuous integration, update for more recent platforms (Window 10, MacOS Mojave, Ubuntu, Fedora), several hundred github issues, several thousand support emails, one new release so far, several emergency fixes to the website, finally migrating the 2010 website implementation to a 2020 software stack, a new forum server, moving the blog from wordpress to a static page, a dedicated email server (increasing email delivery from 95% to more than 99%) and automated testing for the website. Because of the website rewrite, there was low activity on fritzing app repo the last months. In progress are
- release 0.9.5
- a new parts editor
- improvements to the project editor on the website
- adding more parts
On the website, right above the payment form, we state "... This way, we can ensure future releases, bugfixes, and features". We could elaborate this more, and I did in the forum, in issue #3435 and others. On the webpage, people don't need to bother with the project's struggles if they don't want to. I'll prepare a similar story for the Fritzing Blog, and will mention this on the main website.
Does this answer your questions?
WimberleyTech
ChadBailey
erm3nda
el-j
d3cline
failiz
hkienle
After a recent run-in letting the magic smoke out of some electronics I wondered to myself, "Can I simulate circuits so that I can test them before building them?" That is the question that lead me to Fritzing.
When I was on the website, I was asked for a $8 donation... (OK, 8 euro but I don't know how to do that sign and the actual amount is unimportant to my point). My first thought was, "Cool, an open source project which is requiring payment... I can get behind this!" My next thought was "Why are they asking for donations for development when they've only released 2 updates in the past 5 years?"
When I begin unearthing the layers searching, I find things like this https://github.com/fritzing/fritzing-app/issues/3435
Truly I'm left very confused and conflicted. Do I donate to help revive this project? Are the original owners just using the money donations on hookers as the aforementioned talk alludes to? If so, why not fork it? If not - maybe this is a new addition to the page to re-ignite dev work? If so, why has it been a year and a half since then? I have so many questions and no answers.
Truth be told, I would rather have spent $8 than the time and effort I've spent trying to figure out if I should toss a coin in the hat so to speak. I know that if I feel this way - very likely most visitors feel this way. Worse yet, I'm sure they wouldn't bother investigating and will just download the latest release on github foregoing the donation option. I don't blame them for doing so, but I for some reason decided to dig in and attempt understanding.
TLDR; if you want donations, make it super clear that they are to rekindle dev work. If the donations are actually being used for that, make it clear on the page that the project is under new management/in process of being revived. If they aren't being used for that, please get over your nostalgia of the name and fork the project already. Whatever you do, don't call it "libre-fritzing" or "free-fritzing" because those names suck.