In the (logged in) users’ download page there is paragraph:
I totally agree with this because I realize the hard work that goes into maintaining and evolving PureBASIC — which has been a solid and steadily growing language since 1998. I can only guess how time-consuming it must be to maintain a cross-platform language in time, especially since computing standards are evolving faster and faster — and I’d like to express my admiration for the constancy of PB’s devs for this.Since updates are free, those who want to support the further PureBasic development can do it here. Thank you !
But I think that donation-support should be give more visibility. Open source software often have a banner in the homepage and a whole page dedicated to the inflow of users donations.
It’s clear to me that a loving community of affictionados has grown around PureBASIC, and this very Forum — and the various websites dedicated to the language, as well as the moltitude of projects found around the web — are a testimony to this.
User participation is a very important aspect of any product, but especially so when it comes to programming languages: it stimulates other users to take an active role, and it’s a motivating factor when embarking in tasks that require long term dedication. There is a “viral” aspect to it, it’s just natural that envolment with others breeds more participation.
With all that supporting PureBASIC via donations is totally optional, I still think that it shouldn’t be something that happens “in the corner of the website”. I think that a banner with the (anonymous) donations toll should be well visible in the Forum — to both thank users who donated as well as to remind all users that supporting economically PureBASIC development is part of the community’s envolvement.
It’s easy to forget the separation line between contributing to the language by writing code and libraries (which are an important part of the language richness) and the economic support that helps maintainance of the language itself. In times were the scale of expectations is distorted by accustomization to videogames which have been devloped by teams of thousands of programmers, it’s even easier to forget that PureBASIC is maintained by a small team of dedicated people.
PureBASIC enjoys a users community which has nothing to envy to open source projects communities — it has the same spirit and dedication. As far as I see it, the PureBASIC license fee is almost nominal: you get a lifetime updates for a cross platform language, a full IDE with debugging tools, documentation in three locales, an SDK, and forums in different languages. What more can you ask?
Well … apprarently a lot. After all it seems that the more we love this language, the more we are making feature requests. It’s natural: we love it and we always want more of it, more from it, and better of it. And it’s so easy to forget that cross-platform bugs-fixing, and implementing, testing and maintaining features is a time consuming task.
Of course, I’m not proposing we stop asking for more from PureBASIC (or complaining when this or that feature isn’t the way we want it to be) — we can’t do that, we love it and we want more of/from it. So it will never happen. I instead propose we start giving more (of course, just in order to ask even more!
)This why I’m proposing that support donations may be given more visibility, and a donations-toll banner be created as incentive and a reminder. I also believe that a donations toll is good for transparency, apart from breaking the idea that coding support is a “community thing” whilst economic support is a “private thing” — they are both faces of the same coin, you can’t really have one without the other.
For some reasons, the latter of these two aspects has been given less visiblity that then the former. It’s not as if I was proposing something completely new, the invitation to donations has always been there, just not strongly emphasized.
I’d like to know what the community thinks on the issue — after all we’re speaking about community support.
