[Vorbis] Bitrate Peeling (no. really)

[Ralph Giles]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 10:48:23AM +0200, Paul Wagland wrote:

> OK, so it is on the Wiki, how do I say, here's 20USD on the way to this.
> Especially since I don't want to give the money until there is a reason ;-)

Well, we could have a page of 'people who promised to pay' but 
personally I wouldn't find that especially motivating.

> How do we "ensure" that people who "only say" that they will donate to the
> cause, will donate to the cause. What I would really like to see is an 
> escrow that has the following "fields"

I think using the Xiph.org Foundation as the escrow agent makes the most 
sense. Any service with an online interface is going to take a 
significatnt cut for themselves, and the amounts are a probably too 
small and from too many contributors for a traditional escrow agent to 
make sense. That leaves some individual, or xiph.org itself. I'd rather 
trust the foundation.

> What is the money for?
> Who can say whether or not this is done?
> What timeframe is the pledge valid for?
> What should happen with the money when the pledge expires?

I'd suggest the following:

People can make donations to Xiph.org, but say they'd in particular like 
to support one of (or any of) the bug bounties. We'd earmark the money 
for the bounty fund and update the posted bounty. Award would be based 
solely on the decision of the core xiph.org team.

The bounties can be disbanded by decision of the Xiph.org Foundation 
board, at which point the money reverts to the foundation. If it's 
important to a lot of people, we could refund the donations at this 
time to those who so requested when they contributed; if we can't find 
you the money reverts to the foundation. There should probably be a 
minimum posting time, say 2 years, to reassure people the board won't 
cut and run with the money. (Why we'd do that is beyond me. Xiph.org 
exists to foster this work, and if we didn't believe these were 
important task in support of our mandate, we wouldn't have posted 
bounties for them!)

 -r