So a few things. First, where should we store money? To be honest, for any amount up to $1000, distributed amongst at least 3 of us, I'm happy to let PayPal handle it. Over that amount we should probably create a legal entity with owners and stuff and get a real, insured bank account for it. Um, not that money in cash, more like that money in flow. So say we have sooo much money coming in that we're getting at least $400/month, we should have something to handle it. That's probably quite a ways off.
So how do we spend it? Generally, I'm talking.
1. Up to a certain amount we should save. Not sure where to set it, should be something like 3 x expenses, which in this case is $105. That would be yearly expenses, and after they reach a certain level, if income is strong enough, reduce the factor we need to save. We pay our expenses out of this.
2. After that, what? We should spend it on stuff that Benefits The Project, what does the project need? I suggest we put together a wishlist somewhere where developers can say what they need, give links to buy or whatever, and then we can prioritize it. I'm thinking stuff like MS Visual Studio (if we want to keep doing builds with it and it's worth buying), special video cards for testing, computers for testing (like buying Lucifer a new router so he can make an OpenWrt port
), stuff like that. It should either be to fix bugs that can't be fixed without a developer possessing the hardware, or adding features/porting the game that require new hardware to add.3. More stuff that benefits the project. Would a compiler farm be helpful to us? Something that spits out nightly builds from svn trunk?
4. Industry conventions.
We send representatives to industry conventions. Stuff like LinuxWorld, LinuxExpo, whatever else appears. We'd have to put up entry fees, hotel rooms, etc. Expensive, but worthy expenses.5. I think it's reasonable that developers have a chunk of it at some point, if there's a lot. But how much and how to give it out? One consideration is to contract with one or more developers to do work on the game. There are other ideas we can beat around, we've got a ways before there's enough money to consider this, if it ever happens.
6. Potential loans/gifts to developers if they have the misfortune to hit on hard times. We should take care of each other, right?
As for the $200 we've got, we can sit on it, but I think we should work out how we're going to spend any money and start moving on it. People have given us $200! Rock! They want us to spend it making the game better, or somehow improving the project, so we can't sit on it too long without at least developing a plan, right?
- long live to adblock.)
