Whomever is the maintainer of the GitHub repo for Allegro, could you submit the project to be sponsored? Visit https://github.com/sponsors, and click "Join the Waitlst" to submit. GitHub will match donations.

I was recently using https://github.com/nlohmann/json on TINS and was like "This is so useful, I wonder if there's a way to donate." At the top of the repo is a Sponsor button and I was like 🤔🤔🤔.

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Talk to elias and SiegeLord on IRC. I think one of them could probably help you. I will gladly donate $100 of my $2000 stimulus check. Assuming it passes the senate. ::

We don't need money, we need people . And the numbers here aren't enough to pay for people.

I'll second what OP said. I would gladly donate, especially if the donation was matched.

Yeah, what SiegeLord said. In a distant past we had donations enabled on sourceforge but there wasn't really much we could have done with the occasional $50.

It isn't always about money...

https://blog.codinghorror.com/is-money-useless-to-open-source-projects/

That blog post suggests funding bounties. That might be an interesting option. But first we'd need to agree on what the bounties are.

sponsor on github, what a useless thing. All its source codes are shared free of charge by its non-profit developers. And if you really wanted to profit you would not use github, you would go by closed code and you would apply a direct Paypal button on your personalized website.

It only serves to attract idiotic or curious people.

It's not about profit. It's a way of generating revenue to be able to pay people to work on the project fulltime rather than only in their spare time.

@LennyLen , It is the same, generating income is profit. You need to be paid to be able to pay the programmers.

On the topic of bounties in game libs, there was an interesting discussion on this Godot issue where the lead devs actually refused it. Annoyingly in this case, that issue is still open and still a massive problem.

Sorry, but that's just blatantly wrong. It's only profit if the income is greater than the expenses. If you spend all of the income on paying people, then the profit is zero.

I do agree that having people power is more desirable than money power when it comes to OSS projects.

Let me offer a different perspective, however.

After TINS, amarillion and I chatted a bit about ways to incentivize more interest in the compo. This year's compo was really good, there was a lot of engagement, a lot of participation, a bunch of submissions. (#allegro IRC was very active, there were tons of logs, etc)

There's a lot of other things we could do to bring in more people, including consolidating social outreach. All of this is work, true, but some of it comes down to raw capital. I think competitions like this and Speedhack are a good way to let Allegro "live" longer, and increase interest, participation, and awareness.

During our discussion, the topic of offering prizes came up.

Like, take for example that we right now have a pledge for $100 from Edgar. Matched with GitHub that would be $200. I'm happy to pledge $100 too, and that would bring the a total to $400.

What could we do with $400? Run the next Speedhack, partially sponsored by Allegro, and offer prizes. Any combination of:

• $250 pass to the next GDC

• Nintendo Switch (I don't have one!)

• Radeon RX 5600 XT

• Reclining Gamer Chair

• Top 10 get a license to Aseprite

• Free allegro stickers mailed to participants (US/Canada and some other countries)

I think we would get a lot more people aware of and using Allegro with things like this.

I also recall a good portion of the last pile of Allegro funds went toward developing mobile ports (buying devices for testing) which I think was a great allocation of the money.

The important message is, I wouldn't cut short the possibility of leveraging capital as a way to bring good people in. . And, I think starting by opening channels like GitHub sponsors is the right place to start.

I actually like the idea of physical prizes like stickers (I love my allegro stickers ). And I think in one of the early *hacks I won a CD with Monster-1 on it (probably Trent G. was running it) - and finding it in the mail made me really happy

Not sure we should use the Allegro github for it though. We'd be too late to get any matching funds [1] so really the only advantage over just sending to you or amarillion directly would be the button on the github site.

For what it's worth if anything comes out of this I can also pledge $100 out of the $1200 I got from Trump (I was going to donate it all to ODNR (local nature preserves) but fine with splitting it a bit).

[1] https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source-community-with-github-sponsors/about-github-sponsors#about-the-github-sponsors-matching-fund

Ah dang! That's too bad.

Wouldn't it be funny though:

1. Shawn Hargreaves starts Allegro.

2. Shawn Hargreaves leaves Allegro and works for Microsoft to work on game programming libraries.

3. Allegro moves to GitHub.

4. GitHub gets bought by Microsoft.

5. Microsoft starts sponsor program on GitHub.

6. Allegro gets sponsored.

7. Microsoft matches funding to Allegro, which gives it just enough to propel it in popularity to become the #1 game programming library!!

8. Microsoft's scraps its game programming department in favor of Allegro support.

9. Shawn Hargreaves wat .

Regarding the actual topic (luls), I do think that opening up as many channels as possible is really the right approach. At my company, we advise most if not all business to start being available on as many channels as possible to find their audiences and sell products. Online store, in-store, Twitter, YouTube, Patreon, Instagram, Facebook, and so forth. It's more about reaching the customer where they are, enabling the payment gateways that are most familiar for them, etc.

So I would advise to experiment and give the GitHub sponsorship program a try. It might work, it might not. That's kinda the nature of the game, though.

Reading back in that sticker thread, there seemed to be some interest in an Allegro store (stickers, mugs, t-shirts). I would expect that it would be incredibly low volume. It would be more a labor of love, really. That might be something to explore, it could all go in the same pile. A big Allegro bucket of cash haha

I would love to see Allegro to rise in popularity to SDL / SFML levels. I really don't get why it's not more popular.

For what it's worth I would also be willing to pledge $100.

@LennyLen
As long as you make some money, it's still profit, no matter how many expenses are involved.

Even if you follow your way of thinking, it is unfair that you treat programmers or even yourself as an expense, and it is even more unfair to think that if you do not pay other programmers then it is not considered an expense because you keep them. Those kinds of twisted self-sacrificing thoughts are worthless, don't exist, and come from the general and viral thinking of internet society as a crazy definition of kindness, or are even treated on the opposite side as something evil or perverse that should be avoided.
If you receive money then it is profit, and you keep them, and you decide what to spend it on, whether it is for the programmers or for yourself, but there is no difference, they all count to reinforce your project, regardless of who the money is directed to, so that you have licenses, or under what conditions your projects have. It is stupid to decide or discriminate according to the decision made by the project owner about within their projects.

@Mark Oates
I find it interesting. Although there should be only 1 prize, or 3 prizes maximum. Despite being 14 participants this year, it is still not enough to spend on prizes.
As it is some kind of contest or competition, rather than the popularity of the graphic library, it needs to be more popular than contests (such as ludum ware, or speedhack, or anything else).
Also in TINS, the use of Allegro is optional. If more people come from outside, they will be people who do not use Allegro, they will end up making games in Java, Rust, Go, or any other shitty language that nobody gives a cucumber, and so it will be even more difficult promote Allegro. And I don't think that forcing those people to use Allegro encourages them to participate in the competition. Maybe if you offer tempting prizes and hide the contest entry date until you accumulate a reasonable number of entrants.

@Mark Oates

Maybe DirectX will add Allegro as a dependency

You're thinking in reverse, here. We offer the prize up front during the announcements of the upcoming competition, which will increase the number of people who participate. For perspective, I think 20 people entering with 14 people actually submitting, just because they love it and for no prizes whatsoever, is strong evidence that it can work.

I think most people this year actually submitted with an Allegro powered game, to be honest. Some food for thought.

Loooool

Again, that's not how profit works. Profit is defined as revenue less expenses. So if I have a business that makes $1000 a week, and costs $500 a week to run, the profit is $500 per week, not $1000. Here is a whole article on profit.

And where did I say any of that?

as devs, or library users?

Yes!

I see some potential for Allegro sponsoring:

• Meet-ups: let's organize a real meet up (as soon as this corona thing has passed) as a satelite conference of a big conference like GDC, and give devs a contribution towards their travel expenses. The Amsterdam meet-up this year fell through, also because of corona, but here also, I still want to come back to this later in the year.

  
  

• Prizes - Like Mark said, we discussed prizes for TINS 2021. I would love to be able to offer, let's say a ~$250 value first prize, plus t-shirts for the top 10 or something like that. Use of Allegro would be required to participate in the prizes (also I'd have to exclude myself as organizer). It would draw new people to the competition and increase attention to allegro. In a way, it's just a form of advertising.

These are about building out the community. I was thinking some more about bounties, but I don't think lack of features is what is holding Allegro back. To make Allegro more popular, it's more worthwhile to invest in the community.

I'd be happy to support Allegro either montly or per bounty.

not sure if this is helping in any way: a random thought: I have never tried using Allegro with SDL port for system calls - though, if this is implemented completely then having a HTML5 showcase page should be feasible - and having an online showcase might bring more people in. Possibly all of the TINS could be made available online in that case?

EDIT: If it is possible to compile to HTML5, I could do that. Just will likely need some help getting my environment setup.

I help out where I can, but simply with my health issues I can't full-time anything. I might be making a simpler Steam game slated toward September. But my life is always one big question mark.

I'd love to help more on the library... though Siegelord practically did most of the work to implement MP3 support in the end, after I fumbled up the inital code to use them as Samples.

I wouldn't want to give off an impression that we've gotta pay people to use Allegro, hah. I guess a prize-pool sort of thing might make sense though. I've never seen bug bounties work, but perhaps that's an okay idea too.

I think it cannot hurt to enable it on the GitHub page and leave it for 6 months - see how that goes. By that time it should be obvious how much there is and what can be done with it. If it fails to be a sum of interest to anyone just send it to one charity or similar.

@MikiZX , What?? Nothing for one charity! If nobody wants the money send it to me!!

This makes complete sense to me. Most experienced developers are already rich driving lambos. That leaves the bounties $$ incentive to more junior developers who are likely to implement the bounty in a sloppy way.

At this scale, it seems merit and passion (and availability) are better motivators.

For the sake of argument, though, I wager bounties are less about a direct link to the development of a feature, and more of a marketing thing, spreading awareness about the project in general.

Things is old standing projects like this don't get devs if they don't get users. What we need are more users, and then they will contribute more often as devs, because they have a vested interest in making the library they use work well for them.

I have wanted to say this for a long time, I have built my server and client with the purpose of making developers earn money. Why don't you support me in some way for the same purpose?

Hi all!
if you want more users... what about youtube? there are a lot of channels about c++, videosgames, programms, android... I mean, why allegro havent got a youtube channel yet? let the crowd meet allegro;D

I talk about allegro on my channel, and many others too.

I think what is needed is something a little more professional I guess. Separated by chapters and explaining game reviews or codes for 30 minutes per chapter. All from depots.

Long ago when I had the opportunity to use YouTube, I wanted to do the same with my server the time I had Chess working. But guess that? I couldn't do absolutely nothing! Issue? There were no people participating. This can only work if there are people participating which can nurture and allow for any lengthy reviews or interviews. Allegro has very little, and may risk running out of anything to show.

Perhaps in Richmond or Mountain view...

According to this we make more than half of what a doctor makes and we're up in the top 10 along with dentists and pharmacists and architects

I must admit, whilst I always turn to Allegro from my development projects, finding or building an Allegro port always seems pretty difficult.

I'm currently looking at making my current project compilable on my new Odroid Go Advance. As always, there's an SDL 2 port already though.

I don't even understand the concepts of KMS/DRM to even know how to port Allegro to it. Though there is a library for interacting with the OGA's features, but I'll be honest, this sort of stuff is generally over my head.

I'm maintaining a project with SDL. While it's more popular, it's a pile of trash in so many ways. Even installing it can be a PITA because SDL and SDL2 have conflicting filenames.

I'd almost port it to Allegro just to see how hard it would be but it wouldn't really "do" anything for me as long as SDL is currently working.

Funny thing is, this is a 90's game open sourced "update" so it uses tons of per-pixel access and scanline access (was originally for 8-bit color), so it might even be faster in Allegro4.

I decree this thread shall be open for another two weeks.