There are concerns with fairness, among other reasons.
ENIGMA is, at this point, a long-standing project which is quite unlikely to die. But it has serious issues with usability. A recent example of what I do not want this project to be is the Parakeet IDE that took the GMC by storm. We are, in many ways, the opposite of that project.
Parakeet is a proprietary IDE maintained by a small team of developers "contracted" by one GMC user. It is ostensibly vaporware; a download is available with limited features which was last updated May 2. If I had to guess, I'd say the project is dead. Before it died, though, it collected several hundreds of dollars from naïve twelve-year-olds loose with their parents' money. This is more than the net cost of running ENIGMA, and more than ENIGMA has ever drawn in, eg, via the ads on the home page.
I do not want ENIGMA to be that. What we have right now is basically solid, but it's missing the degree of polish that justifies selling a program. I don't want to personally accept donations until I feel that the project has reached a point where, were it not designed to be completely free, we
could sell it. I understand that you, and many others, are old enough and responsible enough to choose whom and which projects you would like to donate to. I respect that, and appreciate the sentiment.
But when a project has a donate button, it seems to imply that donations will in some way help the development, and people feel obligated, however slightly, to consider donating. Tossing money at ENIGMA will not help its development. Donations to the project should all be in your spirit of, "I see the work you have done, and I appreciate it; this is a token of that appreciation" rather than the Parakeet "WOW THE CONCEPT OF THIS IS PRETTY COOL AND IF YOU ACTUALLY MADE IT DO THE THINGS YOU SAY IT WILL IT'D TOTALLY BE WORTH THIS MONEY BUT ANYWAY HERE TAKE MY MONEY."
So basically, I want donations to be reactive, not proactive, first and foremost. Moreover, looking over my work in the project, I do not personally consider it to be worth accepting donations as of now. When the project inevitably reaches a point where that opinion changes, there arises the question of who gets the money. Do we split it evenly amongst all developers? Well, if we did that, it likely wouldn't cover ENIGMA's (relatively small) running costs. If the developers instead trusted me to be fair in deducting those costs first, then dividing up the remainder, we have a new problem: not all of our contributors generate the same amount of code, or put the same amount of work into the project. The proportion of work to code varies, too. Then on top of that, the quality varies. It wouldn't be hard for me to generate a hierarchy of contributors I would pay the most were doing so in my power, but in a transparent, donation-based environment, there could be hurt feelings.
What's more, imposing incentives for work in the field of computer science never ends well, period. Most lines of code? Enjoy 10,000 shitty lines of code to do the work of 300 clever lines. Most functions? Well, we have enough problems with function specialization and verbosity as it stands. In the case of donations, this wouldn't be about the money so much as about sheer competition. A developer's code style should not be influenced by any metric, save maintainability. which is itself not quantifiable.
We could allow you to contribute to each member based on your own judgment, which solves the bulk of the political issues. As it stands, though, none of the developers have requested that, so I assume they feel roughly the same way as I do about accepting donations at this phase of the project. This also makes it into a popularity contest; you might be inclined to donate to me, simply because I founded the project, despite the fact that I'm in third or fourth place by my own ranking system. You might also not be as inclined to donate to forthevin, simply because he is one of our less social developers, despite the surprisingly large number of nice things I have to say about him and his work on the project. Robert, on the other hand, is often the first on the scene with a response to a question, be it a useful one or a decorated shitpost.
I suppose my point here is that it is hard to maintain a fair and positive donation environment in a completely free project with multiple significant contributors.
In summary, this is what we don't want:
- Hurt feelings
- Donations from over-optimistic children (or adults) in the false hope that they will catalyze the completion of the project
- Unfairness based on a lack of an objective and uncontested ranking system of merit to the project
- Popularity contests and code-metric pissing contests, which only serve to hurt feelings and the project