We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Khalil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923

In my previous article—Before there was a beginning—we looked at some of the problems with the Joomla! 4 project and the myth that these problems can be easily cured simply by throwing money at them.  We also looked at a couple of the interest revenue-raising ideas that people have proposed.  This topic continues my story about how I arrived at the decision to build this websiteMuch of the material for this article is sourced from my comments on the Joomla! forum posted a couple of months ago..

How to obtain revenue for Joomla development and, thereby, use those funds to remunerate the otherwise-voluntary nature of how the project comes together has been something in the news over the past couple of months.  I don’t know whether financial incentives will improve the amount of work involved with the Joomla! 4 project or the quality of that work.  That’s a matter for debate but, in my view, the financial incentives would have to be on a par with, say, the salary levels that operate in successful businesses.  In other words, one would be talking in terms of millions of dollars.

Whether these levels could be achieved is something we can only speculate about at this time.  And, if those levels can be reached, will it result in a lift in the output and quality of work?  I really don’t know.

Is there in truth no beauty?George Herbert, Jordan (I), c. 1633

As with any community project, you can please some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time.  The Joomla! 4 project is a typical example.  As with any project that runs overtime—perhaps because there’s a failure to obtain consensus on the design specification or the development methodology (who knows?)—there usually reaches a stage where people—mostly people who reside outside of the project—suggest the way to fix the problem is by throwing money at it.

As anyone with experience in managing software projects would knowThere are three things a project manager needs in order successfully manage a project:  (a) control of the people who are involved in the project deliverables, (b) control of the financial budget and (c) control of the information that determines how much time and money will be spent and who does what. If you remove or constrain any of those elements the project is doomed to fail., when people ask the question, “Would more money fix the problem?”, questions like these imply there exists a universal, silver-bullet solution to every project manager’s dilemma:  that money can fix everythingAlthough, I should add, there is an adage in project management that says, “As soon as you put a dollar sign in front of the answer, the solution will become immediately obvious.”.