This poll is only to measure actual interest and preferred models.
What if we create a community-funded Bug-Fix Taskforce
, a dedicated group focused solely on fixing bugs and improving Rhino’s robustness (with no new features)?
The concept: each interested user contributes a voluntary annual donation (e.g. USD 50–200/year). Funds go directly to support additional developers dedicated to triage, regression fixing, and stability improvements.
Would you contribute annually to a Bug-Fix Taskforce (bug fixing only, no new features)?
McNeel is neither a registered 501(c)(3) charity, nor an NGO. McNeel is an incorporated business. If McNeel would be interested to fix more bugs, and fix them faster, the company would hire additional coders. McNeel could then raise the price, which could be justified, or take a cut to the bottom line, and not raise the price.
Also, who would be the legal recipient of the donations? What contractually enforceable obligation would the recipient have with respect to the donors? Which bug fixes are more urgent than other bug fixes? Would a donor donating $100 per year have lesser voting rights pertaining to the urgency of a bug-fix than a donor donating $150 per year?
Yes lol! It will stir up some interesting discussion perhaps. I suspect that might be the actual goal.
This is more appropriate for the business model of course. For the more challenging bugs to fix they will have to make a compromise between features and reliability. For the less challenging bugs to fix I think they have to do some internal re-organization or something, and possibly some different protocols. There are some bugs that would be very easy to fix but they just don’t bother. Lots of code doesn’t get checked before being pushed. In general there isn’t enough testing. And in some cases there appears to be a lack of understanding of the problem. I feel that if they juggled people around that might be beneficial as someone stuck on a problem might be way more productive if placed on something else - and at the same time someone new might be easily able to fix the issue. It appears there might be enclaves or a lack of integration/communication between areas/features.
I don’t think increasing the price of the general Rhino license is a good idea, as it seems unfair to students, beginners, or those who only use Rhino occasionally.
The idea behind a voluntary pool was to give advanced/professional users, who prioritize stability, the option to accelerate bug fixes, helping the Rhino team without penalizing others.
For this to work in the long term, the only realistic beneficiary would be McNeel himself (or an entity he directly controls). Any other option would create unnecessary overhead or legal ambiguity.
This means that McNeel and the developer team would have to be willing to establish a transparent channel, such as a “Rhino Stability Fund.”
A service contract rather than a “donation.”? McNeel could publish a clear scope, e.g., funds are earmarked for additional developer hours dedicated to bug triage and bug fixes.
A voting rights (e.g. 10 votes per year) as a user-driven pain signal. They clearly show where paying users feel the most pain. Severity (crashes, regressions, data loss)
I wish they would do something such as selling older version licenses for cheaper. People with smaller budgets also can’t afford the latest hardware so being able to use R6 (w Flamingo!!) could help people a lot.
Sketchup successfully removed this barrier by having a free version. They’re fiddling around with that model now and screwing it up. But they’re still profiting from it as it likely drastically increased their user base.
Student licenses are cheap but more and more often students are actually quite wealthy. Maybe they can give a 'super car’ discount to anyone who drives a Lamborghini or Ferrari . I’m exaggerating but do strongly believe that not just students should be given cheap access.
The more ‘help’ people get with tech it seems the lazier or more detached they get. Construction drawings generated with Revit more often have missing dimensions and many other errors even though the program streamlines many of those things. Seatbelts made people worse drivers allegedly. The scariest thing with AI for me is the prevalent “someone else will fix/deal with it” attitude; people get away with doing low-quality work for various reasons and the buck gets passed down the chain. Before the automated tech people would just do it right because it didn’t save them much time to do it wrong. But now you can do it wrong with AI in seconds - sure the task would take longer if they actually checked their work… but checking their work???
. I’m exaggerating but do strongly believe that not just students should be given cheap access.