politics are not for restricted government use. nor does it have anything to do with rights.
wherever there are people who think for themselves, there are politics. voting is just one aspect.
Well, such feature pricing scheme has been successfully deployed in other projects quite many times. The context is simple: Implementing feature takes time. Time equals money. By giving money for feature X you basically buy developer workhours.
Let’s say a developer hour costs $30. If feature has got $300 of donations, it means community has compensated 10 hours to work on the feature. The one who says he can do the feature in 10 hours does the work and gets the money.
It’s not actually voting. It’s just normal development practice to take money from the client for the work hours task is going to be completed. Only this time the Client is the community.
I’m not surprised this turned into a politics debate…from the topic title, I thought this was about the US presidential elections, with some dirty scam being uncovered 
PS: I love the feature vote, does any other software have such a feature for it’s users?
If we’re going to talk in terms of money, I think that the team owes more time to the community as a whole then to some little rich kid that buys up more votes than anyone because they want their precious piano roll. The fact is, the registered members in the community have paid for their chunk of the vote already, and offsetting it by an additional $10/vote is simply ludicrous. If that little rich kid really wants his piano roll that badly, he can damned well buy more licenses and use THEM to vote.
… Switching topics: That speech you posted, which is from a fictional novel I might add, is nothing but a bunch of poorly conceived rhetoric that never really gets to the point of what it’s trying to say. Trying to rebut such a work is nearly impossible due to its almost complete lack of direction, and almost certain lack of structure.
At its core however, it speaks of the fact that money is representative of our efforts as an industrial people to produce useful product or service for our fellow people, and that as such, it is inherently good. It argues that the “looters” and “moochers” will always be there to take their undeserved share, however, but it also goes on to say that those are most likely the ones that will be the first to knock down the ideal of money. It goes on to make analogies to slavery, pointing out that money is the only viable alternative to more torturous and inhumane scenarios of production.
This point of view however, is flawed in that it assumes that the intentions of those that produce are inherently good… that they’re not “looters” or “moochers” themselves. It assumes that those that produce aren’t stepping on other people to get where they are. It assumes that things like slavery no longer exist, and it doesn’t even take into account collateral damage caused to things like the environment and our society as a result of amassing wealth. It doesn’t even start to look at the concept that perhaps money is more a representation of your debt to the world as a whole than it is a representation of your job well done. And it certainly doesn’t take into account the efforts of those that do good things for others without the expectation of money.
Last but not least, it doesn’t address the core issue… that the phrase was misworded and should have read: “Greed is the root of most evil” … the fact is, this speech was right to say that money isn’t the root of all evil, but was dead wrong in its argument. Money is not evil in and of itself. In fact, if noone were greedy, and if everyone had pure intentions, money would not be considered evil whatsoever.
But the reality is, we have greedy people in the world. And an idea like this voting scheme would become flawed by the embodiment of greed. Greedy people who thought they had the right, would undoubtedly steal the show from the rest of the community that have been waiting long and hard for the features we voted for fair and square. We’ve already bought our votes, and as such it’s our right to receive our percentage thereof. And besides, what would come next, buying out features we don’t like? I know more than one community member that would push for something like that, but I certainly don’t want to see Renoise go down this road.
^ what he said
Yes, that’s a good point.
Let’s not go OT. But you are correct in many of your conclusions, and I appreciate the fact that you’re actually producing rational arguments rather than simple smears.
To repeat what I said earlier: If the path to earn votes come in the form of “free donations”, for example articles, songs, videos, tutorials, community involvement, etc – THEN what’s the big deal? Anyone can do that. I think it’s time to reward those people and send out clear and vital signals to this community. Give more incentives to the fans of Renoise other than a sense of idealism. The voting procedure is an excellent place to consider in this regard.
Just a thought…
if Renoise would be open source,
everybody REALLY interested in a feature could implement it
(or help to implement, or do better bug-squashing 
So everybody could donate his energy/time to make good things better…?
Goodbye capitalism,…
you’ve been here around for a while, but now it’s ok, if you go on 
There is absolutely no difference in “free donations” or “buying for money”. Mankind has been trading stuff and services for thousands of years. So what is the difference between donations, services or money??
Well we use money every day and it has become the common object for exchange but I dont see any difference. Would it be ok to use a prostitute if the payment was a donation in form of food instead of money?
See, that concept is still flawed, because it would result in activities such as people spamming other areas of the net with links to Renoise and going “I CAN HAS VOTES NOW?” … the fact is, if you want to contribute to Renoise, simply make the community an inviting place as possible, and the money will flow in from new customers buying licenses.
I have to wonder if this topic has more to do with the fact that you want to purchase features than it has to do with us helping the developers 
Well, making the community a better place is the difference… the devs don’t pay people to pimp Renoise and to help people in the community… so we couldn’t very well pay the devs for features based on community deeds done. I should also point out, again, that money is not always a reflection of services rendered. Little rich brats don’t do shit to get their money other than con their rich parents.
You’re assuming that prostitution is morally wrong instead of legally wrong… a distinction that becomes clear when you realize that it happens to be legal in many civilized countries. Might I remind also, that the biblical figure known as “Jesus”, who happens to be touted as the source of all things moral, happened to sleep with a prostitute on a very regular basis.
The thing is that you are normally in an enclosed box of trade. Like you know how much a litre of milk is probably going to cost. Or a new bed or something similar. This is a complex systems which also incorporates the average income of people in your country/area. We had some discussion here some time ago about the prices for certain things in different countries.
My point now being : This system is incredibly unfair towards users coming from poorer countries. We also had some discussions about the price of renoise which made it perfectly clear that for some people the price of renoise is the same as one weekend partying and for some it’s like a quarter of their monthly income.
You may be able to shell out 100 bucks to get 10 votes, but there are people here who probably couldn’t afford one vote all together altough they may be as “serious” about renoise as you are.
And on a sidenote, we are not in a democracy about renoise, we are in a (very, very friendly and hardworking) monarchy. All hail taktik. 
PS:Prostitution is morally very wrong.
Yes, that’s true. Probably quite difficult to measure. Oh well, keep the system. No, I think you should get as many votes as your number of posts in this forum. No, make that the number of characters in this forum.
thats me for the win.
Yep. You win. And everybody else, too. So we all agree then? 
I’ve seen more open source projects die than I can count… open source does not dictate that the community will keep up with development… in fact, the opposite is often true because:
A ) Authors and hardcore contributers often ditch the projects because it’s “it’s open source! someone else will keep it up, so I don’t have to!”
B ) Nobody wants to slave through someone else’s badly written source when they could “do better” by themselves.
Not only that, but most of the supporters of the open source movement are users, not developers. This is because developers need income to keep developing.
And that was my point. Buying votes is morally wrong irrespective of what form the payment is.
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Corruption is also legal in some civilized contries and lobbying is even more common. I think both are bad.
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I am not religious so I dont justify things the person we call Jesus did.
I think for myself and to me, democrasy and justice are the two most important things upon which society stands.
Personally, I hope to see that taktik & co announce that there will be no more voting on features. Instead we would have to trust their vision of what constitutes an integrated tracker, trying to convince them with our arguments and sketches for feature suggestions. (Voting can still be there of course, but more as a survey, a way to mirror the demands of the registered userbase.)
(And no, I won’t argue with those mentalities who constantly cry “Uhh-huuu, I don’t want to pay for my software!! Piracy is not theft, it’s a human right, Renoise source code should be free, down with evil capitalism… uh-hu-huh”. Personally, I really wish to see a more “capitalistic” future for Renoise! Think NAMM…)
clearly the whole idea of voting for Renoise is a token gesture.
The coders will decide what they want to work on, the votes just help them gage what to do, as do the suggestions.
If one day, a coder wakes up with a eureka and codes some inspired feature because they want to, that’s entirely within their prerogative.
We’re not drones.
Listening to us, the community, is supposed to be helpful and symbiotic. Not an obligation or a chore!
Also, as of 1.8, everything that comes out of Renoise is XML. The community should be doing a hell of a lot more than ‘voting’ IMHO.
Good times.
Too bad the government doesn’t agree… and you spelled Democracy wrong
Lobbying happens in every country… and I’ve never heard of any laws, anywhere, prohibiting the generic concept of “Corruption”
I’m not religious either… I just used that as an example, as laws prohibiting prostitution are based on hypocritical religious values.
But yes… I agree with your original point, just not how you stated it
Open-Source does not mean, the software has to be free…
As I said in another post, this masterpiece in byteform will be
the first software I’ll buy since decades 
I’m new to Renoise, so i don’t know how the coders
think about giving out the Code to Registered Users/Customers…
One thing about open-source software is,
that it’s so highly dynamical and error-chasing is much
more fun than in a closed-source app…
And anyone could make add-on’s on his own, and the
really good ones perhaps make it in a new version of renoise…
…
There are some OS Projects that die, and some which don’t…
Look at Jost… If Kraken has time, it’s growing geniously,
but if not… → not
Or the tons of good projects, got stucked somewhere in the middle,
After thinking about, it’s quite good and calming, to know,
that renoise won’t die because of some dev(s) founding a family or so
(I know that’s not a realistic example )
((but never forget the working projects… e.g. OpenOffice, Firefox… … …)
sorry i dont read all the other posts this time.
it is already like this because only registered users can vote.