On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 08:25:27PM +0200, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote: > Op dinsdag 15-06-2010 om 16:50 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Graham > Percival: > > > That has been attempted before... hmm, 2007? Han-Wen tried to work on > > lilypond full-time, but there just wasn't enough people offering > > bounties > > I am considering to offer commercial support and may be able to do > that on a part-time basis. However, working on two bounties has > illustrated that bounty work can be quite tricky.
Indeed; there's almost no relationship between the amount of work required and the amount of money being offered. > It would be very > nice for someone doing this for a hobby and getting to know LilyPond, > but commercial support requires some level of predictability. Actually, somebody pointed out (privately) that chasing bounties is less appealing for inexperienced developers: a $100 bounty could very well take you 50 hours to complete (i.e. if it's your first time working on spacing code), making the job $2 / hr. > Also, if the amount of work is not consistent but takes the form > of a few thousand euros once a year, you would be very lucky if I > (or whoever else would take this on) would happen to be available > within a reasonable time frame to work on those. Yes. I'm not trying to discourage people from offering bounties -- it's certainly better than nothing! However, there's very good reasons why programmers don't immediately start working on any issue that has a bounty being offered. One idea I've toyed with is seeking a grant to work on lilypond. Various governments and agencies give research grants; I'm pretty certain that we could get a grant to improve medieval chant notation or contemporary non-Western scales or whatnot. However, this would probably require - a bunch of grant applications - collaborating with some musicologists (i.e. a medieval chant expert, or John Cage scholar, or whatever) - overhead of writing reports about deliverables, giving presentations to people, etc. - etc. In the process of doing the specialized notation, the developer might fix a few "normal" bugs as well. If there was a concerted effort, particularly between the European academics involved with LilyPond, it could be done, and we might even be able to fund a full-time developer for 6 months or even a year. However, I'm not certain the effort would be worth it -- writing grants is a lot of work; we'd probably have to make multiple attempts; dealing with the administration of the grant would be a lot of work; etc etc. Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
