Hi folks, I've been on my yearly vacation (climbing in Italy for 10 days) since last Thursday and so I've been a lot less responsive and particularly productive the last day. While I do check the messages and try providing answers morning and evening, I don't actually have the focus and time to do significant productive work.
Sorry for that. I'll try getting stuff to move forward again when back home (Sunday or so): there is a lot of consolidation (documentation, regtests, change logs) to do for stuff I did in the last few weeks. There are also decisions to tackle with regard to my future with LilyPond as leeching off fellow developers is becoming unsustainable. My previous largest sponsor has decided to call it quits on account of a drop in productivity with regard to commits to LilyPond and I can't blame him for that: the return in value I provided for his own contribution was certainly fluctuating more than his large investment warranted. On the other hand, I think I still provide enough money to warrant minimum levels of living, so I need to check out how to coordinate the possibility of lots of small payments. I'll likely try to make use of FSF channels of funding which has the disadvantage that they take 10% flat for their own funding. It will enable donation buttons, donation by credit card, tax deductible donations in the U.S. Of course, this will require agreement of other developers to actually go ahead with a scheme that will mostly benefit, given the current situation, a single person on behalf of the project. We currently also see the need for funding with regard to fonts, and there are also infrastructure needs currently carried by project members which might warrant funding. And having a system administrator for making our issue tracking free and maintaining it would also be nice. So even if it turns out that total funding or the wishes of other developers don't make it feasible to let me continue on the project, it does not seem like we'd soon get into the situation where there would be more funding available than we could sensibly make use of. So I don't think we would need to backpedal with regard to donation buttons and other gushing sources of money in case I left. LilyPond would not be where it is without the bunch of dedicated workers continually answering questions, providing improvement, writing documentation, improving what is there, providing translations, managing issue reports and testing and so on and so on. If this level of dedication and support would have been there from the start, maybe our core code base would be somewhat more transparent and documented and versatile: the continuing efforts (and failures) to make the best of the existing state provide a strong driving source for developers to make things easier to access and use, and to cater for more use cases and provide the tools for making this easier. Thanks to everyone -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
