Re: Perl 6 fundraising and related topics.
Hi everyone, Guess it's time for me to finally join the discussion. :-) I've been paying attention to this thread since it started. > > Which made me think ... wasn't this why Mozilla created a corporation? > I believe one can find online write-ups from the people involved with the decision to create MoCo as to why they felt this was a good idea. I read them once years ago. I would need to re-read to remind myself what those reasons were. Or could we even just go to that Mozilla corporation? > > Given that Mozilla is a Perl 6 supporter, would they be willing to handle > earmarked Perl 6 donations in lieu of TPF (for a limited time, say 2 > years)? > One of the stated goals and desired outcomes of the MoFo joint sponsorship with TPF of Patrick Michaud's work was to assist TPF to do more (and more effective) fundraising for p6. MoFo's goals in p6 are served by supporting TPF. I strongly doubt that they would accept donations for p6 and distribute them themselves directly. (I'm in touch with the MoFo executive director on a weekly basis. I've got a pretty good idea of where he's at in his thinking.) > Their major name recognition as a solid entity could be very helpful in > attracting major donations prior to Perl 6's first production release. > Yes, they appreciate that, which is why they donated to TPF. They wanted to endorse TPF and p6 to make it easier for others to do so. Cheers, - Richard Dice (President of TPF)
Re: Perl 6 fundraising and related topics.
> I've seen that Daniel Ruoso applied for a grant for his smop project, > basically a virtual machine and fast backend for kp6, and perhaps other > implementations. > > TPF decided not to invest into yet another implementation. I appreciate that it is a subtle distinction to make, too subtle to reasonably be guessed at from someone in the Perl community at large, but the Grants Committee does _NOT_ define TPF policy. The GC is autonomous. It is populated by respected members of the community. I think what was demonstrated is that there is a certain amount of lag-time between where the larger Perl community is (which has both p5 and p6 aspects) and the constituents of the GC, who were chosen when p6 wasn't strongly on the radar. The result of this is that there is an impedance mismatch. It will get better with time as membership turns over. In fact, things are changing currently. Cheers, - Richard
Re: Perl 6 fundraising and related topics.
I think the crucial point to pick up on is something that chromatic has pointed out very well in any number of use.perl journal postings over the past year. That is, Perl 6's creation is dependent on how much time people put into it, and how many people put in time. The volunteer effort to date has been exemplary and inspirational. When you think about the universe of possible things intelligent and energetic people could be doing with their time, that so many have put so much into Perl 6 is a tribute both to the worthiness of the Perl 6 project and to the fundamental goodness of the volunteers. Funding is the piece of the puzzle that allows us to buttress and enhance the contributions of volunteers. Someone who can contribute 5 hours a week to p6 development could possibly contribute 30 hours a week if they took on a reduced workload at their day job. But that doesn't mean their responsibilities just disappear: a mortgage / rent to pay, insurance policies need maintaining, kids have to be clothed and educated, and everyone has a powerful need to eat. Funding makes it possible to bridge this gap. To Richard's point, a systematic development plan is a tool that can be helpful in acquiring funding. The plan is meant to acquire funding, and the funding is meant to be applied against the plan to make it come to pass. Done correctly, it's a virtuous circle that Gets Things Done. I completely agree with chromatic that a plan without resources put against it is neutered. I don't want a plan that has calendar dates on it. I want a plan that has major pieces of work and their dependencies on each other reflected (i.e. a GANTT chart) and a sense of the man-months of required effort for each work-piece. At that point, the implementation volunteers have done their job. It then becomes the responsibility of the funding-acquisition volunteers to take the plan and with it seek out funding to make the man-months happen. Cheers, - Richard PS I often think of it like this: Distance = velocity x Time (D = v x T) When people ask for a "release date" for Perl 6, what they're implicitly saying is, T = D / v, solve for T chromatic has been the #1 expositor that "v" is unknown, and therefore we can't solve for T. In this he is quite correct. (And when we think hard about it, D can be sometimes hazy as well. If Perl 6 had been implemented 100 times before we'd know D pretty well. But we're still figuring out what D is.) The idea behind "a plan" is to firm up D, at least to a certain minimum acceptible level, and to allow for "what if" scenario planning to be played with potential funding sources. (i.e. if you can give us this much v, we'll have a decent shot of T happening in the 8-16 month timeframe afterwards, etc.) On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 2:36 PM, chromatic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tuesday 25 March 2008 10:50:15 Richard Hainsworth wrote: > > > What the perl6 language needs now is a systematic development plan, with > > broad aims and clear goals that will lead to good quality software and > > to the tools to enable ordinary programmers to use perl6 for a variety > > of tasks. > > Richard Dice mentioned that I should elaborate, lest it sound like I'm > trying > to lecture Richard Hainsworth (not my intent, and I apologize for doing > so). > > It's important to keep in mind the degree to which one or two volunteers > going > on vacation can slow the progress of Rakudo (for a recent example) or to > which one or volunteers putting in a few extra hours of visible work can > improve the progress of Parrot (for a slightly less recent example). > > A plan that includes some degree of funding will help Perl 6 arrive much > sooner. Previous plans glossed over this part, which is one reason they > didn't work out in the long term. > > I just want to make sure that any discussion of a plan acknowledges that > there's a fixed amount of work to go and an unknown amount of available > resources to implement the plan. > > -- c >
Re: Perl 6 fundraising and related topics.
Hi James, Your comment suggest you have a particular perspective or point of view. Without providing a some context I'm afraid I'm going to find some of your comments confusing. > > * just release perl 6 now and move on > This is one of those confusing comments. There isn't a single p6 implementation attempt which is feature complete. How can it be released? What do you mean by "move on"? > * do not hire 40 year olds with responsibilities, convince the > young to spend their time for free ... isn't that what one is supposed > to do after the age of 40 ? > Even if I agreed with you, who would be the project manager? Who would be the technical architect? There are 21 year old diamonds-in-the-rough, but someone needs to craft them. Unless you're suggesting that open source is its own magic pixie dust and gifted youngsters will just materialize out of nowhere and solve all our problems? 'pugs' was a good rough-cut at this theory, but it was also a demonstration that the youngsters (eventually) need jobs and health care and whatnot too. And that can leave the project in the lurch. (also, call this A) > * use all funds to promote its usage, not fund its development > I have nothing at all against funds being spent on promoting usage. Rather, more broadly, I have nothing against "doing things" to promote usage, where funds being spent is one good possibility. Your statement of "do all of X, none of Y" suggests you have done some kind of cost-benefit analysis, linear programming, etc. that I don't understand. (also, call this B) * look at successful OS orgs like mozilla and apache (different to > each other yes) and copy their techniques > This seems at odds with A and B. Mozilla funds plenty of developers directly. Apache is slightly more indirect in their efforts but it co-ordinates the activities of programmers that have been hired directly by participating corporations. By the way, I spent plenty of time talking with Mozilla, Apache, Eclipse, and others to try to figure out what they do and what ideas I can bring back from them to Perl's world. * promote its usage past perl's borders, e.g. perl should be an > ingredient not a closed garden at some Perl conference ... > Again, you seem to have some perspective that Perl is only a closed garden. I recently attended a technology/finance hybrid conference and the 3 "ingredient" technologies that were talked about at the conference were #3 - SQL, #2 - XML and #1 - Perl. No others even came up. > a systematic plan past these points will then be possible. > What all of myself, chromatic and Richard Hainsworth seem to appreciate is that a plan without resources to back it up is almost guaranteed to be ineffective. Even more than that, we have an appreciation that planning itself requires resources. (Or should the mythic 21 year olds with free time be crafting Perl's strategic plans and cross-organization promotional activities too?) This is what we're working on. Cheers, - Richard
Re: Fundraising follow-up
Conrad, Regarding targeted, earmarked funding - I have investigated the legalities, tax implications, etc. of what is involved. The result of my investigation is that it is do-able within the construct of TPF. The other question is one of creation of a technical platform for implementing this. There is a discussion within TPF of how we might accomplish this, or how it might otherwise be accomplished. For instance, one member of TPF pointed out that http://www.thepoint.com/ already exists and could provide the necessary infrastructure. So if the goal is (and only is) to connect Perl 6 developers with funding collected from various sources piggybacking off of this site could be the easiest way. My concern and the concern of TPF is maximum and best possible support of Perl, including Perl 6, given our resource limitations. I try to direct my time to what can be best accomplished in that context. This particular matter has received considerable attention, but so have other matters in the past 6 weeks as well. It seems to me that you too are energetic in your support of Perl 6 and have capability in this regard. If there is a project that you think you can devote attention to in such a way that the likelihood of success is maximized while not incurring the trouble of having anyone else on the critical path of the project plan then I would not want you to feel encumbered by TPF or anyone else. I think the main thing that TPF can offer is a legal structure: we have experience in meeting world-wide tax code requirements (as various countries will look upon grants of this kind as being income), and we have experience dealing with Things Going Wrong, including legal council identified and retained, insurance policies, limited liability of directors of the corporation, and similar. These things are important in Real Life and they are difficult and costly to replicate. Something I would ask you to consider is that 1.5 months _is not_ a lot of time, _especially_ for a volunteer organization. If that isn't going to work for you then I understand; there's a lot to be said for individual JDFI, which can be very efficient. But it doesn't scale into certain realms. Maybe this is one of those realms, maybe it isn't. The plan currently under discussion within TPF is the one written up by Richard Hainsworth on March 11, with body beginning "Richard Dice covered some crucial questions below." I will email Karen Pauley, the new TPF Steering Committee chair, with your email address. If this matches the kind of program you are interested in then maybe you could be the "implementation volunteer" on the TPF version of the project? Cheers, - Richard On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 8:25 PM, Conrad Schneiker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Pleases direct follow-ups to just perl6-users. > > It's been about a month and a half since the first time that I > brought up the topic of fundraising. So I want to find out what > the prospects are of decisively resolving the earmarked funding > issue within The Perl Foundation any time soon. > > Otherwise, I would like to take the initiative to set up a Parrot > Platform Foundation specifically to handle earmarked grants for > Rakudo, the Parrot VM, C6PAN, and any other Perl 6 projects of > interest, such as SMOP. (I want to avoid using Perl in the > Foundation's name, to avoid any confusion with TPF.) > > I know that others have differing strong opinions and grand > visions on how they want things to be done. That fine. > > In the mean time, I want to pursue several more modest and > presently-available opportunities for supporting Perl 6 > developers, which are presently falling through the cracks. > > TIMTOWTDI. > > You know what I want for Christmas. The clock is ticking. > > Best regards, > Conrad Schneiker > > www.AthenaLab.com > > Official Perl 6 Wiki — http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6 > Official Parrot Wiki — http://www.perlfoundation.org/parrot > > >
