I'll get right to the point.
I have been developing TurboVNC, libjpeg-turbo, and VirtualGL full-time
and independently for the past 16 years, the majority of my 29-year
career. I have managed to scrape by with funded development and support
contracts on these software projects, as well as some patronage (mostly
from corporations that rely upon the software.) However, the amount of
money I make through this work is not great. My gross income is
something like half of the median for the U.S., and my net income is in
an even lower percentile because of self-employment taxes and other
business expenses that corporate employees do not have to pay. Prior to
2024, my income had been relatively flat since 2012 (except for 2018,
which was a really lean year.) That was already bad enough, because it
meant that I was not able to keep up with inflation. (In fact, were it
not for marrying someone during the Pandemic who is smarter about real
estate than I am, I would have had to quit this game years ago.)
2024 was another really lean year (not quite as bad as 2018 but close),
and a big reason is that funded development on TurboVNC and VirtualGL
has dried up. None of the features in TurboVNC 3.2 received any funded
development at all. I was able to use the TurboVNC General Fund,
provided mostly by Santos and Crimson Vista, to pay for some of them,
but most of the work on this new release was pro bono. TurboVNC 3.2 is
a "Hail Mary pass" of sorts, a desperate attempt to maintain relevance
against a rising tide of competitors who have deep pockets and whole
teams of people who do what I do. Unlike my competitors, I don't charge
money for TurboVNC. I also don't wrap an open source project within a
paid closed-source product and reserve the best features for the paid
version. TurboVNC is TurboVNC. Thanks largely to libjpeg-turbo,
TurboVNC's performance is no longer unique in the industry, but many of
its features (the Session Manager, for instance) are unique in the open
source world. Unlike most open source projects, TurboVNC is maintained
with enterprise-level quality control and version management processes.
Being independent allows me to develop TurboVNC in a platform-agnostic
manner, free of any one organization's agenda.
TurboVNC has helped a lot of people, and I want it to continue helping
people. I strongly believe that it should remain free-- in terms of
cost, in terms of license, and in terms of agenda. However, developing
this software is not free. It costs me money, both in terms of actual
expenses and in terms of opportunity cost from continuing to do this
rather than make 3-5x as much working for a corporation. Bug fixes have
been and always will be free to end users (paid for with the General
Fund.) However, I simply can't afford to continue developing major new
features for free. All major new feature development from this point on
will have to be funded. That means that TurboVNC 3.3 and all future
major releases will live or die on the strength of that funding. If
there isn't enough funding for TurboVNC 3.3, then there won't be a
TurboVNC 3.3.
How can you help?
- If you represent a corporation or other organization that needs
additional functionality in TurboVNC, then contact me for a free
estimate. For inspiration, here is a list of features, requested by
various members of the TurboVNC community, that are in need of funding:
https://github.com/TurboVNC/turbovnc/issues?q=state%3Aopen%20label%3A%22funding%20needed%22
- If you are an individual TurboVNC user, then please consider
sponsoring our project through GitHub:
https://github.com/sponsors/TurboVNC. If everyone who used TurboVNC
contributed even $5/month, then I would have no funding problems at all.
Every dollar received translates directly into time spent on TurboVNC
development, maintenance, and support.
DRC
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TurboVNC
User Discussion/Support" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to turbovnc-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/turbovnc-users/6c2a480b-063b-43ce-96f4-6c71f9d71d27%40virtualgl.org.
