Re: Thinking about putting together a grant to support development on LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Feb 08, 2012 at 02:29:00PM +0000, Carl Sorensen wrote:
>> So I looked into the National Endowment for the Arts and the
>> National Endowment for the Humanities.
>
> I could see this funding Americans to work on lilypond programming
> while living in America.
>
> I could see this potentially funding Americans to work on lilypond
> programming while living outside of America (i.e. Mike Solomon).

[...]

> I can not see this funding non-Americans working outside of
> America.

For what it is worth, I can wave an American citizenship around if
required for this purpose.  But even while I am probably looking like
one of the more interesting venues of turning funding into progress, it
would be good to figure out non-US-centric approaches as well.

> I've said that grants are the best way to have "commercial" funding
> for lilypond.  However, they tend to be country-specific.  For David,
> an EU grant would be best; I am pessimistic that he could be funded
> with a US grant unless he was willing to move there.

As I said: the required citizenship would be available, but indeed most
US-specific funding options tend to have "US residency" attached.

> The other question is whether to aim the grant directly at
> lilypond, or instead include a bit of lilypond development as part
> of a different grant.  Just like most (US) universities skim
> 10%-50% off of any grant for "operating expenses", a grant could
> direct 10-20% of its money towards program development, ideally
> focused on its area.  For example, I could imagine a grant to
> preserve the history of Spanish guitar music spending maybe 10% on
> general lilypond development, 10% on tablature-specific lilypond
> development, and the rest on students to typeset guitar music,
> make scores available online, write a book, etc etc.

The problem is to find a nice middle path between "grantability" and
"general usefulness".

-- 
David Kastrup