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Re: Supporting LilyPond development financially


From: David Kastrup
Subject: Re: Supporting LilyPond development financially
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2012 09:54:25 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.2.50 (gnu/linux)

Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 7:12 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>> soundsfromsound <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Do you guys have a PayPal donation link or something where perhaps I
>>> could send a little something your way?  I couldn't find anything on
>>> the website... :)
>>
>> Then I need to rethink my strategies.
>
> ...and we (Lily team) may need to rethink our strategies as well.
> Ben, we have this website about sponsoring Lily development:
> http://www.lilypond.org/sponsoring.html
> should we make it more visible?  or should we make it more clear how it works?
>
>> Of course, I am only a single developer and so I do
>> not "scale": give me ten times the money and I can't actually do more
>> than I do currently, but I might be around for quite longer, and others
>> will then be able to back off a bit: there are some who are _really_
>> supporting me a lot.
>
> Spreading the load of supporting David over more people would
> definitely be a good thing.
> As for the "scaling" thing: it's not like giving David more money
> wouldn't do us good.  Imagine that next month David receives 10 times
> the money he usually gets: we'd have David covered for next ~10
> months,

More like the next 6 months.  The current level is not something I can
sustain indefinitely as it means skipping social security and not having
any fallback when things go wrong.  And actually I could down that kind
of amount into the state pension fund in one go, and still be quite
below average in coverage for the time I worked fully on LilyPond so
far.

To put this into perspective:
<URL:http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armutsgrenze#Relative_Armutsgrenzen>.
"Poverty endangered" is €940 of available net income in Germany _after_
deducting health care and taxes.  I got about €600 which clearly counts
as "poor".  In Switzerland, you are considered poor if you have €822
left after health care, taxes, and reasonable rent.  I had about €200
left when we are talking about "the money he usually gets", but then the
cost of living here is of course less than in Switzerland.

So _if_ we had a general LilyPond fund catering for money flow and it
was considered inappropriate to direct more money in my direction than
to thwart immediate starvation, I'd likely be pissed.  And likely quite
a few other people would be pissed to get even less.

At the current point of time there is just not enough to get into a
fight over.  Since I put out regular reports, I guess we'll notice when
this changes, and at some point of time we might think about centrally
managed alternatives.

But I don't think that this is going to be anytime soon.

> and we could "hire" another developer with the money that we'd
> otherwise give David.

The problem here is that we don't have a good notion of a "we" that
could do such things.  Since we don't have some official organization
receiving and distributing money (and that means quite a bit of
additional work and costs on the side), it remains the responsibility of
individual contributors to figure out where they see their efforts put
to best use.

If some millionaire pipes up and states "I'll cover David for the next
five years", then there will be a good incentive to think about ways in
which we can let the willingness of users to express their appreciation
with monetary means work out to the best of LilyPond in other ways.
And, if needed, form some administrative body for that.

And, of course, if we get enough people saying "I'd be willing to
contribute monetary means to LilyPond development, but not the stuff
David does", it would not matter whether or not I can live from what I
get for trying to figure out how people _not_ wanting to support me
could usefully invest into LilyPond.

-- 
David Kastrup



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