Re: Another happy lilypond user

[David Kastrup]

SoundsFromSound <address@hidden> writes:

> I'd like to donate on a regular basis.  What's the easiest, most
> efficient way to setup this via my PayPal? Send money direct to
> David's email, or is there a centralized option?

My Emacs is registered at PayPal.  Most contributors in the Euro zone
contribute via bank transfer (ask for my account if interested), cutting
out the PayPal fees.  For transfers outside from the Euro zone, banking
fees are not regulated and way beyond ridiculous, so Paypal is the
generally used option there.  I have not checked out other options so
far (I am just now testing something else but no results yet).

> PS.  Is there a link to show how much per month the LilyPond project
> "uses" (costs, hosting, coding hours, etc)?  That would give me a
> better understanding of the entire situation as it stands currently.

The expose for my own situation is at
<URL:http://news.lilynet.net/?The-LilyPond-Report-24#an_urgent_request_for_funding>.
Check out the LilyPond Reports after that for upcoming "financial
reports".  Unfortunately, there has not been a LilyPond Report for some
time, but I still wrote financial reports (I'll append the last one to
this mail) which are sent out to everybody who has contributed and of
course it is not an issue to send them to everybody who is interested in
them.

I am not sure what the beef with the LilyPond Reports right now is, but
if people wrote up some more articles, Valentin might try to push
himself for another issue.

There is no rundown of "costs, hosting, coding hours, etc".  The
hosting, as far as I can tell, is paid for by external entities (the
Free Software Foundation, Google) via their outreach programs.  The
LilyPond Report site is done by Valentin.  Several of those running
computational expensive parts of the testing structure have bought
themselves powerful computers for that purpose, but that cost is
actually not much compared to the time they are putting in.  My own last
hardware acquisition was a dual-processor laptop for €250 covered by a
single donation a year ago.

With regard to what I do personally, the reports contain some accounting
of tasks that have been done.  "costs" are what I need for living,
"coding hours" are fulltime, where fulltime is defined as all the hours
I can focus on work.  I am not doing anything else, and I indulge in
rather few distractions.

So with regard to accountability, there is no "you get so and so many
coding hours for this investment".  Rather there is something like "you
are responsible to x% that David is still on the project".

Since I am working from home, this scheme results in quite more than the
usual office hours.  Since I don't have any supervision, it can mean
that I can get tangled up into some stuff more than they might be worth
in terms of hours, but I do try to get some other stuff done.  The
average commits in the last year were about one per day.  This includes
fairly trivial ones, but also fairly complex ones.

-- 
David Kastrup

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