Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Urs Liska]

Replying to this initial message but addressing others' comments too.

There is no such thing as a "Donate" button on the website because there
is no such thing as an "organization" of LilyPond that could be
supported. What we are talking about is an individual developer who
tries to back up his full-time work for LilyPond through donations. One
might argue if that is correct, fair or whatever, but it seems since
this "arrangement" is in place noone opposed against it. David Kastrup
is doing hard work for LilyPond, and he's working on stuff that would
probably hard to find someone else taking care of.

So if you think this thread is an opportunity to support LilyPond
development it may be a good idea to support David. But as there is no
"Donate" button publicly available you should simply contact him
directly about it.

As to sponsoring individual features there is a tradition (?) of
bounties. You can ask for a feature or report a bug that annoys you
personally on the bug-lilypond mailing list and say that you are willing
to spend X Dollars or Euro or whatever. You may find someone who chimes
in, sometimes other users chime in to increase the bounty. But I can't
say how successful these things have been in the past and what the
chances are to get "the" specific thing done one has in mind.

Now to David: I don't think your report should be interpreted like users
"have stopped being happy with" your work. I think it should be
interpreted as "a significant number of people who did pay something in
the past don't do that anymore. And others didn't fill the gap."

People may stop donating money for any number of reasons. OK, not being
happy with your work is one possible reason but I'm sure it's not the
reason of a majority of these people. The issue is: the type of income
stream that you are after doesn't keep its level on its own. If you want
to keep (or even increase) it you *have* to do constant advertising. And
I think the last time we heard about the fact that you even *have* this
sponsoring scheme was in 2013. I know it's hard to ask for money, even
when you do that in exchange for an actual value. But without it won't
just work out on itself.

I would very much prefer if you could keep up your work for LilyPond,
but of course, if you're not able to maintain it nobody could blame you.

Urs

Am 22.10.2015 um 19:21 schrieb David Kastrup:
> As you all know, my sole source of income are donations from happy
> LilyPond users.  It would appear that LilyPond users have stopped being
> happy with my work.
>
> I've taken a look at my last bank report.  In the last month I received:
>
> 1 donation of 200 EUR
> 1 donation of 100 EUR
> 2 donations of 25 EUR each.
>
> That's it (and honestly, the two large donations are embarrassing as
> they are by people who have done more than I ever did on LilyPond and
> who are helping people more on lists and forums than I do,
> respectively).  That does not even cover my rent, let alone medical
> insurance, food, repairs, clothes or other stuff.  Let alone pension
> funds or similar luxuries.  I'm currently bleeding about 800EUR per
> month for working on LilyPond.
>
> What has happened in the last month?
>
> address@hidden:/usr/local/tmp/lilypond$ git shortlog --since "1 month ago" -n 
> -s
>     48  David Kastrup
>     12  Phil Holmes
>      4  Jean-Charles Malahieude
>      2  Dan Eble
>      2  James Lowe
>      1  Masamichi Hosoda
>      1  Thomas Morley
>
> Well, 48 commits does not look like much, but I implemented
> functionality to attach to slurs to single notes in a chord in that time
> (important for tablature and piano music), designed and implemented an
> interface for working with multiple slurs per Voice, fixed several bugs,
> made c:5 in chord mode a power chord rather than equivalent to c major,
> created several low-level functions for manipulating graphical object
> properties like \offset does, removed a hard-to-understand internal
> object called a "simple closure" and prepared for more simplifications.
>
> I will likely work several more months on those internals and if the
> situation has not improved by then, call it quits.
>
> I thank all those who have supported me for this long.
>