Re: Leave of absence / lookahead

[tisimst]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 2:04 AM, David Kastrup [via Lilypond] <
address@hidden> wrote:

>
> Hi folks,
>
> I've been on my yearly vacation (climbing in Italy for 10 days) since
> last Thursday and so I've been a lot less responsive and particularly
> productive the last day.  While I do check the messages and try
> providing answers morning and evening, I don't actually have the focus
> and time to do significant productive work.
>
> Sorry for that.
>

What do you think you're doing?! Just kidding. On the contrary, I bet I'm
not the only one who might be even a little upset that you aren't
completely "vacating"! ;-) Take a break! Enjoy the mountains! Everything
and all of us will still be here when you return. You deserve a mental
break! Go have fun. We better not see you responding to any more emails
until after next Sunday, at least!

There are also decisions to tackle with regard to my future with
> LilyPond as leeching off fellow developers is becoming unsustainable.
> My previous largest sponsor has decided to call it quits on account of a
> drop in productivity with regard to commits to LilyPond and I can't
> blame him for that: the return in value I provided for his own
> contribution was certainly fluctuating more than his large investment
> warranted.
>
> On the other hand, I think I still provide enough money to warrant
> minimum levels of living, so I need to check out how to coordinate the
> possibility of lots of small payments.  I'll likely try to make use of
> FSF channels of funding which has the disadvantage that they take 10%
> flat for their own funding.  It will enable donation buttons, donation
> by credit card, tax deductible donations in the U.S.
>
> Of course, this will require agreement of other developers to actually
> go ahead with a scheme that will mostly benefit, given the current
> situation, a single person on behalf of the project.  We currently also
> see the need for funding with regard to fonts, and there are also
> infrastructure needs currently carried by project members which might
> warrant funding.  And having a system administrator for making our issue
> tracking free and maintaining it would also be nice.
>
> So even if it turns out that total funding or the wishes of other
> developers don't make it feasible to let me continue on the project, it
> does not seem like we'd soon get into the situation where there would be
> more funding available than we could sensibly make use of.  So I don't
> think we would need to backpedal with regard to donation buttons and
> other gushing sources of money in case I left.
>

David, you are extremely kind to mention my situation here. I'll be the
first to say it, though, that what you do is WAY more important than what I
am doing. If anything, we ought to set YOU up a Patreon/Gratipay/whatever
account that can be an on-going contribution. Seems like that would be
easier for lots of people, helping in a small way, can help you in a bigger
way.


> LilyPond would not be where it is without the bunch of dedicated workers
> continually answering questions, providing improvement, writing
> documentation, improving what is there, providing translations, managing
> issue reports and testing and so on and so on.  If this level of
> dedication and support would have been there from the start, maybe our
> core code base would be somewhat more transparent and documented and
> versatile: the continuing efforts (and failures) to make the best of the
> existing state provide a strong driving source for developers to make
> things easier to access and use, and to cater for more use cases and
> provide the tools for making this easier.
>
> Thanks to everyone
>

Thank YOU, David. You have made so many things easier. I know you aren't
the only one working on this great program, there are many people who
faithfully put in countless hours to improve it. Either way, I think I
speak for everyone by saying I am grateful for what you do. If you had not
been in the picture, I'm sure the program wouldn't be nearly as good as it
is today.

Have a fantastic vacation (and take some awesome pictures to share with
us!),
Abraham




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