Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Bruno Ruviaro]

Hi David,

Please let me know via separate e-mail how I can donate.

And below is a suggestion of an alternative funding mechanism for you to consider in the future.

It seems to me that Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/) might be a good system in your case. (disclaimer: I have never used it myself, but I know the founder and trust him, and I find the concept very interesting).

Patreon allows you to charge your supporters "per creation": in the case of software development it would probably be the "release" or announcement of a number of significant commits accumulated over a month or two. If you get a number of happy Lilypond users to become your regular "patrons", you'd get a more or less predictable and constant stream of support -- without having to remind people to donate every time. For example, if I were your supporter on the website, every time you make a release, Patreon would automatically charge me a fixed amount (I decide how much), notify me of your latest work, and transfer the money to you (minus Patreon's fee of 5%). From the patron side, a nice thing is that I can establish a cap for my monthly donations (in case you do more releases in a month that I could "afford").

Anyway, just an idea.

Thanks for your work on Lilypond. I only became a more serious user in the last few months, and I can say I am a happy Lilypond user.

Bruno

On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 10:21 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

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.

--
David Kastrup

_______________________________________________
lilypond-user mailing list
address@hidden
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user