Re: Thinking about putting together a grant to support development on LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> writes:

> Developers,
>
> I've been thinking about the problem of sustaining LilyPond development
> long-term (and specifically the problem of obtaining enough money to
> support David K as long as he's interested).

One problem with grants is that they make it _much_ harder than
individual contributions to travel across borders.

Frankly, I am rather annoyed at the general assertion "I would not pay
any individual, but if The Project TM would have a donate button, I
would consider using it."

"The Project TM" needs setting up administration and basically a "trust"
mechanism and so on that ensures that not something happens like 6000€
being collected and then somebody disappears with that money, leaving
the contributors with empty hands.  Or, more probably, 6000€ get
collected and the majority of that is burnt for administrative tasks
while the machinery churns away figuring out how to distribute.

If you donate 6000€ to me and I disappear with the money tomorrow, there
is still all the already accomplished work in LilyPond (that figure is
not entirely arbitrary: it is about the amount that my personal account
declined since the time I have been doing nothing but LilyPond, and I am
not exactly a spendthrift).  So it is not even a matter of trust.

However stupid this may be, however, people won't consider paying for
anything that can't be taken from them again.  And people are not
comfortable giving money to a person, but only to "a cause".  Because
they could not otherwise "justify" the expense.

This is the silliness one has to work with, but I'd rather avoid having
to wrack my brain about this as well.  It makes me mad, and that does
not improve the amount of work I get done.

So I most certainly would appreciate it if others thought about the
infrastructure that is required for making people happy with paying me
for what I would like to be doing.  It is totally silly that
intermediate layers like that are required for getting people to deal
with the realities of what it takes to get something done in a setting
involving people contributing various and dissimilar resources, but
that's the way it is.  And I am lousy of making the best of that.

I prefer not dealing with realities I can't or do not want to make sense
of, but of course it can't be avoided in the long run.  It is not
something I am good at.

-- 
David Kastrup