Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Federico Bruni]

Il giorno gio 22 ott 2015 alle 23:09, Urs Liska <address@hidden> ha 
scritto:
> 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.

In 6 years I've been following LilyPond I've never seen a bounty having 
success. None of the issues marked with Bounty label is closed, which 
seems to confirm my feeling.

We have currently 19 open issues marked as Bounty:
https://sourceforge.net/p/testlilyissues/issues/search?q=labels%3A%22Bounty%22+AND+!status%3Aclosed+AND+!status%3AVerified+AND+!status%3ADuplicate

Obviously, bounties are more likely to attract interested donators, who 
know what they are paying for and that it will be useful for them. I 
know that it is more complicated for a number of reasons.. but why not 
even 1 bounty in 6 years (unless I missed something) worked out?

> 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 agree, but I think that we can easily improve the situation. A few 
simple ideas:

1) DOWNLOAD PAGE
What's the most viewed page in the website (excluding the home)? 
Probably the download page:
http://lilypond.org/website/download.html

Let's add there a big Note saying something like: "Our most active main 
developer David Kastrup is working full-time on LilyPond development 
and need your support to make a living. If you use and love LilyPond, 
please allow David to continue his precious work by contributing 
whatever amount of money you can afford. [link to Community>Sponsoring 
page]"

2) SPONSORING PAGE
I can guess without looking at 'git log' that the sponsoring page was 
written by Graham :-)
It does not encourage any donation, right? The feeling is very 
different from what we are reading in many replies in this thread. 
Maybe it's time to change it a little bit?

3) GITSTATS
The gitstats linked in the sponsoring pages are a great idea but they 
are out-of-date (november 2012). Any chance to keep them up-to-date 
automatically?
Also, I'd rather link to the Authors tab:
http://lilypond.org/~graham/gitstats-3months/AUTHORS.html

gitstats is just a python script. Who has access to the server may just 
set up a cron job to create the stats every X days:
https://github.com/hoxu/gitstats/blob/master/doc/INSTALL