Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

Simon Albrecht <address@hidden> writes:

> On 22.10.2015 19:21, David Kastrup 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.
>
> You must know that this is not the case. I should be much surprised if
> I were the only one to appreciate the highly complicated work you do,
> of which the results sometimes are hard to grasp in their immediate
> effect. But that does not diminish their value for the project at all,
> and unless I’m much mistaken nobody currently working on LilyPond
> could rival your understanding of the internals and your ability to
> fix them.

Sounds like a liability more than an asset.  I do hope that I am moving
in a direction where acquiring such understanding will become easier but
the movement is slow as molasses.

In the backend area, I think that of the active programmers, Keith
O'Hara still has a better grasp of what is going on.  Particularly with
regard of weird dependencies so I am aiming to annihilate his advantage
in the long run by getting rid of the need for dealing with weird
dependencies manually.  Cheating, I know.

Dan has been taking up a number of C++ issues recently and also worked
on moving things to more mainstream C++.  David Nalesnik has been doing
impressive things using Scheme alone, and Thomas Morley's contributions
are not to be sneezed at either.  I am glad that there is a bit more
volume of work actually happening since, "understanding of the
internals" or not, solving individual problems is still taking a lot of
time and I am not particularly productive in that area.  Probably
age-related as I've passed 50.

> I do not think one can construe a link between the work you do and the
> sudden (?) decrease of funding;

I don't think it would be sudden.  It's been over a year since I started
procrastinating about even taking a look at my finances and/or writing
about them.  I haven't yet looked further backward yet, but the Paypal
account, usually responsible for a third or so of contributions, has
been pretty dry for at least half a year or so when making small
purchases.

Of course, I'll still have to face the music eventually, but the total
level of my bank account is roughly 4000 down from what I remember about
a year or so ago.  And I actually sold off one accordion in that time.

> indeed, you continue to make quite impressive and important changes.
> I have taken so much profit from your work that it’s about time I gave
> something back. It can’t be as much as I’d certainly like to give, but
> if I don’t remain the only one to take part, it will make a
> difference. Please tell me (privately, I assume) where to direct the
> support. (You probably know that I live in Germany.)

Via separate mail.  Thanks

-- 
David Kastrup