There’ve been many discussions about how to manage funding and contributing 
especially for those of us who cannot contribute to the coding.  The Lilypond 
project doesn’t have any administration or central organization to be 
responsible for soliciting, collecting, accounting for and distributing money 
to developers.  Some people have put up bounties to get “feature X" developed.  
The most efficient- indeed the only- way to fund development of Lilypond is to 
send money directly to the specific developer.

A number of years back David Kastrup basically devoted himself to working on 
Lilypond full time and to correct many of the internal difficulties created by 
having a patchwork of developers writing things (sometimes in different 
development languages as well as different human languages) over a very long 
period of time.  He was able to afford to do this due to direct contributions 
from users to him.  He has done an amazing amount of heavy lifting in revamping 
the code base without which the current versions of the application would not 
exist with the functionality and stability they have.  Not that he is the only 
developer working on it, by far, but he has done such a lot for the community 
especially in the unglamorous hidden corners of the code- and also being a 
prolific troubleshooter and adviser on the lilypond-user list.  

I am very sorry to hear he has fallen on such difficult times and hope things 
get better!
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