I'll contribute a few cents of agreement to Jan-Pieter's comments. I agree with the questions in the context of donations. In my few years of using J, I've seen most of the development go towards the free IDE and the commercial (free for personal use) jd product. It's a bit unclear what is commercially supported and what is community supported because the key contributors (chris, bill, eric, and other I'm sure) all use personal email addresses.
I'm sure everyone has something that they are passionate supporting J's continued success. For me, the most essential item is server hosting of the wiki and addons. I also appreciate and would be willing to support the android improvements. If we ran the risk of losing server hosting because of funding, then I think many of us would feel that call to action for donations. On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 6:33 AM, Jan-Pieter Jacobs <[email protected]> wrote: > Very nice update, good to have some more accessible info on Jd. > > I do have a comment about the donation though. Myself, I would surely > consider donating, as I really enjoy J and it's little ecosystem. > But I imagine there are a lot of people reluctant to donate to an > organization which does not give any information about itself. > And a more visible "Donate" button is not going to solve this issue. > Some questions that might be useful to answer to convince people to donate: > > - Who are the people behind Jsoftware? > - What's the organization's history? > - What do donations go to concretely (infrastructure, developer cost, > serving cost, development of new features, ...)? Especially because > Jsoftware does not seem to be a non-profit organization, clarity on this > part would be highly appreciated. > - Who are representative customers of jsoftware (of course with consent)? > - What's the roadmap for the future? > - Does jsoftware have a mission? Values? > > A nice example I ran into is https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en . > Of course, Jsoftware is not such a big organization ( is it?) and not as > widely known, but it's a very nice example which lists most of the answers > on the above list. > > Another thing I saw elsewhere is a "hall of fame" for donators like here: > http://winscp.net/eng/donate.php . Maybe some companies / people would like > some advertisement in change for a donation? > > Just my two cents > > Best regards, > > Jan-Pieter > > 2015-05-12 0:56 GMT+02:00 Eric Iverson <[email protected]>: > >> J home and help pages have been updated to include Jd (J database). >> >> Please take a look (you may need refresh to see new versions). >> >> Docs for the latest Jd release are now at the web site. >> >> Web searches for just J are problematic and other phrases have been >> used inconsistently. We'd like to encourage the use of the following >> terms for all things J: >> J language >> J database >> Jsoftware >> in context use abbreviations J and Jd >> >> We think it might be better to consistently use J language (rather >> than J programming or J programming language). >> >> A new Jd release was just announced in the database forum. >> >> Also note the ever so slightly more visible DONATE. Now would be a good >> time! >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
