Re: Should the LilyPond website mention financial support for contributors?

[Tim McNamara]

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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Re: Should the LilyPond website mention financial support for contributors?

[Saul Tobin]

I support all of these suggestions.

My own two cents: I would like to contribute monthly, but I'd personally
prefer to contribute to the project as a whole or the core developers as a
group, if possible. It seems like it could be helpful to set project-level
finances up in the long run anyway, given things like web hosting expenses.

On Fri, Nov 9, 2018, 4:42 PM Karlin High   From recent thread:
>
> 
>
> I was following the LilyPond community for quite a while before
> realizing that financially supporting developers was a thing. The most
> obvious pages on the website, "Sponsoring" and "Help us" say nothing
> about it:
>
> 
>
> Lots of other websites have a "tip jar" for the site operator. How about
> putting up some PayPal.Me links...
>
> 
>
> ...for David Kastrup, Urs Liska, or other major contributors? Assuming
> the contributors are open to the idea, and it fits with the way the
> contributor and the community see their role in the project.
>
> I guess project-level donations would also be possible, but then there's
> the whole issue of managing the funds, and maybe non-profit organization
> compliance if using GNU's donation systems. Giving directly to
> contributors seems simpler.
>
> I'm thinking such website changes would go through code review just like
> anything else, giving the LilyPond community a chance to discuss what
> contributors would get listed for financial support.
> --
> Karlin High
> Missouri, USA
>
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