On Sun, 18 Jan 2026 at 09:43, Jerome Lelasseux via users <[email protected]> wrote: > It's also difficult for me to contribute to Netbeans, though I'd like to. But > I'd be glad to contribute money (donation) to Apache Netbeans to help setting > up a robust AI agents infrastructure. It provides a "realistic purpose" for > the donation which, I think, could encourage users like me to donate. I'm > aware that, at the end of the day, you need people to set up the AI agents > and oversee them. But maybe it's doable with the few "core" maintainers ? > > As an example, it could start by a documenting task: even if I've been > developing a Netbeans platform app for several years, making changes to > Netbeans still looks scary to me. Source code often has no comments at all, > documentation is spread in many different places, etc.
Most of those few "core" maintainers that we have now working on the IDE and platform were exactly where you are right now not that long ago. I know I was in a very similar place even having hacked with the platform for years prior! Just jump in, it may not be as scary as you think. :-) I don't know how useful or practical sponsoring AI agents would actually be. On the other hand, ASF may have some foundation-wide resources we could explore. Individual sponsorship is a difficult one on both sides, particularly if targeted, and might have to exist externally - https://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsorship OTOH, we've had a sponsorship button on the community installers since they've been made available, and there's been a sum total of two sponsors in all that time. One of those was for NB28, out of 140,000+ downloads - another 49 and I might even cover my personal costs in providing them! :-) Sorry, I have a certain cynicism about individual donations being a realistic way to resource open source projects. I'd prefer the multiple massive corporations still utilising the platform day-to-day stood up and contributed something. Best wishes, Neil --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] For further information about the NetBeans mailing lists, visit: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Mailing+lists
