I think this is very common. The opportunity or appetite for full time involvement is either within a large company, or some consultancy that is focused around the language/ tooling.
The former has just gone and the latter case is becoming very rare now. I don't know of any now, and I don't think it's really a sustainable model any more. G2One was of that type, Typesafe too, but now they have focused on reactive and the Akka middleware rather than the language per se. My company uses Groovy a lot, and we work with clients on Grails quite a bit too, and I'm more than willing to put resources in as I'm able to, but I've got commercial justifications and a board to satisfy. Eclipse support is something of a sore point right now. All our commercial discussions say that it's got to be there for Groovy to continue to win. Grails is still a big driver, although not as dominant as it once was, and having a Grails IDE does support adoption of that framework. Intellij alone just isn't enough. I think there is space for something extra, some organisation or other that can manage and hopefully funnel funding to this kind of thing. That would give me an easier time to put some cash in without having to try and fund someone full time. With enough companies, and individuals perhaps, we could fund this up? Maybe Object Computing will be interested now they've got some Grails support? I'll try to get in touch. For the Apache members reading, do you know of any existing model being applied for broader community funding of a project? Beyond a single company paying for something, or some behemoth stepping in. It'd be interesting to get some feedback on this conundrum if there's some experience elsewhere. Best, David. On 13 April 2015 at 13:11, Mauro Molinari <[email protected]> wrote: > Il 12/04/2015 17:56, Russel Winder ha scritto: > >> On Sun, 2015-04-12 at 16:49 >> If the plugin is important to you, there is nothing stopping your >> organization resourcing the maintenance of the plugin. >> >> > If it were so simple... My company is a small one, that struggles every > day to survive by creating and selling its own products, there are no > resources (either in terms of persons, or in terms of money) to support a > full-time involvement in Groovy tooling. > What I want to stress here is that I'm not shooting to anyone because of > the current situation, I just wanted to let you hear my voice as an Eclipse > user, who nevertheless tried to help both Groovy and Groovy-Eclipse as much > as possible during the last years by opening bugs, verify fixes, give > opinions and promoting Groovy in two companies I worked for. I can't do > more than this currently, sorry. > > Mauro > -- David Dawson CEO Simplicity Itself Limited Tel +44 7866 011 256 Skype: davidadawson [email protected] http://www.simplicityitself.com
