Carl Sorensen <c_soren...@byu.edu> writes: > Developers, > > I've been thinking about the problem of sustaining LilyPond development > long-term (and specifically the problem of obtaining enough money to > support David K as long as he's interested).
One problem with grants is that they make it _much_ harder than individual contributions to travel across borders. Frankly, I am rather annoyed at the general assertion "I would not pay any individual, but if The Project TM would have a donate button, I would consider using it." "The Project TM" needs setting up administration and basically a "trust" mechanism and so on that ensures that not something happens like 6000€ being collected and then somebody disappears with that money, leaving the contributors with empty hands. Or, more probably, 6000€ get collected and the majority of that is burnt for administrative tasks while the machinery churns away figuring out how to distribute. If you donate 6000€ to me and I disappear with the money tomorrow, there is still all the already accomplished work in LilyPond (that figure is not entirely arbitrary: it is about the amount that my personal account declined since the time I have been doing nothing but LilyPond, and I am not exactly a spendthrift). So it is not even a matter of trust. However stupid this may be, however, people won't consider paying for anything that can't be taken from them again. And people are not comfortable giving money to a person, but only to "a cause". Because they could not otherwise "justify" the expense. This is the silliness one has to work with, but I'd rather avoid having to wrack my brain about this as well. It makes me mad, and that does not improve the amount of work I get done. So I most certainly would appreciate it if others thought about the infrastructure that is required for making people happy with paying me for what I would like to be doing. It is totally silly that intermediate layers like that are required for getting people to deal with the realities of what it takes to get something done in a setting involving people contributing various and dissimilar resources, but that's the way it is. And I am lousy of making the best of that. I prefer not dealing with realities I can't or do not want to make sense of, but of course it can't be avoided in the long run. It is not something I am good at. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
