Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Bruno Ruviaro]

Hi David,

Please let me know via separate e-mail how I can donate.

And below is a suggestion of an alternative funding mechanism for you to
consider in the future.

It seems to me that Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/) might be a good
system in your case. (disclaimer: I have never used it myself, but I know
the founder and trust him, and I find the concept very interesting).

Patreon allows you to charge your supporters "per creation": in the case of
software development it would probably be the "release" or announcement of
a number of significant commits accumulated over a month or two. If you get
a number of happy Lilypond users to become your regular "patrons", you'd
get a more or less predictable and constant stream of support -- without
having to remind people to donate every time. For example, if I were your
supporter on the website, every time you make a release, Patreon would
automatically charge me a fixed amount (I decide how much), notify me of
your latest work, and transfer the money to you (minus Patreon's fee of
5%). From the patron side, a nice thing is that I can establish a cap for
my monthly donations (in case you do more releases in a month that I could
"afford").

Anyway, just an idea.

Thanks for your work on Lilypond. I only became a more serious user in the
last few months, and I can say I am a happy Lilypond user.

Bruno



On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 10:21 AM, David Kastrup  wrote:

>
> As you all know, my sole source of income are donations from happy
> LilyPond users.  It would appear that LilyPond users have stopped being
> happy with my work.
>
> I've taken a look at my last bank report.  In the last month I received:
>
> 1 donation of 200 EUR
> 1 donation of 100 EUR
> 2 donations of 25 EUR each.
>
> That's it (and honestly, the two large donations are embarrassing as
> they are by people who have done more than I ever did on LilyPond and
> who are helping people more on lists and forums than I do,
> respectively).  That does not even cover my rent, let alone medical
> insurance, food, repairs, clothes or other stuff.  Let alone pension
> funds or similar luxuries.  I'm currently bleeding about 800EUR per
> month for working on LilyPond.
>
> What has happened in the last month?
>
> dak@lola:/usr/local/tmp/lilypond$ git shortlog --since "1 month ago" -n -s
> 48  David Kastrup
> 12  Phil Holmes
>  4  Jean-Charles Malahieude
>  2  Dan Eble
>  2  James Lowe
>  1  Masamichi Hosoda
>  1  Thomas Morley
>
> Well, 48 commits does not look like much, but I implemented
> functionality to attach to slurs to single notes in a chord in that time
> (important for tablature and piano music), designed and implemented an
> interface for working with multiple slurs per Voice, fixed several bugs,
> made c:5 in chord mode a power chord rather than equivalent to c major,
> created several low-level functions for manipulating graphical object
> properties like \offset does, removed a hard-to-understand internal
> object called a "simple closure" and prepared for more simplifications.
>
> I will likely work several more months on those internals and if the
> situation has not improved by then, call it quits.
>
> I thank all those who have supported me for this long.
>
> --
> David Kastrup
>
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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Or maybe Gratipay (https://gratipay.com/) (formerly known as
> “gittip") which is based on continuous weekly payments – ongoing
> contributions for ongoing work – rather than payment per creation.

This is nice!  However, it is US-based, which is less than optimal for
EU citizens...


Werner
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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Paul Morris]

> On Oct 27, 2015, at 8:19 PM, Bruno Ruviaro  wrote:
> 
> It seems to me that Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/ 
> ) might be a good system in your case. 

Or maybe Gratipay (https://gratipay.com/) (formerly known as “gittip") which is 
based on continuous weekly payments – ongoing contributions for ongoing work – 
rather than payment per creation.  

Also, unlike most of these deals, Gratipay does not take a percentage off the 
top of each transaction.  Gratipay is itself funded on Gratipay.  How’s that 
for "eating your own dog food"?

It looks like they are going through a big transition that involves a new 
approach organized around funding teams (rather than individuals) that offer 
what they’re calling “open work”.  It’s an intriguing and unconventional 
approach… FWIW.

-Paul
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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Federico Bruni]

Il giorno sab 24 ott 2015 alle 13:08, Federico Bruni 
 ha scritto:

3) GITSTATS
The gitstats linked in the sponsoring pages are a great idea but 
they are out-of-date (november 2012). Any chance to keep them 
up-to-date automatically?

Also, I'd rather link to the Authors tab:
http://lilypond.org/~graham/gitstats-3months/AUTHORS.html

gitstats is just a python script. Who has access to the server may 
just set up a cron job to create the stats every X days:

https://github.com/hoxu/gitstats/blob/master/doc/INSTALL


Actually, it can be even run within 'make doc'. I've just run and it 
compiles the stats of 2015 in 40 seconds:


$ time gitstats -c processes=2 -c start_date=1/1/2015 lilypond-git 
lilypond-gitstats-2015

[...]
real0m40.352s

$ du -h lilypond-gitstats-2015
612Klilypond-gitstats-2015

I'll move the discussion to @bug-lilypond


There's already an open issue for this:
https://sourceforge.net/p/testlilyissues/issues/2086/

(just added a comment to make it up-to-date)




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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Simon Albrecht]

On 26.10.2015 04:04, Paul Morris wrote:

Maybe “contributing” is a good heading for all these things, i.e. we could have 
a single “contributing” page instead of “help us” and “sponsoring” pages?


‘Contributing’ is the more technical term and to me it’s associated with 
doing actual work on the code. Since this page is directed to all 
_users_ of LilyPond, I’d suggest subsuming the ‘sponsoring’ page under 
the ‘Help us’ page, which latter name is more colloquial and easy.


Yours, Simon

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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Paul Morris]

> On Oct 23, 2015, at 9:19 AM, Federico Bruni  wrote:
> 
> 1) DOWNLOAD PAGE
> What's the most viewed page in the website (excluding the home)? Probably the 
> download page:
> http://lilypond.org/website/download.html
> 
> Let's add there a big Note saying something like: "Our most active main 
> developer David Kastrup is working full-time on LilyPond development and need 
> your support to make a living. If you use and love LilyPond, please allow 
> David to continue his precious work by contributing whatever amount of money 
> you can afford. [link to Community>Sponsoring page]"
> 
> 2) SPONSORING PAGE
> I can guess without looking at 'git log' that the sponsoring page was written 
> by Graham :-)
> It does not encourage any donation, right? The feeling is very different from 
> what we are reading in many replies in this thread. Maybe it's time to change 
> it a little bit?
> 
> 3) GITSTATS

I agree that doing some things along these lines would be a good idea.  

Another possibility is to combine the "help us"[1] and “sponsoring"[2] pages.  
That way all the ways to help further LilyPond are in one place and we could 
link to it from the download page and/or home page with some appropriate 
message.  Combining these pages would also help reduce the large number of 
sub-pages under Community heading.  The content of the “sponsoring” page could 
become a single section on the “help us” page with a heading like “Bounties and 
Sponsorships”.  Maybe “contributing” is a good heading for all these things, 
i.e. we could have a single “contributing” page instead of “help us” and 
“sponsoring” pages?  

(Apparently I’m always thinking about what to name things…)

-Paul

[1] http://lilypond.org/help-us.html
[2] http://lilypond.org/sponsoring.html



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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

Jacques Menu  writes:

> Hello folks,
>
> I’m only an amateur musician, but I really appreciate Lilypond’s
> availability. I haven’t been creating scores any other way since I
> first encountered it at the time of version 2.12.
>
> Current example : Bach’s Magnificat, in which I partly double the
> cello with the bassoon, has many alterations changes. I’m using «
> \accidentalStyle Score.teaching » to have all of them made explicit,
> which greatly helps the bad reader I am.

Well, the current syntax of the command is due to me, and some overhaul
of the internals and making sure that accidentals are repeated after
clef changes (yes, I have read the request by someone else(?) just now
to stop that again but have not yet had the time and/or energy to reply
yet, sorry, willdo eventually).  But the functionality as such was
available from before my time...

> For the same, I transposed a flûte part one half-tone to help the
> player (she’s young and still a music school pupil) getting a better,
> more plain sound using another flute.

Well, I messed with the definition of the \transposition command to make
it somewhat less weird.  But transpositions still are not really the
most fantastic part of LilyPond, particularly with MIDI.

Like with many other things, so much remains to be done...

Probably not worse than other programs though.

> I feel guilty for not having contributed yet, since I’m much indebted
> to the people who make Lilypond alive and evolving, including those
> who provide help on this list.  I’ve been a C++ developper in a former
> life, and I have an idea of the kind of arduous work David Kastrup
> performs with such a big piece of software.  And LP doesn’t benefit
> from support by big computer science companies, as some other open
> software products do.

The OpenSSH(?) situation was remarkably bad for a long time.  Something
used everywhere, and the single core developer no longer able to support
himself.  At least that has made people attentive.  LilyPond is not an
integral part of similarly essential offerings.  Perhaps we need to work
on that in order to make wake-up calls reach bigger money than they
currently do.  It's basically all volunteers without economic dependence
on LilyPond.

> So, David, please send me your IBAN privately, and I’ll fix this
> problem on my side.

Will do.

Thanks!

-- 
David Kastrup

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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

Simon Albrecht  writes:

> On 22.10.2015 19:21, David Kastrup wrote:
>> As you all know, my sole source of income are donations from happy
>> LilyPond users.  It would appear that LilyPond users have stopped being
>> happy with my work.
>
> You must know that this is not the case. I should be much surprised if
> I were the only one to appreciate the highly complicated work you do,
> of which the results sometimes are hard to grasp in their immediate
> effect. But that does not diminish their value for the project at all,
> and unless I’m much mistaken nobody currently working on LilyPond
> could rival your understanding of the internals and your ability to
> fix them.

Sounds like a liability more than an asset.  I do hope that I am moving
in a direction where acquiring such understanding will become easier but
the movement is slow as molasses.

In the backend area, I think that of the active programmers, Keith
O'Hara still has a better grasp of what is going on.  Particularly with
regard of weird dependencies so I am aiming to annihilate his advantage
in the long run by getting rid of the need for dealing with weird
dependencies manually.  Cheating, I know.

Dan has been taking up a number of C++ issues recently and also worked
on moving things to more mainstream C++.  David Nalesnik has been doing
impressive things using Scheme alone, and Thomas Morley's contributions
are not to be sneezed at either.  I am glad that there is a bit more
volume of work actually happening since, "understanding of the
internals" or not, solving individual problems is still taking a lot of
time and I am not particularly productive in that area.  Probably
age-related as I've passed 50.

> I do not think one can construe a link between the work you do and the
> sudden (?) decrease of funding;

I don't think it would be sudden.  It's been over a year since I started
procrastinating about even taking a look at my finances and/or writing
about them.  I haven't yet looked further backward yet, but the Paypal
account, usually responsible for a third or so of contributions, has
been pretty dry for at least half a year or so when making small
purchases.

Of course, I'll still have to face the music eventually, but the total
level of my bank account is roughly 4000 down from what I remember about
a year or so ago.  And I actually sold off one accordion in that time.

> indeed, you continue to make quite impressive and important changes.
> I have taken so much profit from your work that it’s about time I gave
> something back. It can’t be as much as I’d certainly like to give, but
> if I don’t remain the only one to take part, it will make a
> difference. Please tell me (privately, I assume) where to direct the
> support. (You probably know that I live in Germany.)

Via separate mail.  Thanks

-- 
David Kastrup

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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Federico Bruni]

Il giorno ven 23 ott 2015 alle 15:19, Federico Bruni 
 ha scritto:
I agree, but I think that we can easily improve the situation. A few 
simple ideas:


1) DOWNLOAD PAGE
What's the most viewed page in the website (excluding the home)? 
Probably the download page:

http://lilypond.org/website/download.html

Let's add there a big Note saying something like: "Our most active 
main developer David Kastrup is working full-time on LilyPond 
development and need your support to make a living. If you use and 
love LilyPond, please allow David to continue his precious work by 
contributing whatever amount of money you can afford. [link to 
Community>Sponsoring page]"


2) SPONSORING PAGE
I can guess without looking at 'git log' that the sponsoring page was 
written by Graham :-)
It does not encourage any donation, right? The feeling is very 
different from what we are reading in many replies in this thread. 
Maybe it's time to change it a little bit?


3) GITSTATS
The gitstats linked in the sponsoring pages are a great idea but they 
are out-of-date (november 2012). Any chance to keep them up-to-date 
automatically?

Also, I'd rather link to the Authors tab:
http://lilypond.org/~graham/gitstats-3months/AUTHORS.html

gitstats is just a python script. Who has access to the server may 
just set up a cron job to create the stats every X days:

https://github.com/hoxu/gitstats/blob/master/doc/INSTALL


Actually, it can be even run within 'make doc'. I've just run and it 
compiles the stats of 2015 in 40 seconds:


$ time gitstats -c processes=2 -c start_date=1/1/2015 lilypond-git 
lilypond-gitstats-2015

[...]
real0m40.352s

$ du -h lilypond-gitstats-2015
612Klilypond-gitstats-2015

I'll move the discussion to @bug-lilypond


Last idea:

4) David reports on lilypondblog.org

If Urs and David agree, the past and future development logs of David - 
if David wants to keep them up - may be published on lilypondblog.org 
and made available to anyone, not only to the people who supported him 
during these years.
We may use some special tag for these reports and link to it from the 
sponsoring page.
I volunteer for converting the texinfo (?) source of these reports to 
any format needed for Wordpress, trusting the great power of pandoc :)





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Feature Requests (was: Re: My finances for working on LilyPond)

[Simon Albrecht]

On 23.10.2015 20:31, Bernardo Barros wrote:

Something I requested many years ago was the support for quarter-tone
tablatures notation, which seems to work but is actually buggy at the
moment, it generates wrong tablatures in strings with quarter-tones
alterations etc. Did it receive some attention recently?


Obviously not, and for multiple reasons:
First, it seems to be a very special thing, and it may even be that 
you’re the only one to suffer from this limitation/bugs.
Second, we do have too few developers. Indeed, David Kastrup is 
currently doing the majority of the work which is done on LilyPond (as 
you can guess from the figures he sent), many other core developers 
having (largely or wholly) ceased to work on LilyPond.
Third, feature requests aren’t quite as crucial in the motivation of a 
developer to take up a certain task. As has been said, even bounties 
lately tend to have little effect, since the time resources, 
capabilities, and personal interest of the dev himself(*) play a more 
important part.
So unfortunately there’s nothing for it, except exercising patience, 
doing it yourself or finding someone to do it…


Yours, Simon

(*) very few women in the ’Pond…

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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Bernardo Barros]

Dear all,

I contributed before, maybe I will join it again, didn't know the situation
was so bad.

Something I requested many years ago was the support for quarter-tone
tablatures notation, which seems to work but is actually buggy at the
moment, it generates wrong tablatures in strings with quarter-tones
alterations etc. Did it receive some attention recently?

Best wishes,
Bernardo


On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 9:19 AM, Federico Bruni  wrote:

> Il giorno gio 22 ott 2015 alle 23:09, Urs Liska  ha
> scritto:
>
>> As to sponsoring individual features there is a tradition (?) of
>> bounties. You can ask for a feature or report a bug that annoys you
>> personally on the bug-lilypond mailing list and say that you are willing
>> to spend X Dollars or Euro or whatever. You may find someone who chimes
>> in, sometimes other users chime in to increase the bounty. But I can't
>> say how successful these things have been in the past and what the
>> chances are to get "the" specific thing done one has in mind.
>>
>
> In 6 years I've been following LilyPond I've never seen a bounty having
> success. None of the issues marked with Bounty label is closed, which seems
> to confirm my feeling.
>
> We have currently 19 open issues marked as Bounty:
>
> https://sourceforge.net/p/testlilyissues/issues/search?q=labels%3A%22Bounty%22+AND+!status%3Aclosed+AND+!status%3AVerified+AND+!status%3ADuplicate
>
> Obviously, bounties are more likely to attract interested donators, who
> know what they are paying for and that it will be useful for them. I know
> that it is more complicated for a number of reasons.. but why not even 1
> bounty in 6 years (unless I missed something) worked out?
>
>
>> Now to David: I don't think your report should be interpreted like users
>> "have stopped being happy with" your work. I think it should be
>> interpreted as "a significant number of people who did pay something in
>> the past don't do that anymore. And others didn't fill the gap."
>>
>> People may stop donating money for any number of reasons. OK, not being
>> happy with your work is one possible reason but I'm sure it's not the
>> reason of a majority of these people. The issue is: the type of income
>> stream that you are after doesn't keep its level on its own. If you want
>> to keep (or even increase) it you *have* to do constant advertising. And
>> I think the last time we heard about the fact that you even *have* this
>> sponsoring scheme was in 2013. I know it's hard to ask for money, even
>> when you do that in exchange for an actual value. But without it won't
>> just work out on itself.
>>
>
> I agree, but I think that we can easily improve the situation. A few
> simple ideas:
>
> 1) DOWNLOAD PAGE
> What's the most viewed page in the website (excluding the home)? Probably
> the download page:
> http://lilypond.org/website/download.html
>
> Let's add there a big Note saying something like: "Our most active main
> developer David Kastrup is working full-time on LilyPond development and
> need your support to make a living. If you use and love LilyPond, please
> allow David to continue his precious work by contributing whatever amount
> of money you can afford. [link to Community>Sponsoring page]"
>
> 2) SPONSORING PAGE
> I can guess without looking at 'git log' that the sponsoring page was
> written by Graham :-)
> It does not encourage any donation, right? The feeling is very different
> from what we are reading in many replies in this thread. Maybe it's time to
> change it a little bit?
>
> 3) GITSTATS
> The gitstats linked in the sponsoring pages are a great idea but they are
> out-of-date (november 2012). Any chance to keep them up-to-date
> automatically?
> Also, I'd rather link to the Authors tab:
> http://lilypond.org/~graham/gitstats-3months/AUTHORS.html
>
> gitstats is just a python script. Who has access to the server may just
> set up a cron job to create the stats every X days:
> https://github.com/hoxu/gitstats/blob/master/doc/INSTALL
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Bernardo Barros

NYU, GSAS
PhD cand Music Composition
24 Waverly Place, Room 268
New York, NY 10003

http://bernardobarros.com
http://babelscores.com/bernardobarros
http://soundcloud.com/bernardobarros
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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Bernardo Barros]

http://sourceforge.net/p/testlilyissues/issues/1741/

On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Bernardo Barros 
wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I contributed before, maybe I will join it again, didn't know the
> situation was so bad.
>
> Something I requested many years ago was the support for quarter-tone
> tablatures notation, which seems to work but is actually buggy at the
> moment, it generates wrong tablatures in strings with quarter-tones
> alterations etc. Did it receive some attention recently?
>
> Best wishes,
> Bernardo
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 9:19 AM, Federico Bruni 
> wrote:
>
>> Il giorno gio 22 ott 2015 alle 23:09, Urs Liska  ha
>> scritto:
>>
>>> As to sponsoring individual features there is a tradition (?) of
>>> bounties. You can ask for a feature or report a bug that annoys you
>>> personally on the bug-lilypond mailing list and say that you are willing
>>> to spend X Dollars or Euro or whatever. You may find someone who chimes
>>> in, sometimes other users chime in to increase the bounty. But I can't
>>> say how successful these things have been in the past and what the
>>> chances are to get "the" specific thing done one has in mind.
>>>
>>
>> In 6 years I've been following LilyPond I've never seen a bounty having
>> success. None of the issues marked with Bounty label is closed, which seems
>> to confirm my feeling.
>>
>> We have currently 19 open issues marked as Bounty:
>>
>> https://sourceforge.net/p/testlilyissues/issues/search?q=labels%3A%22Bounty%22+AND+!status%3Aclosed+AND+!status%3AVerified+AND+!status%3ADuplicate
>>
>> Obviously, bounties are more likely to attract interested donators, who
>> know what they are paying for and that it will be useful for them. I know
>> that it is more complicated for a number of reasons.. but why not even 1
>> bounty in 6 years (unless I missed something) worked out?
>>
>>
>>> Now to David: I don't think your report should be interpreted like users
>>> "have stopped being happy with" your work. I think it should be
>>> interpreted as "a significant number of people who did pay something in
>>> the past don't do that anymore. And others didn't fill the gap."
>>>
>>> People may stop donating money for any number of reasons. OK, not being
>>> happy with your work is one possible reason but I'm sure it's not the
>>> reason of a majority of these people. The issue is: the type of income
>>> stream that you are after doesn't keep its level on its own. If you want
>>> to keep (or even increase) it you *have* to do constant advertising. And
>>> I think the last time we heard about the fact that you even *have* this
>>> sponsoring scheme was in 2013. I know it's hard to ask for money, even
>>> when you do that in exchange for an actual value. But without it won't
>>> just work out on itself.
>>>
>>
>> I agree, but I think that we can easily improve the situation. A few
>> simple ideas:
>>
>> 1) DOWNLOAD PAGE
>> What's the most viewed page in the website (excluding the home)? Probably
>> the download page:
>> http://lilypond.org/website/download.html
>>
>> Let's add there a big Note saying something like: "Our most active main
>> developer David Kastrup is working full-time on LilyPond development and
>> need your support to make a living. If you use and love LilyPond, please
>> allow David to continue his precious work by contributing whatever amount
>> of money you can afford. [link to Community>Sponsoring page]"
>>
>> 2) SPONSORING PAGE
>> I can guess without looking at 'git log' that the sponsoring page was
>> written by Graham :-)
>> It does not encourage any donation, right? The feeling is very different
>> from what we are reading in many replies in this thread. Maybe it's time to
>> change it a little bit?
>>
>> 3) GITSTATS
>> The gitstats linked in the sponsoring pages are a great idea but they are
>> out-of-date (november 2012). Any chance to keep them up-to-date
>> automatically?
>> Also, I'd rather link to the Authors tab:
>> http://lilypond.org/~graham/gitstats-3months/AUTHORS.html
>>
>> gitstats is just a python script. Who has access to the server may just
>> set up a cron job to create the stats every X days:
>> https://github.com/hoxu/gitstats/blob/master/doc/INSTALL
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>> lilypond-u...@gnu.org
>> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Bernardo Barros
>
> NYU, GSAS
> PhD cand Music Composition
> 24 Waverly Place, Room 268
> New York, NY 10003
>
> http://bernardobarros.com
> http://babelscores.com/bernardobarros
> http://soundcloud.com/bernardobarros
>
>


-- 
Bernardo Barros

NYU, GSAS
PhD cand Music Composition
24 Waverly Place, Room 268
New York, NY 10003

http://bernardobarros.com
http://babelscores.com/bernardobarros
http://soundcloud.com/bernardobarros
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RE: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Javier Ruiz-Alma]

David,
I appreciate all you do to bring us a better LilyPond. As much as we all
enjoy new feature releases, I also encourage you to continue with the
important infrastructure work you often focus on, making the codebase more
robust, maintainable, understandable.
Glad to contribute!
Javier


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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Frederico,

> In 6 years I've been following LilyPond I've never seen a bounty having 
> success.

I’ve personally sponsored ten or so that have had success!  =)  n.b. Some may 
have been more than six years ago, and many (most?) happened “off-list”.

However, I must admit that recently (e.g., in the past six years), it has been 
difficult to locate developers to tackle the specific fixes and/or feature 
requests (e.g., finishing up the GSoC lyric code) that I most want to sponsor… 
so there is clearly *something* not working optimally.

Cheers,
Kieren.


Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: i...@kierenmacmillan.info


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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Federico Bruni]

Il giorno gio 22 ott 2015 alle 23:09, Urs Liska  ha 
scritto:

As to sponsoring individual features there is a tradition (?) of
bounties. You can ask for a feature or report a bug that annoys you
personally on the bug-lilypond mailing list and say that you are 
willing
to spend X Dollars or Euro or whatever. You may find someone who 
chimes

in, sometimes other users chime in to increase the bounty. But I can't
say how successful these things have been in the past and what the
chances are to get "the" specific thing done one has in mind.


In 6 years I've been following LilyPond I've never seen a bounty having 
success. None of the issues marked with Bounty label is closed, which 
seems to confirm my feeling.


We have currently 19 open issues marked as Bounty:
https://sourceforge.net/p/testlilyissues/issues/search?q=labels%3A%22Bounty%22+AND+!status%3Aclosed+AND+!status%3AVerified+AND+!status%3ADuplicate

Obviously, bounties are more likely to attract interested donators, who 
know what they are paying for and that it will be useful for them. I 
know that it is more complicated for a number of reasons.. but why not 
even 1 bounty in 6 years (unless I missed something) worked out?




Now to David: I don't think your report should be interpreted like 
users

"have stopped being happy with" your work. I think it should be
interpreted as "a significant number of people who did pay something 
in

the past don't do that anymore. And others didn't fill the gap."

People may stop donating money for any number of reasons. OK, not 
being

happy with your work is one possible reason but I'm sure it's not the
reason of a majority of these people. The issue is: the type of income
stream that you are after doesn't keep its level on its own. If you 
want
to keep (or even increase) it you *have* to do constant advertising. 
And
I think the last time we heard about the fact that you even *have* 
this

sponsoring scheme was in 2013. I know it's hard to ask for money, even
when you do that in exchange for an actual value. But without it won't
just work out on itself.


I agree, but I think that we can easily improve the situation. A few 
simple ideas:


1) DOWNLOAD PAGE
What's the most viewed page in the website (excluding the home)? 
Probably the download page:

http://lilypond.org/website/download.html

Let's add there a big Note saying something like: "Our most active main 
developer David Kastrup is working full-time on LilyPond development 
and need your support to make a living. If you use and love LilyPond, 
please allow David to continue his precious work by contributing 
whatever amount of money you can afford. [link to Community>Sponsoring 
page]"


2) SPONSORING PAGE
I can guess without looking at 'git log' that the sponsoring page was 
written by Graham :-)
It does not encourage any donation, right? The feeling is very 
different from what we are reading in many replies in this thread. 
Maybe it's time to change it a little bit?


3) GITSTATS
The gitstats linked in the sponsoring pages are a great idea but they 
are out-of-date (november 2012). Any chance to keep them up-to-date 
automatically?

Also, I'd rather link to the Authors tab:
http://lilypond.org/~graham/gitstats-3months/AUTHORS.html

gitstats is just a python script. Who has access to the server may just 
set up a cron job to create the stats every X days:

https://github.com/hoxu/gitstats/blob/master/doc/INSTALL





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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Kevin Tough]

On Fri, 2015-10-23 at 03:10 +0200, Simon Albrecht wrote:
> On 22.10.2015 19:21, David Kastrup wrote:
> > As you all know, my sole source of income are donations from happy
> > LilyPond users.  It would appear that LilyPond users have stopped
> > being
> > happy with my work.
> 
> You must know that this is not the case. I should be much surprised
> if I 
> were the only one to appreciate the highly complicated work you do,
> of 
> which the results sometimes are hard to grasp in their immediate
> effect. 
> But that does not diminish their value for the project at all, and 
> unless I’m much mistaken nobody currently working on LilyPond could 
> rival your understanding of the internals and your ability to fix
> them. 
> I do not think one can construe a link between the work you do and
> the 
> sudden (?) decrease of funding; indeed, you continue to make quite 
> impressive and important changes.
> I have taken so much profit from your work that it’s about time I
> gave 
> something back. It can’t be as much as I’d certainly like to give,
> but 
> if I don’t remain the only one to take part, it will make a
> difference. 
> Please tell me (privately, I assume) where to direct the support.
> (You 
> probably know that I live in Germany.)
> 
> Yours sincerely, Simon
> 
> ___
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Where can we donate too?
Namaste,
Kevin

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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Jacques Menu]

Hello folks,

I’m only an amateur musician, but I really appreciate Lilypond’s availability. 
I haven’t been creating scores any other way  since I first encountered it at 
the time of version 2.12.

Current example : Bach’s Magnificat, in which I partly double the cello with 
the bassoon, has many alterations changes. I’m using « \accidentalStyle 
Score.teaching »  to have all of them made explicit, which greatly helps the 
bad reader I am.
For the same, I transposed a flûte part one half-tone to help the player (she’s 
young and still a music school pupil) getting a better, more plain sound using 
another flute.

I feel guilty for not having contributed yet, since I’m much indebted to the 
people who make Lilypond alive and evolving, including those who provide help 
on this list.
I’ve been a C++ developper in a former life, and I have an idea of the kind of 
arduous work David Kastrup performs with such a big piece of software.
And LP doesn’t benefit from support by big computer science companies, as some 
other open software products do.

So, David, please send me your IBAN privately, and I’ll fix this problem on my 
side.

Thanks everybody for your help, and a nice day!

JM

> Le 23 oct. 2015 à 03:10, Simon Albrecht  a écrit :
> 
> On 22.10.2015 19:21, David Kastrup wrote:
>> As you all know, my sole source of income are donations from happy
>> LilyPond users.  It would appear that LilyPond users have stopped being
>> happy with my work.
> 
> You must know that this is not the case. I should be much surprised if I were 
> the only one to appreciate the highly complicated work you do, of which the 
> results sometimes are hard to grasp in their immediate effect. But that does 
> not diminish their value for the project at all, and unless I’m much mistaken 
> nobody currently working on LilyPond could rival your understanding of the 
> internals and your ability to fix them. I do not think one can construe a 
> link between the work you do and the sudden (?) decrease of funding; indeed, 
> you continue to make quite impressive and important changes.
> I have taken so much profit from your work that it’s about time I gave 
> something back. It can’t be as much as I’d certainly like to give, but if I 
> don’t remain the only one to take part, it will make a difference. Please 
> tell me (privately, I assume) where to direct the support. (You probably know 
> that I live in Germany.)
> 
> Yours sincerely, Simon
> 
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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Simon Albrecht]

On 22.10.2015 19:21, David Kastrup wrote:

As you all know, my sole source of income are donations from happy
LilyPond users.  It would appear that LilyPond users have stopped being
happy with my work.


You must know that this is not the case. I should be much surprised if I 
were the only one to appreciate the highly complicated work you do, of 
which the results sometimes are hard to grasp in their immediate effect. 
But that does not diminish their value for the project at all, and 
unless I’m much mistaken nobody currently working on LilyPond could 
rival your understanding of the internals and your ability to fix them. 
I do not think one can construe a link between the work you do and the 
sudden (?) decrease of funding; indeed, you continue to make quite 
impressive and important changes.
I have taken so much profit from your work that it’s about time I gave 
something back. It can’t be as much as I’d certainly like to give, but 
if I don’t remain the only one to take part, it will make a difference. 
Please tell me (privately, I assume) where to direct the support. (You 
probably know that I live in Germany.)


Yours sincerely, Simon

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Re: My finances for working on LilyPond

[Thomas Morley]

2015-10-22 19:21 GMT+02:00 David Kastrup :
>
> As you all know, my sole source of income are donations from happy
> LilyPond users.  It would appear that LilyPond users have stopped being
> happy with my work.
>
> I've taken a look at my last bank report.  In the last month I received:
>
> 1 donation of 200 EUR
> 1 donation of 100 EUR
> 2 donations of 25 EUR each.

Well, it's a shame that the amount of donaters has decreased to only four.
Let me out myself as the one, who does the 100 EUR.
I do this monthly, for some years now.
I don't earn that much myself, can't do more.

I'd like to invite all to think about the own financial possibilities,
and whether it's doable to support him.

>
> That's it (and honestly, the two large donations are embarrassing as
> they are by people who have done more than I ever did on LilyPond and
> who are helping people more on lists and forums than I do,
> respectively).

This is not the entire story.
Very often I use functionality David had created or improved, without
it, I'd be far less effective.

His work is sometimes not directly visible to the average user and
sometimes it is protracted and tedious.
LilyPond needs him and this kind of work, maybe you can't imagine how
much we need it!
Loosing him would be a desaster.

We need a lot of people at all layers. I don't now where we would
stand without Phil (releases), James (patch-organisation), the
bugsquad, the translators, people reporting bugs etc, etc
And we need people like David for fundamental/parser work.

For german speakers, I posted similar:
http://www.lilypondforum.de/index.php?topic=1222.msg11630#msg11630

Again, please think what you can do!!!
If you think you can donate something please contact David privately.

> That does not even cover my rent, let alone medical
> insurance, food, repairs, clothes or other stuff.  Let alone pension
> funds or similar luxuries.  I'm currently bleeding about 800EUR per
> month for working on LilyPond.
>
> What has happened in the last month?
>
> dak@lola:/usr/local/tmp/lilypond$ git shortlog --since "1 month ago" -n -s
> 48  David Kastrup
> 12  Phil Holmes
>  4  Jean-Charles Malahieude
>  2  Dan Eble
>  2  James Lowe
>  1  Masamichi Hosoda
>  1  Thomas Morley
>
> Well, 48 commits does not look like much, but I implemented
> functionality to attach to slurs to single notes in a chord in that time
> (important for tablature and piano music), designed and implemented an
> interface for working with multiple slurs per Voice, fixed several bugs,
> made c:5 in chord mode a power chord rather than equivalent to c major,
> created several low-level functions for manipulating graphical object
> properties like \offset does, removed a hard-to-understand internal
> object called a "simple closure" and prepared for more simplifications.
>
> I will likely work several more months on those internals and if the
> situation has not improved by then, call it quits.
>
> I thank all those who have supported me for this long.
>
> --
> David Kastrup


Greetings,
  Harm

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My finances for working on LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

As you all know, my sole source of income are donations from happy
LilyPond users.  It would appear that LilyPond users have stopped being
happy with my work.

I've taken a look at my last bank report.  In the last month I received:

1 donation of 200 EUR
1 donation of 100 EUR
2 donations of 25 EUR each.

That's it (and honestly, the two large donations are embarrassing as
they are by people who have done more than I ever did on LilyPond and
who are helping people more on lists and forums than I do,
respectively).  That does not even cover my rent, let alone medical
insurance, food, repairs, clothes or other stuff.  Let alone pension
funds or similar luxuries.  I'm currently bleeding about 800EUR per
month for working on LilyPond.

What has happened in the last month?

dak@lola:/usr/local/tmp/lilypond$ git shortlog --since "1 month ago" -n -s
48  David Kastrup
12  Phil Holmes
 4  Jean-Charles Malahieude
 2  Dan Eble
 2  James Lowe
 1  Masamichi Hosoda
 1  Thomas Morley

Well, 48 commits does not look like much, but I implemented
functionality to attach to slurs to single notes in a chord in that time
(important for tablature and piano music), designed and implemented an
interface for working with multiple slurs per Voice, fixed several bugs,
made c:5 in chord mode a power chord rather than equivalent to c major,
created several low-level functions for manipulating graphical object
properties like \offset does, removed a hard-to-understand internal
object called a "simple closure" and prepared for more simplifications.

I will likely work several more months on those internals and if the
situation has not improved by then, call it quits.

I thank all those who have supported me for this long.

-- 
David Kastrup

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