Re: [Matplotlib-users] [matplotlib-devel] Matplotlib and Numfocus Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement (FSA)
+1. Great news. Nicolas. On 21 Jan 2015, at 20:22, Chris Barker chris.bar...@noaa.gov wrote: +1 -- sounds great! On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Michael Droettboom md...@stsci.edu wrote: Matplotlib is a widely used, well regarded, and powerful visualization library that has dominated the Python visualization stack for over a decade. However, to maintain that position, matplotlib must continue to evolve. Complementary or alternative libraries are appearing at an increasing rate, including browser-based plotting and GPU acceleration. To maintain its leadership position for the next decade, Matplotlib must interface with these alternatives while simultaneously expanding its capabilities and becoming easier to use and learn. Matplotlib’s large existing user base (greater than 50,000) means that new developments need to be carefully balanced with maintaining existing interfaces. With the large user and code base comes a significant maintenance and user-support burden. These responsibilities currently account for a majority of the core-developer time spent on matplotlib and has resulted in both the code base and community being in a healthier state than ever before. Even 6 years ago there was no automated testing to speak of and the number of contributors continues to soar on github. However, this effort is, for the most part, done on a volunteer basis in the nights and weekends of the core developers. To go beyond this maintenance level—to make step-change improvements for the benefit of matplotlib’s users—will require funding for full-time developers. Inspired and encouraged by the example of IPython, we would like to begin the process of fundraising. Managing funding on the needed scale is a complex and time-consuming process. Thankfully, NumFOCUS, a 501(c)3 charity organisation co-founded by John Hunter, offers a fiscal sponsorship agreement to minimize the administrative and legal burden on open source projects. We would like to enlist NumFOCUS as our agents in all legal and financial matters, including banking, accepting donations as a non-profit, payroll, and access to legal counsel. As part of the agreement, NumFOCUS would charge a percentage of all funds raised to cover their costs. The full text of the agreement is attached. To comply with the legal and accounting requirements of a non-profit, matplotlib needs to form an administrative body to interact with NumFOCUS and direct the disbursement of any funds. The proposed initial members of the body, are myself (Mike Droettboom), Eric Firing, Phil Elson, and Thomas Caswell, with Thomas acting as the point of contact with NumFOCUS. In practice, signing an FSA will have very little impact on the matplotlib project itself - it will still be BSD-licensed and community-driven as it has always been, and the only motivation for doing this is to give us an opportunity to apply for funding to do more work on matplotlib. We'd like to canvas the community's opinion on the matter, but to put a concrete timeline on the discussion, we would like to propose signing an FSA with NumFOCUS in 3 weeks (Feb 10th 2015) unless there is a major community discomfort with us doing so. Cheers, Michael Droettboom -- Michael Droettboom Science Software Branch Space Telescope Science Institute http://www.droettboom.com -- New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA. GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn. Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth. Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant. http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet ___ Matplotlib-devel mailing list matplotlib-de...@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/ORR(206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception chris.bar...@noaa.gov -- New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA.
Re: [Matplotlib-users] [matplotlib-devel] Matplotlib and Numfocus Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement (FSA)
+1 - that's really great news! -Shawn On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 2:36 PM, Nicolas P. Rougier nicolas.roug...@inria.fr wrote: +1. Great news. Nicolas. On 21 Jan 2015, at 20:22, Chris Barker chris.bar...@noaa.gov wrote: +1 -- sounds great! On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Michael Droettboom md...@stsci.edu wrote: Matplotlib is a widely used, well regarded, and powerful visualization library that has dominated the Python visualization stack for over a decade. However, to maintain that position, matplotlib must continue to evolve. Complementary or alternative libraries are appearing at an increasing rate, including browser-based plotting and GPU acceleration. To maintain its leadership position for the next decade, Matplotlib must interface with these alternatives while simultaneously expanding its capabilities and becoming easier to use and learn. Matplotlib’s large existing user base (greater than 50,000) means that new developments need to be carefully balanced with maintaining existing interfaces. With the large user and code base comes a significant maintenance and user-support burden. These responsibilities currently account for a majority of the core-developer time spent on matplotlib and has resulted in both the code base and community being in a healthier state than ever before. Even 6 years ago there was no automated testing to speak of and the number of contributors continues to soar on github. However, this effort is, for the most part, done on a volunteer basis in the nights and weekends of the core developers. To go beyond this maintenance level—to make step-change improvements for the benefit of matplotlib’s users—will require funding for full-time developers. Inspired and encouraged by the example of IPython, we would like to begin the process of fundraising. Managing funding on the needed scale is a complex and time-consuming process. Thankfully, NumFOCUS, a 501(c)3 charity organisation co-founded by John Hunter, offers a fiscal sponsorship agreement to minimize the administrative and legal burden on open source projects. We would like to enlist NumFOCUS as our agents in all legal and financial matters, including banking, accepting donations as a non-profit, payroll, and access to legal counsel. As part of the agreement, NumFOCUS would charge a percentage of all funds raised to cover their costs. The full text of the agreement is attached. To comply with the legal and accounting requirements of a non-profit, matplotlib needs to form an administrative body to interact with NumFOCUS and direct the disbursement of any funds. The proposed initial members of the body, are myself (Mike Droettboom), Eric Firing, Phil Elson, and Thomas Caswell, with Thomas acting as the point of contact with NumFOCUS. In practice, signing an FSA will have very little impact on the matplotlib project itself - it will still be BSD-licensed and community-driven as it has always been, and the only motivation for doing this is to give us an opportunity to apply for funding to do more work on matplotlib. We'd like to canvas the community's opinion on the matter, but to put a concrete timeline on the discussion, we would like to propose signing an FSA with NumFOCUS in 3 weeks (Feb 10th 2015) unless there is a major community discomfort with us doing so. Cheers, Michael Droettboom -- Michael Droettboom Science Software Branch Space Telescope Science Institute http://www.droettboom.com -- New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA. GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn. Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth. Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant. http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet ___ Matplotlib-devel mailing list matplotlib-de...@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/ORR(206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception chris.bar...@noaa.gov -- New
Re: [Matplotlib-users] [matplotlib-devel] Matplotlib and Numfocus Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement (FSA)
+1 -- sounds great! On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Michael Droettboom md...@stsci.edu wrote: * Matplotlib is a widely used, well regarded, and powerful visualization library that has dominated the Python visualization stack for over a decade. However, to maintain that position, matplotlib must continue to evolve. Complementary or alternative libraries are appearing at an increasing rate, including browser-based plotting and GPU acceleration. To maintain its leadership position for the next decade, Matplotlib must interface with these alternatives while simultaneously expanding its capabilities and becoming easier to use and learn. Matplotlib’s large existing user base (greater than 50,000) means that new developments need to be carefully balanced with maintaining existing interfaces. With the large user and code base comes a significant maintenance and user-support burden. These responsibilities currently account for a majority of the core-developer time spent on matplotlib and has resulted in both the code base and community being in a healthier state than ever before. Even 6 years ago there was no automated testing to speak of and the number of contributors continues to soar on github. However, this effort is, for the most part, done on a volunteer basis in the nights and weekends of the core developers. To go beyond this maintenance level—to make step-change improvements for the benefit of matplotlib’s users—will require funding for full-time developers. Inspired and encouraged by the example of IPython, we would like to begin the process of fundraising. Managing funding on the needed scale is a complex and time-consuming process. Thankfully, NumFOCUS, a 501(c)3 charity organisation co-founded by John Hunter, offers a fiscal sponsorship agreement to minimize the administrative and legal burden on open source projects. We would like to enlist NumFOCUS as our agents in all legal and financial matters, including banking, accepting donations as a non-profit, payroll, and access to legal counsel. As part of the agreement, NumFOCUS would charge a percentage of all funds raised to cover their costs. The full text of the agreement is attached. To comply with the legal and accounting requirements of a non-profit, matplotlib needs to form an administrative body to interact with NumFOCUS and direct the disbursement of any funds. The proposed initial members of the body, are myself (Mike Droettboom), Eric Firing, Phil Elson, and Thomas Caswell, with Thomas acting as the point of contact with NumFOCUS. In practice, signing an FSA will have very little impact on the matplotlib project itself - it will still be BSD-licensed and community-driven as it has always been, and the only motivation for doing this is to give us an opportunity to apply for funding to do more work on matplotlib. We'd like to canvas the community's opinion on the matter, but to put a concrete timeline on the discussion, we would like to propose signing an FSA with NumFOCUS in 3 weeks (Feb 10th 2015) unless there is a major community discomfort with us doing so. Cheers, Michael Droettboom * -- Michael Droettboom Science Software Branch Space Telescope Science Institute http://www.droettboom.com -- New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA. GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn. Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth. Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant. http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet ___ Matplotlib-devel mailing list matplotlib-de...@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/ORR(206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception chris.bar...@noaa.gov -- New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA. GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn. Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth. Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant. http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet___ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
