Couple of notes on this: The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) does not currently take “directed donations”. That means that if you send in a check to the ASF, you can’t dictate that it goes only to Flex, it only goes to the general fund and is shared by all projects. There are many ongoing discussions to change that, but even then, there are likely to be restrictions on using the funds to pay developers. Directed funds are likely to go for servers, events, marketing, but not development. There is a strong ASF sentiment towards never having the ASF pay any developer directly. I’m not sure of the reason, but it may just be that then the unpaid volunteers will start asking to be paid to contribute.
So, the proposed solutions are for folks to come up with their own ways to pool money including crowd funding sites. But the model that the ASF commonly promotes is this: Companies that want to support development of a project should simply hire developers to work on that project. No need to try to form a consortium or foundation and deal with tracking the money and taxes. Just hire someone to do the work or to do your work so you can contribute. If you have extra money to donate to the ASF, spend that money on hiring a Flex developer, even part-time. I can guarantee you that if Adobe stops paying me to work on Flex, I’ll be trying to stitch together a living by working on Flex by trying to get companies to pay me to work on Flex. Live Support is a tricky topic. A couple of big companies I’ve talked to want another big company to pick up support for Flex. Not sure who a candidate would be, but in the ASF, live support is a community thing. There are folks watching the mailing list essentially 24/7 already. But that’s not good enough for these big companies. Adobe has only promised 5 years of support for Flex. Not sure when the deadline is up, or if Adobe will immediately stop at the 5 year point, but as we near the 5 year point, it will be interesting to see which big companies still want Flex support and if we can convince some other big company to pick up the ball if Adobe no longer wants it. -Alex On 2/25/15, 11:46 PM, "Carlos Velasco" <carlos.velasco.bla...@gmail.com> wrote: >The last threads about whether it would be good or not to create a virtual >machine which moves FLEX from using the Adobe Flash Player or not, have >made me spent many time thinking about the whole thing. > >I think there are four points where the product need hard investment: > >1. The said virtual machine. >2. A good, maintained and free (without cost) IDE for developers to work >with FLEX. >3. FLEX evangelism and live support. >4. A bigger FLEX SDK full time commiters base. > >The thing is... those projects are heavy enough to fail if they are to be >developed in a pure community driven context, as they would require full >time dedicated people to get them live and working (in parallel to >community free efforts). > >On the other hand, moving to a company to handle them delivers the >community to the same situation that is suffering right now with Adobe >placed at the base of the technology development. > >In fact, most people here work or owns companies which make profit or at >least made profit by creating FLEX solutions, and I think we all here >believe that it shoud be that way for the next years to come. > >The idea is: > >We could create an "I support FLEX" manifest that those companies and >developers would sign to voluntarily commit to making regular donations to >a foundation created to support and make real and maintaining alive those >projects. > >The foundation goals would be: hiring programmers, analysts, product >managers and so to maintain the 3 projects, which obviously will remain >being open source Apache projects and mainly community driven. The scope >here is not to become owners of the technology, but ensure that there is >full time people working everyday on getting FLEX fit, hitting and >running. > >Here in Paraguay we have very good portfolio of developers and a very low >development hour costs rate, so it would be the right place to create such >a foundation. > >Of course where comes and goes such received money, what the people is >working on, is to be mandatory transparent as the foundation could only go >on and work if the contributors are happy investing on it. > >Do you find interesting such an idea? Do you people think it would collect >enough money to get those 4 development teams running and improving the >technology? > >As I see it, it would be as if every company or developer working with >flex >and selling flex based solutions shared a flex development team which by >the way would work for and only for them that are paying it. > >Should we work in developing the idea?
