Re: Supporting LilyPond development financially

[David Kastrup]

Francisco Vila <address@hidden> writes:

> 2012/11/8 Janek Warchoł <address@hidden>:
>> ...and we (Lily team) may need to rethink our strategies as well.
>> Ben, we have this website about sponsoring Lily development:
>> http://www.lilypond.org/sponsoring.html
>> should we make it more visible?  or should we make it more clear how
>> it works?
>
> If I were the sole designer/developer of the web page, I'd put a big
> star-shaped Donate! or Sponsor! button clearly visible on the front
> page. Tiny, personal projects do it all the time.

Ah, but this is not a tiny, personal project.  We discussed this before,
and putting a "Donate to David" button on a central LilyPond page was
deemed inappropriate.  And just to make this very clear: _I_ consider it
inappropriate as well.  "Donating to the LilyPond project" and "Donating
to David" are separate things, and I don't want any mechanism in place
where the first is more or less silently converted into the second.

Contributors could do worse for LilyPond than supporting me in this
manner, but they have a choice, and they can take this personal choice
after informing themselves, and it is _their_ responsibility if they
decide to support me, and not a responsibility of the project.  And it
means if more people want to work on LilyPond in this manner, we don't
need to have committees fight over allotments but everybody can make his
own choice.

As long as we don't get hit by the "too much choice, I'll do nothing
instead" syndrome, I think it best if everybody can make his own
informed choice.

The problem is rather that the "informed choice" angle does not seem to
work erll since the information does not get out enough from a core
circle of developers and power users who are actually doing enough for
LilyPond even without putting in money in _addition_ to everything else.

-- 
David Kastrup