Re: some tiny care for the Sponsoring page

[David Kastrup]

Federico Bruni <address@hidden> writes:

> During a recent discussion I suggested few ideas to make the
> sponsoring page more visible:
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2015-10/msg00131.html
>
> But after reading this old thread:
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2012-11/msg00131.html
>
> I realize that I don't want to discuss,

Well, the situation underlying that discussion is not quite the same as
our developer landscape has changed.  I'm not particularly thrilled
about having become a more important part of LilyPond infrastructure by
having others drop out.

There has been an offer by the FSF to collect and disburse donations for
LilyPond.  They are taking a 10% cut if I remember correctly, but it
would allow credit card processing, donation buttons and some other
fairly standard stuff.  I declined last time this was brought up since
I barely made ends meet and am less than convinced that microdonations
will make up for dedicated people putting up a regular plan (of course,
they still could).

However, stipulating that it's not all that unlikely that I fail to
actively maintain contributor relations at some time again in future,
and that the consequences of that may be quite worse than a 10% cut, it
might still be worth thinking about.

But it's likely still a shaky proposition since one needs a whole lot of
small payments to make up for one person with a more substantial
dedication.  In the end, every dime paid out has to be paid in.  "If
everybody contributed just a dollar per month", then we would only need
perhaps 1500 people on a continuing basis to keep me somewhat reliably
funded.  So I'm fairly skeptical towards the micropayment narrative.

> - Download page: add a Note box with a link to the Sponsoring page
> (which is hidden under Community), so that casual users, not
> subscribed to lilypond-user, may know about this possibility.
>
> - Sponsoring page: update the statistics (reminder for Phil), see:
> https://sourceforge.net/p/testlilyissues/issues/2086/

Well, some basics would certainly not be amiss, yes.  I'm not overly
enthused about these statistics as they tell only a small part of the
story, but then better to tell a small part rather than nothing.

-- 
David Kastrup