Re: paying for Han-Wen's development work

[Graham Percival]

On 18-Aug-05, at 4:29 PM, Mark Van den Borre wrote:

> > Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > >  1. apart from the "involved" people like you,  how do you convince
> > > people to donate money?[...] Psychologically, it's much easier to 
> > > part with money, if you get
> > > something in return.
> This is not about donating. It's about investing.

Absolutely.

One (seemingly unlikely) reason in favor of subscription donation are
webcomics.

Most of them are quite visible about requesting donations, and many 
explicitly
say "I like drawing this story, but I need to eat.  If I get enough 
donations, I'll
devote all my time to drawing, and you'll get a comic each day.  If I 
don't get
enough donations, I'll need to find a job, and you'll only get a comic 
on MWF".

The biggest, most successful webcomics seem to make enough money for
a family[1].  A number of good webcomics make enough for a single 
person to
live on[2].  Even some not-so-great comics make $500-$800 per month[3].

[1]  I don't know exactly how much they make, and this income is 
supplemented
by sales of books, merchandise, etc.

[2]  Last year, one author issued a challenge to his readers; he didn't 
think he
would get enough donations to let him quit his job, and he was stunned 
when
he got $21,000.

[2]  Some webcomics list the amount of donations on their site; that's 
how I
got these numbers.


If people will give money to support a once-a-day webcomic (which can be
quite interesting/funny/touching, but only for about 60 seconds per 
day), then we
should be able to get a non-trivial amount of money for lilypond.


> * extract say €120 LilyPond license money from some of the 100+ public
> music schools in Flanders (northern part of Belgium)
> * get the music shop where I buy my guitars to buy a LilyPond license

I know that by "license money" you mean "donation", but (as Han-Wen said
about " `stealing' SCORE users")  we need to watch the language.  I 
don't
think we can truthfully talk about GPL'd software licenses, and we 
definitely
shouldn't talk about _extracting_ license money.


Getting back to small donations: another item of interest is the 
Mandrake
community donations.  I forget what they called them (and I also forget 
what
Mandrake is calling itself this month :),  but a few years ago they 
introduced
some donation levels... $30 was a silver member, $60 was a gold member,
or something like that.  This had some minor benefits, but it was 
mostly just
a donation to support Mandrake.  I also don't know if they're still 
going on.

I don't think that we could get enough small donations to support 
lilypond
on its own, but I imagine that it could cover half of the monthly 
expenses.
They would need to be set up in a more regular fashion, and we could
assign names to various levels.  Say, $10/month could be a "Lilypond 
benefactor";
$20/month could be a "Lilypond sponsor", etc.

Cheers,
- Graham