Leave of absence / lookahead

[David Kastrup]

Hi folks,

I've been on my yearly vacation (climbing in Italy for 10 days) since
last Thursday and so I've been a lot less responsive and particularly
productive the last day.  While I do check the messages and try
providing answers morning and evening, I don't actually have the focus
and time to do significant productive work.

Sorry for that.  I'll try getting stuff to move forward again when back
home (Sunday or so): there is a lot of consolidation (documentation,
regtests, change logs) to do for stuff I did in the last few weeks.

There are also decisions to tackle with regard to my future with
LilyPond as leeching off fellow developers is becoming unsustainable.
My previous largest sponsor has decided to call it quits on account of a
drop in productivity with regard to commits to LilyPond and I can't
blame him for that: the return in value I provided for his own
contribution was certainly fluctuating more than his large investment
warranted.

On the other hand, I think I still provide enough money to warrant
minimum levels of living, so I need to check out how to coordinate the
possibility of lots of small payments.  I'll likely try to make use of
FSF channels of funding which has the disadvantage that they take 10%
flat for their own funding.  It will enable donation buttons, donation
by credit card, tax deductible donations in the U.S.

Of course, this will require agreement of other developers to actually
go ahead with a scheme that will mostly benefit, given the current
situation, a single person on behalf of the project.  We currently also
see the need for funding with regard to fonts, and there are also
infrastructure needs currently carried by project members which might
warrant funding.  And having a system administrator for making our issue
tracking free and maintaining it would also be nice.

So even if it turns out that total funding or the wishes of other
developers don't make it feasible to let me continue on the project, it
does not seem like we'd soon get into the situation where there would be
more funding available than we could sensibly make use of.  So I don't
think we would need to backpedal with regard to donation buttons and
other gushing sources of money in case I left.

LilyPond would not be where it is without the bunch of dedicated workers
continually answering questions, providing improvement, writing
documentation, improving what is there, providing translations, managing
issue reports and testing and so on and so on.  If this level of
dedication and support would have been there from the start, maybe our
core code base would be somewhat more transparent and documented and
versatile: the continuing efforts (and failures) to make the best of the
existing state provide a strong driving source for developers to make
things easier to access and use, and to cater for more use cases and
provide the tools for making this easier.

Thanks to everyone

-- 
David Kastrup