2015 funding thoughts

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Wednesday 22 October 2014 Oct 19:22:03 Sven Langkamp wrote:
 
> That's sad, although I already feared that it would happen. I assume that
> KO also will be getting out of the remaining Calligra too (not that much
> anyway), right? Paying to you and Dmitry it certainly going to be hard.

But not impossible, I hope...

> Any estimates for the subscriptions?

Not yet. Right now, the development fund is only about a hundred euros a month...

> I think the animation support needs at least three months to fix the
> remaining issues and integrate into the main application. The additions for
> that project would be another 3-4 months.

Hm... So much? That's going to have to be compressed a lot :-(

> 
> Another big item is port to Qt 5 which should also happen in 2015. That
> should take not that much time, but also needs to be scheduled carefully.
> 

Yes. At the calligra sprint we discussed that, too, and planned to do that immediately after the 2.9 release. A straight port first, run all the scripts, make sure everything builds, then disable all applications from compilation, then let the maintainers (if any) re-enable their applications when they start porting the applications properly. It should lead to a 3.0 in about three months, in my estimation. I'm also guessing it will lead to shedding a lot of dead wood in calligra.

> I think it's important that we go back to shorter release cycles as 2.9 and
> not start too many projects at once. Ideally we would be ready to ship a
> development project every 3-4 months. Currently we have sort of a mess due
> to mvc and animation running concurrently. A shorter development cycle
> would bring new features to the users faster.

Yes. Though postponing 2.9 to December was purely because we started the kickstarter project too late.

> I think we should also try Patreon. Form what I saw that seems to be a lot
> more interesting for people than custom development funds. Looking at other
> Patreon stuff it looks like the average is amount per person is about 10$
> for bigger project and we would maybe need between 1000 and 1300 supporters
> to fund everything, but 600 could get a half the amount already.

I will try to set that up this weekend. I'm still not sure how to make it go well, but we cannot afford to let any stone unturned.


-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org