[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       quanta
Subject:    [Quanta] My report on Quanta sponsorship (and request for help)
From:       Eric Laffoon <sequitur () kde ! org>
Date:       2005-05-19 12:36:53
Message-ID: 200505190640.16308.sequitur () kde ! org
[Download RAW message or body]

Hi all!
(This is not short, but if you are interested in the project doing well this 
should be of interest to you.) Those of you who know me know that I really 
detest asking for money. However since we're competitive with expensive 
software packages and we need so little I've always felt it should just fall 
into place. Unfortunately it seems that several times a year I have to go 
through the humble act of asking for money. Last year we lost a $100 a month 
sponsor and his appeal on the Dot resulted in a record response, which I was 
grateful for. I did not need to do my usual Christmas passing of the cup. 
(Yay!) Recently a number of factors have conspired to make things more than a 
little frustrating.

In the interest of saving you some time, we need help. Here's the address. 
http://kdewebdev.org/donate.php
Sponsorships are preferred to donations. I really hate asking on the list 
because my records show it's the same people over and over again to pick up 
the slack. I'd really like to see help from new names. 

Because I consider individual finances personal I have not discussed the exact 
amount going to Andras and Michal. Make no mistake that while I remain 
committed to this project it is essential to have some additional support 
from users and the work being done by sponsored developers is critical to the 
advance of our project and to keeping our code as bug free as possible. If we 
were not able to sustain the sponsorships it would be a real loss. 

To preface this with a personal note, last year I got very ill about this time 
and thanks to the support of our users we managed to pick up the slack. This 
year has been better for me, though I did recently have a debilitating 
stopped up ear for nearly two weeks that left me totally disoriented. My 
business has an absolutely huge income potential in the coming years, but if 
I have to siphon too much resource capital off for this project the net loss 
is orders of magnitude. Obviously if when I was financially struggling to pay 
my bills I spent thousands of dollars on this project it stands to reason 
when my income grows substantially I will have that much more ability to 
positively affect things. At the moment however I'm in a temporary cash flow 
situation again due to various frustrating circumstances I'm not going to 
vent here.

Over the last few years we have taken donations and accepted sponsorships. 
Currently we're at 10 sponsorships, most of which are a small monthly amount. 
Sponsorships are very beneficial because we can budget them. Donations seem 
to ebb and tide with the asking. This year I have not really asked, and now 
that I am behind paying both sponsored developers and short on cash I have 
been looking closely at just how bad this year has been for donations. Keep 
in mind we lost a major sponsor and we have a lot of users... possibly well 
over a million. So far for 2005 we have had 8 donations for a total of 
roughly $360 and an average of about $80 a month. I thought this time last 
year was slower than I expected with 25 donations averaging over $300 a 
month.

Actually we had a 9th donation I wasn't counting. It was $5. However there was 
one name on the card and another on the email address and the card holder 
wrote Paypal to contest it. At the time my ear was stopped up and I got dizzy 
trying to type so I let it lapse. My time expired and Paypal charged me $10 
for dispute resolution. That was a real nice surprise.

To put some perspective on this we have 495 subscribers on this list and I'm 
sure many more who read it on newsgroups. Prior to being included in KDE (and 
prior to Andras' involvement) when we were at the KDE 2 level our Sourceforge 
downloads for a major version were over 35,000 per release and at one point 
we were in the top 10 of 50,000 project on Sourceforge. This is where I get 
my large user number estimations. I figure at most 1 in 10 *nix desktop users 
will compile a program like Quanta and inclusion in KDE and growth since 2001 
means there is no way we don't have at least a probable half a million users. 
When I look at our donations this year and the thousands of dollars I will 
need to come up with for this project in 2005, and when I couple it with all 
the time and effort I have to put into the project, I had one of those "why 
am I doing this?" moments. How does one interpret these numbers? While my 
experience has been resoundingly positive when we ask for help I can't say 
the same when we don't ask.

For the moment I'm looking for a little help so that I can take care of 
getting some money off to Andras and begin catching up with Michal, who has 
been so patient. In the near future I plan to make two very exciting 
announcements which will benefit our users. In each will be a request for 
funding help. I really like having something besides needing money to talk 
about for news. I hope in the coming weeks to do something with this, but 
when I do a fund raising effort I usually end up spending a week with a lot 
of distractions on emails and talkbacks. It's not that I don't enjoy the 
interaction with users because I do, but it tends to impact my productivity. 
I also tend to focus on baseline expenses but there are issues of hardware 
and travel that come up too.

The Quanta announcement will revolve around our new web site which has seen 
some progress. I plan to add our database features including feature requests 
and some development planning and traking tools that are linked in. I also 
want to get our KStuff online interface working and I was just about ready to 
add the news feature before I got too busy a while back. Renewing these 
efforts will be a move to make a resource portal for the community to share 
resources and combined with the extensibility of Quanta this will, in my 
opinion, be a huge step forward for most users being able to access the more 
advanced features of Quanta by simply accessing what more advanced users are 
sharing. This has been a long developing project to produce something that 
changes the way things are done. It's based on my five years of experience 
managing the project. I plan to release a story on the Dot when it is ready 
and I hope to be able to do that before the end of the month.

The Kommander announcement is also close and will be tools for integrating a 
database plugin using the Knoda hk_classes library. (Actually this is a demo 
for the plugin capability of Kommander as more plugins could easily be made.) 
Initially it is a non visual widget and it gives you access to MySql, Postgre 
SQL, SQLite as well as ODBC and other drivers in development. This has 
actually been in final test for some time and I have been developing a dialog 
to enable easy integration with Quanta projects so that you can use it to 
create SQL phrases using point and click with your databases. The next step 
will be to integrate visual widgets. I think database integration will be a 
big plus for many. There are a few other things we want to develop for 
Kommander that would be useful for integration with Quanta. Those include the 
ability to load a KPart or create one, context menus, Actions similar to 
Quanta, script templates, project tools, enhanced drag and drop and more. By 
bringing this together with KStuff it opens the possibility to have extensive 
libraries of community developed tools you can download and use for your 
work.

There are a lot of things I still want to do with Quanta and to me it is just 
getting interesting as it is very capable in so many areas now. At the same 
time I have to focus my attention on some business issues to bring myself to 
greater financial latitude for what I want to do with the kdewebdev packages. 
I'm hoping in a few years to have the financial ability to fly our 
development team someplace nice for vacation together every year and other 
fun things. While all this is more than possible I keep having to spend time 
putting out fires. I really hate putting out fires, just like I don't enjoy 
asking for money. Nothing would make me happier than to focus on business and 
kdewebdev issues in a creative capacity without distraction, but inevitably 
distraction is part of life. 

You can help our project, relieve stress and insure our continued efforts. 
However I don't want to ask for guilt money. The fact is we probably would be 
in great shape with around 5 donations now, about 20 donations in the coming 
weeks and about 10-15 a month, but subscription sponsorships are desired 
because with enough of them I don't have to keep asking. Anyway, I don't want 
people to contribute unless they want to and feel good about it. I would even 
be happier if it wasn't the same people who always step up, but if the 
numbers prove anything it's that if you think the next person will pick up 
the slack for you... there may be hundreds, if not thousands, of people 
between you and that next person.

I really appreciate all the help we've received from all the really great 
users we have over the years. I'll be better when I'm not creating stress for 
Andras. Really. ;-) I've been on and off composing this and now it's the 
middle of the night. When I get up I get to go to the dentist. That should 
cheer me up. Maybe I will have some funds in Paypal I can send Andras too. (I 
have a Paypal debit card.) Thanks for your support and encouragement 
everyone.

http://kdewebdev.org/donate.php

One final note. Please don't use this as a platform to offer new ideas for us. 
We're overflowing with ideas! What we're short on is the time to bring them 
to fruition, and this is compounded by a shortage of finances that we have to 
take time to address. Unless you can contribute time or money I ask that you 
let me get those factors addressed before I take on any more ideas. Thanks.
-- 
Eric Laffoon - Quanta+ Team Leader 
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org
_______________________________________________
Quanta mailing list
Quanta@mail.kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/quanta
[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]