[Cython] funding (Re: sage.math problems?)

[mark florisson]

On 23 March 2012 13:26, mark florisson <markflorisson88 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 22 March 2012 21:53, Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
>> Robert Bradshaw, 22.03.2012 19:39:
>>> On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 10:52 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote:
>>>> Regarding funding in general, maybe we should just start putting up one or
>>>> two of those sexy funding bars on our web site, like the PyPy devs do for
>>>> their funded projects. Assuming that goes well, it would also allow us to
>>>> put money on dedicated projects by paying basically ourselves for doing
>>>> tasks that we won't normally spend our precious spare time on (e.g. because
>>>> they appear too large for a weekend), but that we and our users deem
>>>> necessary for some reason.
>>>
>>> While that's a good idea in theory, I'm not sure how many additional
>>> hours would be freed up just because we could pay ourselves for it.
>>
>> And if more than one person frees hours for a given project, how would we
>> distribute the money? And how do we know we can still trust each other when
>> it comes to counting the hours? ;)
>>
>>
>>> Perhaps it would act primarily as an additional incentive to align our
>>> efforts with user request (though there are certainly already
>>> non-monetary incentives).
>>
>> There sure are, and I'm sure that won't change. We should see it as an
>> addition to what we invest voluntarily. No-one's going to pay for code
>> cleanup and refactoring, for example, or for tweaks and "having fun at the
>> weekend" code and "I hate that being slow" optimisations.
>>
>> We are not necessarily talking about large projects here that represent
>> person months of value. If I were to decide if I'd start implementing a
>> feature that looks like taking me, say, 10 days, and I'm not seriously
>> self-motivated in doing it, I won't even start because I know that I'll
>> have enough other things to do in the meantime that weigh in equally for
>> me. But, when I know I'll be paid for doing it, I'll certainly consider
>> shifting my priorities. And even if it takes three months to finish it in
>> my spare time, it would still be done in the end, which is much better than
>> just staying an open tracker entry forever.
>>
>>
>>> the
>>> monetization of Cython development changes the spirit of things a bit,
>>> and while I am a big fan of people being able to make money, or even a
>>> living, off of open source development
>>
>> I think if that works depends a lot on what you do exactly, who the users
>> are and also what you do in order to sell it (and yourself). It doesn't
>> work for every project and certainly not for everyone.
>>
>>
>>> it complicates things a lot
>>> from a legal, financial, and political perspective.
>>
>> Yes, I'm seeing that, too. But in any case, before it comes to asking for
>> donations for a given feature/project/fix/whatever, one of the first
>> questions will be: who can do it? And when? I think that will kill a lot of
>> political hassle early enough (although hopefully not the project in
>> question ;).
>>
>>
>>> The current model of organization X is willing to pay developer Y for
>>> feature Z directly seems to work well enough for the moment.
>>
>> That would still work. However, a donation based model would allow us to
>> lower the barrier. Paying a whole feature may be too much for a single
>> (smaller) company, and they would have to know exactly what they want in
>> order to ask us to do it for them. If, instead, we put up a list of
>> projects we consider worth doing and they can make a donation of, say, 5%
>> or 10% of the actual sum and let others pay for the same feature as well,
>> they can just use it to show their appreciation for the general gain we
>> give them, without desperately needing a given feature themselves. It would
>> also allow users to contribute money for "nice to have" features, which is
>> otherwise less likely to happen.
>>
>>
>>> E.g. with
>>> GSoC, the bottleneck is finding good enough students and time to
>>> mentor them, not slots (=funding).
>>
>> The mentors are not getting paid in a GSoC. So we invest our time by
>> guiding the student, and that's regardless of the usability of the outcome.
>> Even if there is an outcome, it's not unheard of that the mere overhead of
>> cleaning up and integrating the contribution comes close to reimplementing
>> it. It doesn't always work out as well as with Dag and Mark.
>>
>> I'm not saying GSoCs are bad - we've certainly had a boost of overall
>> development power through them. But they are just one way to fund the
>> development, and not always the best one.
>>
>>
>>> Opening up funding to non-students
>>> could help a bit, but IMHO wouldn't change the balance that much (the
>>> gainfully employed cost a lot more and have less spare time).
>>
>> It's certainly not the right way to attract new developers. But it's a way
>> to advance the development.
>>
>> Stefan
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>
> This may be OT for this thread, but sas numpy removed at some point
> from Jenkins? I'm seeing this for all python versions since Februari
> 25:
>
> Following tests excluded because of missing dependencies on your system:
>   run.memoryviewattrs
>   run.numpy_ValueError_T172
>   run.numpy_bufacc_T155
>   run.numpy_cimport
>   run.numpy_memoryview
>   run.numpy_parallel
>   run.numpy_test
> ALL DONE

I also changed the cython-sdist to pull from the release0.16 branch,
to make sure things work in the release.