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by projectramo 3283 days ago
Q: Are we conflating two issues?

Is there a difference between the "sole developer problem" and the "lack of funding" problem.

I mean, even if a project finds funding, does it follow that it will attract more talented developers?

One way to distinguish the two issues is to look at for-profit software. In the cases where there is one primary developer, do they find it easy to keep the software going when the person retires?

I ask this because, I think, beyond the very real monetary issue, there is a question of how development works. Do we need one very talented individual who does the lion's share of the lifting?
1 comments
webmaven 3283 days ago
> even if a project finds funding, does it follow that it will attract more talented developers?

It depends on what the funding is used for. Outreach in various forms (better documentation, presenting at conferences, a nicer website, moderating community venues from mailing lists to chat channels, triaging and grooming issues and PRs, etc.) takes time and effort (and therefore needs to be funded) as well.

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williamstein 3283 days ago
For SageMath, what funding we’ve got has been mostly used for organizing many “Sage Days” workshop coding sprints – we’ve had nearly 100 now over the last decade! They have made an absolutely tremendous difference in attracting the over 600 people who have contributed. But also key design decision, e.g., 100% test coverage, helped too. I clearly remember the moment – in a big discussion at a Sage Days (funded by the Clay Math Institute) – that Craig Citro argued for 100% doctest coverage, and we all decided to do it. Without funding, those Sage Days wouldn’t have happened, and the community would not have developed. I also remember a Sage Days that we did jointly with Numpy at Enthought, where discussions and work we did together grew into many important things later. Funding is ridicuously absolutely critical to growing certain types of open source projects. In another direction, a lot of our infrastructure (e.g., build, testing, etc.,) is hosted on a big computer bought with a grant.
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