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

[Stefan Behnel]

Dag Sverre Seljebotn, 22.03.2012 17:58:
> On 03/22/2012 09:03 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote:
>> I would prefer copying the original installation over
>> (including the build history), rather than rebuilding it.
> 
> I hope it doesn't come to this, but if it does, I think we should really
> look hard at ShiningPanda instead.

We could set up an OSS test account to see what we'd get for our money,
i.e. how much of our build/test cycle we can put into one hour in their
environment.


> Honestly, my feeling is that if we can't rally up $240/month in funding
> among Cython users then we might as well give up.

As long as we have sage.math, I can think of better things to do with 240$
per month. Didn't we want to organise another workshop at some point?

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.

Basically, any "real" CEP that we consider doable and that we'd have a
developer for could get a funding account where users could "vote" for it
by donating money.

(and that's where the legal issues start ...)


> (And specifically, we
> could ask NumFOCUS first, and possibly share the queue with other open
> source projects on their lists, and possibly ask ShiningPanda for an OSS
> project rebate).

Sure.


> I'm not primarily concerned with uptime, but with the time spent in
> maintaining the systems. The more that can be moved into the cloud the
> better for open source projects, if it means less maintenance, which is
> usually the case; see our move to GitHub.

I don't know how much time the maintenance takes on UW side, but they're
using the machines for many other things, so I guess they'd have to invest
the time anyway. So they won't win much by us moving out.

Speaking for myself, I don't consider the time wasted that I invested into
the Jenkins setup so far, and I'm also not sure there'd be all that much to
gain by no longer administrating the server installation itself by
ourselves. The bulk of the work is about configuring jobs and writing
build/test/whatever scripts, which still applies to a cloud installation
(with, I assume, the added disadvantage of no longer being able to ssh
directly into the machine).


> ShiningPanda also offers features like testing on Windows.

That *is* a feature, but it also takes up additional (paid) time. We
wouldn't have to run continuous tests on it, though, just trigger tests
manually when we want them.

Stefan