Funding continuous maintenance for PyInstaller?

[Hartmut Goebel]

Hi,

I'm seeking advice how to fund continuous maintenance for an open source
project.

*Do you have any idea how to fund continuous maintenance for PyInstaller?
Do you have any idea whom or where to ask?
Do you know somebody to help setting up a commercial support/maintenance
model? *

I'm the (remaining) maintainer of PyInstaller (www.pyinstaller,org).
Currently I'm maintaining PyInstaller in my spare-time. But it's is
getting to much work for working on it for free: the open issue tickets
and pull-requests are piling up. Since PyInstaller is quite mature,
problems are hard to track down and to solve. Thus solving one ticket
often takes half a day or even more.

I'm already got in tough with the the PSF and the Python Software
Verband (much like PSF, just for Germany), but they have not experience
with this. I also read the PSF grants program, but this doesn't fit for
continous maintenance. I also had a look at bountysource, but the
numbers offered there may be teasers for students, not for professionals
- so I did not follow this road. I plan to add a "donate" page to the
web-site, but I doubt this will bring in noteworthy amounts.

So I was thinking about some commercial support/maintenance model, but I
have no experience with this. As I'm a freelance consultant already (but
in the information security business), this could be feasible to
implement, if I'd know how to address the commercial users.

Thanks for any tip!

*About PyInstaller*

PyInstaller is the successor of "McMillan Installer", a tool like,
freeze, py2exe, py2app or bbfreeze - but PyInstaller supports Windows,
MacOS and Unix (GN/Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, etc.). PyInstaller is widely
used sa you can see when looking at the issues and on the mailinglist.
E.g. kivy uses/recommends PyInstaller for building Python-Apps for
mobile platforms.

PyInstaller is also used for commercial applications (as some hints on
the mailinglist or
But most commercial users are unknown.

*About me*

I'm based an Germany and developing open source and free software since
about 1990 and using Python since about 1998. Beside of this I developed
software like pdfposter, python-ghostscript, python-managesieve, etc. My
day-job is freelance consultant focused on information security.

-- 
Regards
Hartmut Goebel

| Hartmut Goebel          | h.goebel at crazy-compilers.com               |
| www.crazy-compilers.com | compilers which you thought are impossible |