[Xapian-discuss] Xapian's 10th Birthday

[Olly Betts]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 10:59:49AM -0700, Kevin Duraj wrote:
> Perhaps you could consider to make a donation button on xapian.org
> site, that would allow users to donate money to cover Xapian open
> source operation expenses, similarly as Eclipse foundation is doing.
> It would make many users of Xapian open source  feel better if they
> could give something back for good cause to help Xapian search engine
> library to grow. Small donations are adding lot faster than finding
> one big sponsor.

It's a possibility, though as soon as you start collecting money on
behalf of the project, you open up issues of how to handle it.  It
sounds like Eclipse have a foundation, which gives them a legal
existence, and that removes some of the pitfalls.

We could create a foundation, or join one of the umbrellas (e.g. the
Software Freedom Conservancy http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/),
but this sort of thing takes effort which distracts from getting on with
improving Xapian.

So we could spend time and effort trying to raise money to help fund
people getting together in the same physical location in several months
time to have a development sprint so we can improve Xapian.  Or we could
just spend that time and effort on improving Xapian right now!

Eclipse is also a popular application rather than a library used behind
the scenes - the majority of Xapian users are actually people using a
website or searching in a desktop application.  For example, Xapian is
installed on more than 60% of Debian machines according to popcon (about
ten times as many as eclipse!), but largely because it's a runtime
dependency of the package manager and other popular software.  The
installed base of libxapian-dev or xapian-omega is a fraction of a
percent.

So I'm also a little dubious how much this would actually raise.  Unless
we have a reason to expect that we'd raise a significant amount of money
via inviting donations (e.g. published figures for sums raised by
projects of a similar nature and popularity), I think it's perhaps
better to just encourage people to give back by spending a little time
writing patches, submitting good quality bug reports, helping other
users on the mailing lists and IRC, etc.

If people want to put money directly into improving Xapian, we're open
to sponsorship of the development of new features.  A lot of features
have been wholly or partly sponsored - a few recent examples are
spelling correction, synonyms, database replication, collapsing to leave
more than one document, and posting sources.  And this way you know
exactly what your money is being spent on!

Cheers,
    Olly