Found on proggit: Nim receives funding from a company (D should be doing something like this)

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 8/13/18 5:50 AM, Joakim wrote:
> Announced last week, the Nim team will be adding two full-time paid devs 
> and setting up grants for needed projects with this new funding:
> 
> https://our.status.im/status-partners-with-the-team-behind-the-programming-language-nim/ 
> 
> https://nim-lang.org/blog/2018/08/07/nim-partners-with-status.html
> 
> D should also be trying to raise resources like this, though it doesn't 
> have to be corporate funding from one source. This company funding Nim 
> raised $100 million in an ICO last year to build some kind of 
> cryptocurrency-oriented mobile apps platform:
> 
> https://www.inc.com/brian-d-evans/status-ico-raised-over-100-million-for-ethereum-powered-dapps-on-ios-and-androi.html 
> 
> 
> There are risks, of course. This company could flame out, like many of 
> these new cryptocurrency companies do, leaving Nim without ongoing 
> funding. Their priorities may not align with the Nim core team.
> 
> However, there are other ways to raise funds. Companies using D could 
> use the existing bountysource page to put up bounties for features/fixes 
> or projects they need, to which community members who need some 
> particular feature/fix could also donate:
> 
> https://www.bountysource.com/teams/d
> 
> There are two primary factors in the success of any project, design and 
> resources. I'm reasonably happy with the design of D and how technical 
> decisions are being made. I think this is a core strength of D.
> 
> However, it appears the D core team has so far been doing a horrible job 
> in gathering resources for the project. I'm not privy to any internal 
> discussions or if this is being discussed at all. But it needs to be a 
> priority for the ongoing growth of this project.

Thanks for the info. That's good for Nim and something we could 
definitely benefit from as well. Currently, Sebastian Wilzbach and 
Razvan Nitu, both students, are working full time with the Foundation. 
Mike is our publishing and general PR person, working a reliable part 
time. We are in talks with a few more students from Romania and Brazil.

Our early experiments with bountysource were sadly unsuccessful. I'm not 
writing it off but we'd probably need a new angle for a new round of 
experimentation. Suggestions are welcome.

Regarding corporate sponsorship, we have been public about being 
interested, but we haven't exactly beaten off offers with a stick. I 
have personally asked our top users in several instances for assistance. 
There has been some, but not to the extent of allocating one or more 
full-time engineers. Shout out to Laeeth Isharc whose enterprise has 
been far and away the most generous, and to Weka as well for sharing 
with us some time and resources at a crucial juncture for the company.

We've always been glad to take suggestions from individual 
collaborators. Mike Parker would be the person to reach out to. What 
would be best is to get some concrete action; historically, the typical 
suggestion came in the form "here's this great idea, you go work on it". 
Even that is fine if the idea is fleshed out and argued convincingly. 
Better yet, there's no better proof that an idea is good than to 
actually execute it to demonstrable benefit.


Thanks,

Andrei