For much of the last 5 years, I've been one of a very small group of people maintaining, developing and improving Open Dylan (http://opendylan.org/) (a Lisp-like language without Lisp-like syntax).
I've managed to fund some of the work by doing other contract work. It has also given me a lot of experience working with pretty much anything I want in the compiler, debugger, linker, run-time libraries, performance tools, C bindings generators, networking code, garbage collection, type systems and so much more. Some of this has resulted in further contract work, some has resulted in contributed fixes or improvements to other libraries.
(I'm now looking to potentially fund a student for some work this coming summer.)
Now, I'm taking a lot of what I've learned from that and starting up a small business (not looking for VC) to produce a new kind of developer tool. We plan to be open source and have some customizations and packaged products that businesses will be interested in and suspect we can fund ourselves that way. It'll be a long hard slog to get there, but we're pretty excited about what we're doing.
In general, I think there are a lot of things that could really use improvements. Our shells haven't changed much in the last 20 years. (I wrote a post about this last October: http://waywardmonkeys.org/2014/10/10/rich-command-shells/.) Almost everywhere you look, there are things that could be better. Most of them are a hard sell as a business. Some sort of increased infrastructure funding would be great.
Along those lines, there are programs that provide funding for some of those sorts of things. Stripe had an open source residency program for a short while. Mozilla funds some projects. The Knight Foundation funds a number of things a couple of times a year. Even Comcast has a funding program (http://techfund.comcast.com/). I'd love it if organizations over a certain size allocated some funding for some work that might benefit them, but would also have a wider benefit. If someone has 50 or 100 programmers on staff, they can probably afford to sponsor someone for 3 months or a year at a time. And who knows what might come of some of it...
A question: do you think it would make sense/be reasonable to try to write a racket language extension for Dylan? Sort of as an alternate implementation? (Not really asking if it would make sense for the Open Dylan project to use resources for that, more if there are obvious things/differences between Dylan and Racket/scheme that would make it infeasible).
>> I've managed to fund some of the work by doing other contract work.
To be clear, you are donating your time to the project. There is no other source of funding. This is the same as a side project on top of your consulting gig.
I've managed to fund some of the work by doing other contract work. It has also given me a lot of experience working with pretty much anything I want in the compiler, debugger, linker, run-time libraries, performance tools, C bindings generators, networking code, garbage collection, type systems and so much more. Some of this has resulted in further contract work, some has resulted in contributed fixes or improvements to other libraries.
(I'm now looking to potentially fund a student for some work this coming summer.)
Now, I'm taking a lot of what I've learned from that and starting up a small business (not looking for VC) to produce a new kind of developer tool. We plan to be open source and have some customizations and packaged products that businesses will be interested in and suspect we can fund ourselves that way. It'll be a long hard slog to get there, but we're pretty excited about what we're doing.
In general, I think there are a lot of things that could really use improvements. Our shells haven't changed much in the last 20 years. (I wrote a post about this last October: http://waywardmonkeys.org/2014/10/10/rich-command-shells/.) Almost everywhere you look, there are things that could be better. Most of them are a hard sell as a business. Some sort of increased infrastructure funding would be great.
Along those lines, there are programs that provide funding for some of those sorts of things. Stripe had an open source residency program for a short while. Mozilla funds some projects. The Knight Foundation funds a number of things a couple of times a year. Even Comcast has a funding program (http://techfund.comcast.com/). I'd love it if organizations over a certain size allocated some funding for some work that might benefit them, but would also have a wider benefit. If someone has 50 or 100 programmers on staff, they can probably afford to sponsor someone for 3 months or a year at a time. And who knows what might come of some of it...