>>>>> "Andrew" == Andrew P Black <black at cs.pdx.edu> writes:

Andrew> 3. What is your view on fund raising and how any such collected money
Andrew> should be dealt with?

Andrew> As Randal says, needs must be identified before one can try to raise
Andrew> money to meet them.  The two main sources will be foundations and
Andrew> companies.  Money is out there if we can paint a vision of where we
Andrew> want to go.  Unfortunately, getting the image cleaned up and our
Andrew> processes organized are not fundable activities.  Developing a
Andrew> concurrent Smalltalk, for example, might be: I mean a parallel VM and
Andrew> an enhanced language with real concurrency primitives (I don't count
Andrew> Semaphores!)

Since you invoked my name (grin), I feel a comment on your comment is
appropriate.

You say that "getting the image cleaned up" is not a fundable activity.

Here's how to think about fundraising.  Who would benefit from a cleaned-up
image?  It's not the empty set.

In fact, one group that clearly would benefit from a cleaned up image *and*
has a commercial interest (therefore, funding) is the ISVs of the world.  Like
Stonehenge, since we intend on using Squeak for our clients.  If the image
were cleaned up, our work would be easier, and we could sell Squeak as part of
the solution more easily into our customer base.

So, you hit the ISVs up for sponsorship towards getting the image cleaned up,
in exchange for a nice "thanks to our sponsors" page somewhere googleable, and
it's win-win.  ISVs get a visibility kickback, and you get money to pay people
to clean up the image.

And it doesn't even need to be monetary.  Suppose Stonehenge paid me for a
month to spend hunkered down cleaning things up.  If that got mentioned in
some sponsors page, I'm sure I could get the Stonehenge board to approve that.

This is what I mean about funding.  Don't think of it all as looking for
501(c)3 charitable individual contributions.  Look for corporate sponsorship
and in-kind donations.  They're the real source of funding.  We've seen that
over and over again in the Perl community.  And you *don't* need to be a
charitable organization for those.  You just need to be organized as a
non-profit, usually.  Sure, the Conservancy deal is interesting, but
there's really no need to wait.

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
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