Thanks for the kind words, David. I just want to mention one thing.
On Jul 24, 2017, at 16:42, ddw David Wilson <ddw.256@gmail.com> wrote:
Personally, when it comes to contributing, I like to have my funds tied or directed to specific, measurable, delivered goals such as frequently seen with crowdfunding applications, rather than simply contributing to an open pool of cash, not earmarked for something specific. Just me, perhaps, but tying the dollars to results makes me feel good, even if it's awkward for those who simply want to delve into the code to fix an irritating bug or work on the next inter-application interface, etc.
Very understandable, and we’ve done this in the past. Our initial donation seed money came from Control.com to implement the topics feature of Mailman 2.
It’s not unfeasible to do something similar today, although as always, such funding focused development work has to serve the needs of our users and overall project goals. We wouldn’t take money to implement something completely antithetical to our vision or principles.
An example of something worthy to fund would be the dynamic lists/nosey lists feature that Systers pioneered, porting that to Mailman 3 proper. But funded development work is difficult because it requires a motivated donor, developer resources (i.e. time), and a project need.
One important thing that our pool of donations has supported in the past has been bringing GSoC students to Pycon to sprint with the core team. We need only point to Abhilash Raj, who started out as a GSoC student and is now a core developer working on amazing things. Talk about the multiplier effect! :)
For many of us (well, I’ll speak for myself), Mailman has been a labor of love. It’s hard to believe it’s been something near 20 years, and somehow it’s still fun!
-Barry