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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

"We would like to thank our donors for the continued support of the PyPy project, and for those who donate to our three sub-projects, as well as our volunteers and contributors (10 new commiters joined PyPy since the last release). We’ve shown quite a bit of progress, but we’re slowly running out of funds. Please consider donating more, or even better convince your employer to donate, so we can finish those projects! The three sub-projects are: "

PyPy are doing such incredible work and they seem to ask for very little in the way of funding to make it happen (and they're very explicit about where they're going to spend the money).

Why is it that there aren't more donations from the industry? Is it just a marketing issue? Do they need to do a snazzy kickstarter video to build the hype?

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PyPy dev here. I would be interested to explore the ideas what can be done to improve our funding situation. We seem to have moderate success in those fundraisers, but nothing REALLY huge.

Unfortunately, it's not something I have answers to. I guess I just look at the success of something like the Micro Python campaign [0] (also a cool project) and wonder if something similar could be achieved.

There are plenty of companies that could benefit from PyPy doing well though. How many python servers do youtube / reddit etc run? With some investment in PyPy they could reduce their on-going costs. Youtube could easily dump $100k into the PyPy project, so what's stopping them? (I suspect the answer in that case is that Google just aren't interested)

I'm in a startup that doesn't have money to invest in PyPy, but if we we had more cash we'd definitely look at putting some into PyPy (though our use case is the hairy NumPy side of things).

I guess in the case of PyPy it's maybe less interesting to individuals but maybe there's some way of reframing it to make it interesting.

In a way, I'm sort of the target market here, because I use python all the time and I haven't donated to PyPy. So why haven't I donated (other than being quite broke because I'm starting a business)?

I think part of it is the urgency. There are 3 specific campaigns you're running [1] to get funding, along with funding for the general project itself. And the campaigns themselves are great - you have good overviews of the issues that you're solving, a realistic approach and a proven track record of being able to execute. But I don't know when those campaigns started and what the cut-off date is. They sort of feel ongoing and it feels like there's no loss in not donating right now. Compare with something like kickstarter, where you have a date by which if there hasn't been enough funding you may end up losing out on something really cool.

Sorry for the rather rambling brain-dump, but maybe there's some useful perspective here.

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/214379695/micro-python-...

[1] http://pypy.org/tmdonate2.html http://pypy.org/py3donate.html http://pypy.org/numpydonate.html

I think the number one thing is you have to give people a reason to pay. Being useful is of course the first step, but people also want to feel they're getting something "extra", they want to feel like it's a transaction, however bad.

One of those things can be to provide a very clear road-map tied to donations and then follow up on it. That's what so powerful with these crowd funding campaigns. People feel like they are making a difference though at times they are essentially buying something.

I don't think you necessarily have to "compromise your values" either. You're probably already limited by money, so add some planning and just be honest about it. "With this amount, this will happen" etc. As always of course "under-promise and over-deliver".

That's mainly for individuals though. Companies are somewhat the same, but they want things that fit into their budget.

Off topic but I just wanted to say thank you. You guys are doing killer work, pypy is an incredible project. Thank you

IMHO, While I have a huge respect for the team from a tech perspective, the pypy core team seems quite inefficient when it comes to communication and networking. Getting money is not real project there.

I may be silly but why don't you contact a professional lobbyist ? Those people know how to get money out of those big corps and could maybe be used for this good cause.

The marketing angle could be also interesting. The Big G would pay a little to appear benevolent to the community. Heck, the new Microsoft (which use Python alot) would pay to continue building their new image.

And ask the guy from LuaJIT, if he can do it...

I'm pretty surprised that you can't get some funding from Canonical, Redhat, Microsoft, SuSE, Linux Foundation, et al. Is there anyone on the team who could engage those organizations?

Several linux distros have much of their customization features written in python.

Microsoft seems to be trying VERY hard to change their course and attract more developers back to their platform(s). They're clearly willing to make strategic investments in open source projects.

I've found that PyPy works wonders for the vast majority of python code I've thrown at it. In order to close remaining gaps, funding is key.

> Microsoft seems to be trying VERY hard to change their course and attract more developers back to their platform(s). They're clearly willing to make strategic investments in open source projects.

RPython/pypy is kind-of a competitor to the CLR (especially with DLR) so unless it's for a CLR/DLR backend I doubt Microsoft would show that much interest.

I get the impression that many of the donations are from individuals. That's crazy considering the great work they're doing. They really need a sugar daddy, like the big G, to fund them.

Compare this with much less ambitious projects where developers gets funded when some company or other commits to it. Perhaps the Euro-centric development holds them back here from getting some of well earned Silicon Valley cash?

I wish I had the slighest idea how to help them, apart from pitching in some beer money. They do truly great work.

It's mostly companies (in the terms of money donated, not the number of donors). We mentioned them on the blog post if they want to (a lot want to stay anonymous)

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