On donations, utilization and Roadmap for 1.0

[Nicolas di Tada]

Hi All, 

There have been a few questions lately around topics that are related and we wanted to address them by sharing details on where we are right now with Crystal.

   

In the last 2 years, we have got total donations for approximately $42.000. The donations we receive are incredibly helpful. On one end, they allows us to count on a somehow predictable income on which to base our additional investment. On an even more important end, they act as a powerful signal for the interest of the community. But those donations are still only a fraction of the costs of this effort and while we don’t intend Crystal to be a major source of revenue for Manas, we do need it to be sustainable in the long-term. 

In that same period we have clocked 3.282 hours of developer’s time (we know exactly because we use a tool we developed for tracking our work time). If we use, for accounting purposes, this lower bound fee for a front-end developer  ($50/h) and discounted the upper bound of the industry standard profit margin (15%) we are still looking at an internal cost of around $140.000 just in those 2 years. Costs like hosting and domains are negligible in the overall picture, so a monthly report of the usage of the donations wouldn’t make much sense. In short, it all goes to paying 1/3 of the development cost.

We have a fantastic community to which we are extremely thankful, and we know we owe an update on the Roadmap to the 1.0 we all want to see. We have spent some time putting together an estimate for what’s pending for a 1.0 release that we could be proud of, an it comes to about 1.400 additional hours. At a pace of 2x the monthly hours we are currently covering with donations (~54hs), that means another extra 14 months. That number is way longer than what we want.

In the last few weeks we have been making efforts to reaching out to a few additional supporters to try to speed that up and the initial responses have been super positive. If you know of companies that could be willing to chip-in, let us know.

If everything goes well, we should soon be able to commit to a much shorter timeline. In the meantime, we thought this quick update would improve our transparency. 

Thanks again for your incredible support,

The Crystal Team at Manas.Tech 

[Serdar Doğruyol]

Hey Nicolas,

Thanks a lot for a great and detailed answer. This really makes the big picture clearer. 

Is there any aimed amount (for example $5k / month) to keep Crystal development in a sustainable pace?

Best,

Serdar

15 Ağustos 2017 Salı 21:41:02 UTC+3 tarihinde Nicolas di Tada yazdı:

[Faustino Aguilar]

By SaltTM on Reddit:

I think the best way to sustain income is to make a product with crystal to generate money. Crystal is stable enough to produce software, maintaining it with newer updates might not be as bad either, but trying to sustain off donations is unrealistic and unpredictable. One minute you could be getting a lot of money and next minute people might lose interest in crystal because of the lack of community/libraries or simply features that they wanted added that won't be coming.

[Faustino Aguilar]

A bit off topic but the slogan seems interesting:

[Faustino Aguilar]

Hi Nico, I know this is a bit uncomfortable discussion, but I recently read asterite comments on Reddit and I think I'm a bit confused:

https://www.reddit.com/r/crystal_programming/comments/8ilwwd/community_question_what_do_you_think_is_missing/dyvq9o9/

I have confidence on Manas and his bountysource campaign , but Do they have the knowledge or the time to fix Crystal major issues?

I mean, I think, maybe, Crystal authors can document crystal internals, so the crystal community can collaborate with crystal core, not just stdlib.

We need most documentation like this: https://crystal-lang.org/2015/03/04/internals.html

[Nicolas di Tada]

Hi Faustino,

The only uncomfortable questions are the ones not asked! 

Thanks to the continued support on the bountysource campaign and the last corporate sponsors we already have one full time person working on Crystal (currently Brian). We'll continue to try to increase that. While Ary might be the one most familiar with the compiler, there are several other super smart devs in well acquainted with Crystal, in Manas (waj, gus, brian) and other places, that could tackle challenging problems. Everything is possible with time and effort, we’ll do well ;-) 

Cheers!

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