Update on Perkeep, Brad, Mathieu, Open Collective donations

[Brad Fitzpatrick]

Perkeep users,

I just wanted to give you all an update on the state of Perkeep and my & Mathieu's situations.

Of Perkeep's nearly 9 year existence, I'd been paying Mathieu to work on Perkeep full-time for the past 6 of those years.

But that was always supposed to be a temporary situation that we just kept doing out of habit. I can't afford to pay Mathieu what he's worth, though, and we've agreed that he it'd be better for him to get a "real job" in the industry where he can make normal industry money.  It'd also cut down on my expenses.

As for me: my time has only become more scarce now that I have a kid. The guilt of not working on Perkeep enough (but wanting to!) is what led me to pay Mathieu in the first place.

So, what to do now?

I continue to use Perkeep myself and it's not going anywhere, but it does require ongoing maintenance for some parts (updating to new Go versions, updating to ever-changing APIs for the site importers) and I hope I or others in the community (including Mathieu for fun) will be able to keep up with that.

But in lieu of anybody working on this a lot (full-time or hobby), I don't expect major work to happen on Perkeep for a bit.

We're very grateful for the 20 supporters and 5 organizations supporting us financially on Open Collective (https://opencollective.com/perkeep/), but at this point you should probably stop or at least pause your donations, as I have nobody to send the money to. I'll be taking out what remains for Mathieu's final payments. 

If anybody has questions, concerns, or suggestions, we're all ears.

We're of course also grateful for all those have contributed their time & code, and we hope you will continue to do so. I hope to continue hacking on Perkeep myself as I find pockets of time.

Life, yo.

- Brad & Mathieu

[Chris Portela]

Makes me sad that there won’t be someone on it full time anymore, but you both have already contributed and/or sacrificed so much to make this project happen.

I can certainly understand not having the time since I’ve tried to contributing, but I simply didn’t have time to fix up my contributions nor contribute more which is a shame.

Life, yo.

[Mathieu Lonjaret]

I just want to add that i'm personally grateful for Brad's "patronage"
and guidance all this time. Fun times were had.
And I want to thank you all again for your time, patience, and contributions.
I'm not going anywhere either, and I'll keep on using Perkeep for my own stuff.

[Paul Lindner]

If you can be compensated with a paypal account I'd like to see people submit for reimbursements.  I've put in $2625 and I'd love to see some devs cash that in with feature implementations, community building or maintenance.

If people start actually doing this I will continue to fund so that we can keep up some momentum and start building organically.

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[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

I still think Perkeep needs more of the passing eyeballs to stick,
getting more users, and hopefully a fraction of those as contributors.
And what's stopping it is an up-front list of wide-ranging use cases
that are possible today, as I said in
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/perkeep/HRvqeDYHvdY/0Zw0t5l2BAAJ

https://perkeep.org/doc/uses is two clicks from the front page, that's
two too many, and over five years out of date.

--
Cheers, Ralph.

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 09:57:08AM +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> https://perkeep.org/doc/uses is two clicks from the front page, that's
> two too many, and over five years out of date.

Definitely! I looked at perkeep about two years ago, wondering if I
could use it for backups, and at the time, it was rough. I don't know
if it was because the documentation was out of date, or the features
weren't there, but at the time, the pain points I found were:

*) Exclude files, so that I don't actually back up all of my git
pack files (those get backed up much more efficiently in other
ways).

*) Garbage collection, so if I accidentally back up git pack files,
or stuff that I really don't want to keep forever (for example,
for various legal reasons), I can easily and selectively get rid
of stuff.

*) An easy way of figuring querying my backups so I can see how many
versions I have of a particular file, and how often host A has been
backed up versus host B verus Laptop C.

I just didn't have the time to figure out how to do this myself, and
every so often I check to see if those features have been added, but
if the documentation is out of date, perkeep could be very much fit
for purpose for my particular use case, but I just didn't know that it
was time for me to try using perkeep again.

- Ted

[Kyle Lemons]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 5:05 PM Paul Lindner <lin...@inuus.com> wrote:

If you can be compensated with a paypal account I'd like to see people submit for reimbursements.  I've put in $2625 and I'd love to see some devs cash that in with feature implementations, community building or maintenance.

If people start actually doing this I will continue to fund so that we can keep up some momentum and start building organically.

Just thinking aloud, but one thing that might be interesting is if donors can set bounties on certain features or bugs.

[Brad Fitzpatrick]

Another update: I've moved https://opencollective.com/perkeep back to being hosted by the Open Source non-profit (https://opencollective.com/opensourcecollective) instead of me being the fiscal host.

That means I don't get the money to my bank account directly anymore, which is good (and easier on taxes, ugh). We were only doing that because I needed to pay Mathieu in Euros before and Open Collective's Open Source non-profit fiscal host couldn't do that.

So at least this point we can let people do work & get paid out via PayPal or Stripe or whatever from the non-profit and I'm not in the path, except to click "approve" on expenses along with Mathieu & Paul Lindner. PayPal can do the currency conversion. Tiny bit more in fees, but better than me dealing with it.

[Brad Fitzpatrick]

Yeah, Matthieu and I can still do reviews & help with such decisions.

On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 5:58 PM Gina White <ginaby...@gmail.com> wrote:

Will there be anyone able to take time to make decisions about design choices and to do code reviews?

Some things I currently have an interest in, (some are small, some are big):

. Adding thumbnails to PDFs
. Having perkeep understand how many pages are in a pdf, with that being searchable
. Somehow allowing for multiple dates and people being associated with a pdf (e.g. this document was created on date ‘a’ by user ‘z’, mailed on date ‘b’ to user ‘y’, then emailed on date ‘c’ to user ‘x’) in a searchable way

I used to make my living doing software engineering (and wrote the pinboard importer for perkeep), but these days I’m working in the legal field. A single case can have over 10,000 pages of PDFs associated with it and I would like to be able to manage them better.

- Gina

[Gina White]

Will there be anyone able to take time to make decisions about design choices and to do code reviews?

Some things I currently have an interest in, (some are small, some are big):

. Adding thumbnails to PDFs
. Having perkeep understand how many pages are in a pdf, with that being searchable
. Somehow allowing for multiple dates and people being associated with a pdf (e.g. this document was created on date ‘a’ by user ‘z’, mailed on date ‘b’ to user ‘y’, then emailed on date ‘c’ to user ‘x’) in a searchable way

I used to make my living doing software engineering (and wrote the pinboard importer for perkeep), but these days I’m working in the legal field. A single case can have over 10,000 pages of PDFs associated with it and I would like to be able to manage them better.

- Gina

On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 6:05 PM Brad Fitzpatrick <br...@danga.com> wrote:

[Abraham Palmer]

I went looking to make a donation and found this thread and the Open Collective page active. It's nice to see there is some regular contributions and a balance there to support at least some smaller needs. Thanks to all for the great prior work and financial contributions.
--Abraham