Company support: Sponsoring Sphinx?

[Daniel Woste]

Dear Sphinx community,

I’m maintainer of an extension called Sphinx-Needs and I support companies in Germany to setup and integrate Sphinx in their internal processes and CI systems.

In this job you realize day by day how important Sphinx became for companies and their development teams.

Only in one company hundreds of engineers do their documentation with it and build Sphinx based websites dozens times a day. Sphinx is awesome.

On the other hand I also see the problems bigger teams have with Sphinx and more important, which features are needed to support bigger, decentralized teams even more.

Stuff you normally not need in smaller teams, e.g. process driven topics, secured executions for functional safety, page/file responsibilities, data driven automation.

And I ask myself, if there is a way Sphinx could take benefit from its usage in commercial projects and higher the amount of available development power.

Maybe Takeshi Komiya and others would love to “outsource” some smaller pieces or get paid for their priceless commitment :).

A lot of famous open-source tools have gone this way. Django got the Django foundation.

Blender also and they have this awesome fund-page: https://fund.blender.org/.

OBS-Studio, a tool for webcam streaming, is using https://opencollective.com/obsproject/ to collect money and they got Twitch and Facebook as main sponsors.

And the amount of money they get is not small. Blender gets ~90.000 € per month and have a paid development team of ~10 guys.

In my eyes Sphinx is important enough for so many companies, that some kind of a sponsoring model could work.

So what do you thing? Any concerns or bad feelings? Any ideas what the sphinx community should test?

Or is all of this not needed?

Cheers,

  Daniel

[marcia wilbur]

Honestly, I think supporting software used within a corp or business environment is an amazing way to go. For example, cURL received a donation from Indeed.

Does sphinx have an affiliate like Open Collective (this is what cURL uses), to accept donations? Other 3rd party sponsors are not recommended (SFC told cURL they couldn't handle the bandwidth, LF affiliation is not recommended - they are a training org anyway.) So, this idea of setting up a foundation is one option. In the interest of supporting sphinx, how could one donate to the effort in terms of financial support? Wondering...

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[Komiya Takeshi]

Hi,

Thank you for your proposal. But I don't have a plan to start
sponsorship. To precise, I don't have a knowledge to manage
sponsorship for OSS products. Only we have to pay is a fee of domain
(sphinx-doc.org) because many online services provides a free plan for
OSS (Thanksfully!). So no good way to use the sponsored money. And
it's boring work to me to control budget and actual result for Sphinx.

Please let me know if you have good idea. I don't object sponsorship
itself. It surely encourage developers, I think. (Personally I started
GitHub Sponsors program last year. And it helps me :-)

Thanks,
Takeshi KOMIYA

2020年4月3日(金) 17:45 marcia wilbur <marcia....@gmail.com>:

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