[LRUG] How to fund an open-source project?

[Eleanor McHugh]

Last weekend at Ruby Manor I talked about my newly launched RubyGoLightly project [0], currently a bit of non-compilable vapourware forked from Marc-Andre Cournoyer's TinyRb codebase. Whilst Google's public release of Go is directly responsible for my taking the plunge on this, the general idea is something I've discussed privately with a number of people in the community over the past couple of years.

Part of the goal of this project is to get Ruby working in the Google Go environment as I believe the concurrency model it offers will allow implementation choices which are either unavailable or poorly supported in C or C++, and which would be unusual in Java. However my real interest - and this may or may not be feasible - is to help move Ruby into the real-time arena.

It's potentially a big project and I'd like to be able to work on it full-time so as to make reasonable progress in the coming year but I'm completely clueless about how to raise sponsorship or even whether that's practical. Does anyone with greater experience of driving an OSS project have any advice they're willing to share on this or any related topics?


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
[0] http://github.com/feyeleanor/RubyGoLightly
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason