[texhax] Crowd funding for LaTeX development

[Joseph Wright]

On 25/09/2017 09:54, Brian Dunn wrote:
> 
> Might it be worthwhile to consider setting up a centralized
> crowd-funding system for LaTeX development?
> 
> 
> - LaTeX is increasing in popularity:
> 	- Overleaf shows 750,000+ authors, 10,000 journals, 250
> 	  advisers, and around 30 organizations/companies.
> 	- ShareLaTeX shows 1,300,000 authors, 30 partner institutions.
> 
> - LaTeX may be a good candidate for crowdfunding:
> 	- LaTeX is a preexisting and growing collection of small
> 	  pieces, instead of one large project.
> 	- Many authors are involved.
> 	- LaTeX packages have a long and useful lifespan.
> 	- Small packages/changes may be developed on spec, priced
> 	  reasonably according to actual development time involved, then
> 	  released when the funding is raised.
> 	- The results are immediately usable.
> 	- There are several LaTeX consultants advertised who presumably
> 	  would have time to do some of the advanced work.  Any number
> 	  of students may be interested in helping with documentation
> 	  and translations.
> 	- The various publishers, journals, etc. may be willing to fund
> 	  anything which would make their lives easier.
> 
> - Things to be funded:
> 	- Bug fixes, updates, and improvements for existing packages.
> 	- Documentation and translation improvements.
> 		(Ex: floatrow, komascript)
> 	- New specialty science, engineering, humanities, and
> 		professional packages.
> 	- Modules for TeX4ht, babel, tikz, lwarp, bidi, etc.
> 	- LaTeX3, XeLaTeX, LuaLaTeX, ConTeXt.
> 	- TUG, DANTE, GUST, etc.
> 	- Web infrastructure such as CTAN, LaTeX Font Catalog, wikis.
> 	- Distributions such as TeXLive, MiKTex.
> 	- Editors, LaTeX syntax highlighting rules.
> 	- Font development
> 
> - A crowdfunding platform should be chosen carefully and hosted
>   independently for the long term.
> 
> - Publicity probably requires the involvement of Overleaf/ShareLaTeX to
>   spread the word to their users.
> 
> - Anyone doing much work may have to form a business entity.  (One
>   advantage of doing so in USA is the ability to use a FEIN instead of a
>   SSN for W-9 forms.)
> 
> 
> Thoughts?

TUG already administer a number of funds, e.g. for CTAN contributions
(https://www.tug.org/donate.html). Do you see the above as being
significantly different from that? Perhaps alternative routes for the
money to get 'in'.

Joseph