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CadQuery / cadquery

A python parametric CAD scripting framework based on OCCT
https://cadquery.readthedocs.io
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Question: Support from NUMFOCUS #714

Open noce2 opened 3 years ago

noce2 commented 3 years ago

Hey all,

Has anyone considered submitting the CadQuery project to NumFOCUS' Fiscal Sponsorship Program?

For those unaware NumFOCUS is the organisation that ensures projects like Jupyter (the Notebook creators), Matplotlib, Pandas and others are well supported for the long term. I just started using CadQuery and have been really impressed with it so far and would love to see it continue to grow. NumFOCUS is itself sponsored by organisations like Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Facebook and other industry heavyweights. A project accepted into NumFOCUS' project benefits from visibility, community and financial support. Keen to hear some thoughts.

jmwright commented 3 years ago

Thanks for bringing this up @noce2

I think there are probably three main things that could keep us from being ready to pursue this right now.

  1. Sustainable growth
  2. Lack of knowing where to spend the money and lack of desire to manage the influx of funding
  3. Lack of time to take advantage of the learning/training resources

The TL;DR of this is that I don't know that our core devs have the time or drive to push for something like this right now. I explain my thoughts a little bit more below, and let's discuss.

On 1, every time we get mentioned in a larger publication or one of the big players (i.e. Fusion 360) drives users away, we get an influx of new users. While that's great, it strains the existing community during that time until a few of those new users get up to speed and invested enough to start helping with questions. Also, more users means more bug finding and lots of good ideas that have to be implemented (or PRs that need to be reviewed and merged), which increases the load on the devs. If the NumFOCUS sponsorship comes with a big splash of attention and new users, we will be overwhelmed. The community is growing, and we have new community leaders emerging, which helps a lot. I would rather grow at a slow and steady pace as we have.

On 2, we have talked about setting up an Open Collective account before, but I'm not sure what the project would spend the money on at this point. We can do things like bug bounties, but that will increase the load on the core devs to manage. I'm also not sure we're at a point where we want the added load of managing finances for the project. I was treasurer for an open hardware non-profit for a couple of years, and am not eager to step back into that role (my background is not in finance).

On 3, it sounds like NumFOCUS comes with training and community resources, which is great. However, I'm not sure that there is enough time available within the core team to take advantage of that. I may be misunderstanding what form the resources come in though.