danielskatz
commented
7 years ago Thanks @knepley
While I somewhat agree with your point that most projects apply for grants together with people using the software, there also is a fair amount of funding that I see for pure software development and maintenance, under NSF, NIH, Sloan, Moore, etc.
It would be interesting to try to understand how much money is in these two categories in a given year, but I have no idea how we would measure this, even for a single funding source like NSF.
However, I'm not sure what changes you would like to make. Are you proposing a new category that's like SaaS but is not? Or do you really want to expand SaaS (as in the issue title)? In either case, if you can be more explicit about your suggestion, perhaps by a pull request, I would be happy to talk about it more. You certain have a point that the current list is missing something.
I think this category actually fits most grant driven projects. As you rightly state, there is very little money purely for software development, and I would venture non for maintenance of existing software. Therefore, most projects apply for grants together with people using the software either to support that use, or often for new development directed at the use case. This is much like the SaaS model, as the codebase remains open and free, but grant money is coming in for services, and then is also used to fund development and maintenance.