My name is Maciej and I'm dealing the PyPy funding situation. Unlike a lot of funded OS projects, PyPy is independent - we are not subject to any single large corporation power. We've gone a long way from EU R&D funding, through crowd-funding and through consulting arrangements. In this talk I would like to present our experience with funding strategies questions and caveats associated during PyPy 10 year history as well as how, at your company, you can promote open source solutions and independent vendors.
Open Source is just a better way to write software, this is very likely pretty obvious at this conference. In this talk I would like to talk about us trying to take it a step further and making it our full time job, without a corporate oversight. I would like to present the common strategies presented for open source project that we've gone through, notably:
R&D from government grants - PyPy started as a research project sponsored through EU. The main downside is the large amount of paperwork you have to deal with.
crowd funding - the main downside being that it works for very well defined features and the funders tend to be very demanding
consulting - the downsides are usually need to spend time working on client code, not on the OS project itself.
All of the above does not really work for projects like cffi, which while successful, does not create any obvious streams of revenue. Additionally, I would like to present some advice how you can help open source at your company.
Speakers: Maciej Fijalkowski