Kawa paid support

Kawa paid support

[Per Bothner]

Yesterday I quit my "day job" at Oracle. That means I am now
able (and motivated) to do paid consulting, development work,
and support for Kawa, including help with projects and products
that make use of Kawa.

The "list price" is USD 3000 per year and contact person.
For smaller smaller companies, non-profits, or individuals,
I may reduce the price.  For a larger company or group that
depends on Kawa you might consider two contact persons, but
you're not required to.
  
This support entitles you to priority response and fixes, plus I'm
more likely to prioritize your enhancement requests.  Most of
the time if I'm awake you should get a response in a few hours.

I am also available for development projects if there is a
new feature, improvement, optimization or complex fix you need.
The price is negotiable: it may depend on both the size and riskiness
of the project and how closely it aligns with my goals for Kawa.

Please help support Kawa so I continue without a day job to pay my bills!
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/

Re: Kawa paid support

[Matthieu Vachon]

Hi Per,

I wish best luck to you in your new journey, hoping for the best.

I'm pretty sure you may have already checked on the crowd funding
side, but I want to let you know that I would eagerly contribute to
such campaign. At least, would you be open for donations to you so I
can contribute financially to the future of Kawa.

I'm ain't no decision maker in the company where I work, but I will
try pushing Kawa paid support.

Best regards,
Matthieu Vachon

On Sat, Jun 7, 2014 at 4:05 PM, Per Bothner <per@bothner.com> wrote:
> Yesterday I quit my "day job" at Oracle. That means I am now
> able (and motivated) to do paid consulting, development work,
> and support for Kawa, including help with projects and products
> that make use of Kawa.
>
> The "list price" is USD 3000 per year and contact person.
> For smaller smaller companies, non-profits, or individuals,
> I may reduce the price.  For a larger company or group that
> depends on Kawa you might consider two contact persons, but
> you're not required to.
>  This support entitles you to priority response and fixes, plus I'm
> more likely to prioritize your enhancement requests.  Most of
> the time if I'm awake you should get a response in a few hours.
>
> I am also available for development projects if there is a
> new feature, improvement, optimization or complex fix you need.
> The price is negotiable: it may depend on both the size and riskiness
> of the project and how closely it aligns with my goals for Kawa.
>
> Please help support Kawa so I continue without a day job to pay my bills!
> --
>         --Per Bothner
> per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/

Re: Kawa paid support

[Per Bothner]

On 06/08/2014 07:37 PM, Matthieu Vachon wrote:
> I'm pretty sure you may have already checked on the crowd funding
> side, but I want to let you know that I would eagerly contribute to
> such campaign. At least, would you be open for donations to you so I
> can contribute financially to the future of Kawa.

I haven't looked seriously into crowd-funding Kawa.  Kawa already has
the problem is poor visibility, and tackling that is something I hope
you all help with.  I have limited time and energy, and trying to start
a crowd-funding campaign may require more that it is worth.  I will
be writing more articles on various sites now that Kawa is my "day job".

I wouldn't object to donations, but there are set-up issues, tax issues,
book-keeping issues.  It seems unlikely donations would bring in
enough to make a difference.Plus I'm not very comfortable with begging ...
If not like I'm a "starving hacking" (to use LWN's terminology for
subscription levels): I have a nice house, in the SF Bay Area,
and it's paid for.  However, I do have big expenses coming up, and
I expect to be eating into my savings unless I can monetize Kawa better.

One website suggests accepting non-cash gifts instead of donations -
such as setting up an Amazon wishlist.  I have to figure out what
put on the list, though ...
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/

Re: Kawa paid support

[Matthieu Vachon]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 6:13 PM, Per Bothner <per@bothner.com> wrote:
> On 06/08/2014 07:37 PM, Matthieu Vachon wrote:
>
> I haven't looked seriously into crowd-funding Kawa.  Kawa already has
> the problem is poor visibility, and tackling that is something I hope
> you all help with.
>

Visibility and current user-base is an issue that could be tackled
from various fronts. A crowd-funding campaign could be a part in a
more global funding effort that would contain for example
crowd-funding (maybe backed by new features), Kawa paid-support,
sponsored development, user donations. In the hope that even if each
sources is not that high, globally, it will be enough to make Kawa
your "day-job".

> I have limited time and energy, and trying to start
> a crowd-funding campaign may require more that it is worth.  I will
> be writing more articles on various sites now that Kawa is my "day job".
>

Great news, let's hope it brings water to mill and we bring more people in.

> I wouldn't object to donations, but there are set-up issues, tax issues,
> book-keeping issues.  It seems unlikely donations would bring in
> enough to make a difference.Plus I'm not very comfortable with begging ...
>

I understand potential issues and they are probably a show-stopper in
some forms. I can also fully understand that you are not comfortable
in asking for donation and I think it's normal. As a developer, I'm
always proud in paying my part and helping other developers,
especially when it comes to tools that I use so often.

If Kawa would have been a non-free application, I would have been
happy to contribute to its financial support. This is not the case,
and I hope it will never be. Hence, don't be ashamed asking for
donation. In my opinion, it's almost the single mean for which a
particular like me can support financially some project I love. I did
it for Eclipse more than once.

I'm sure I'm not alone feeling like this on this list, at least I hope :)

> If not like I'm a "starving hacking" (to use LWN's terminology for
> subscription levels): I have a nice house, in the SF Bay Area,
> and it's paid for.  However, I do have big expenses coming up, and
> I expect to be eating into my savings unless I can monetize Kawa better.
>

I wouldn't expect the contrary. But it's not because your are not
"starving hacking" that's a reason not to help you financially. You
could have been extra-rich that It wouldn't make a difference in my
case. For me, it's more about rewarding all the time and effort you
put into Kawa. You have always been responsive, helpful and fast in
fixing bugs. I'm always impress by this. I read that almost 50% of all
open-source projects are left unmaintained after a year, it's clearly
not Kawa's case.

Kawa has still many aspects in which improvements can be made. I just
wish you will be around for the future of it. And if I can help in
realizing this wish, I will, either financially, programmatically or
by advocating it.

Regards,
Matt

Re: kawa paid support

[mikel evins]

> On Apr 5, 2015, at 1:51 AM, Per Bothner <per@bothner.com> wrote:
> 
> It would be nice if Kawa wasn't a mostly-one-man project.
> Of course other people contribute in various ways, and that is
> very much appreciated, but 90% of the source code and documentation is mine.
> Much of that is my own fault - I have some control-freak tendencies, and
> I'm not very good at publicity.  But I think we're getting better:
> Multiple people have contributed code, documentation, and tests; multiple
> people are writing about Kawa, and using Kawa in interesting ways,

You've mentioned the two great weaknesses with Kawa right now: lack of support for redefinitions, and lack of tooling support. I guess the first one is pretty much up to you, but other folks who want to support Kawa could help with tooling.

Speaking as someone who is using Kawa on a large project, I agree that these are the most important weaknesses. Lack of redefinition support kind of kills the Lispiness of working with Kawa. Because any given reload or eval can cause the JVM to become confused, it's basically impossible to have the kind of ongoing interactive conversation with code that is the hallmark of Lisp development. I learned long ago to simply kill the Kawa repl and restart it every time I make a significant edit. That works fine, and Kawa's startup is so fast that the time it takes to restart is no issue. What is an issue is that every restart throws away my working context, making it impossible to carry on the kind of conversation with my code that is normal for me. It means that working with Kawa is less like Lisp programming and more like a particularly fast version of the batch-oriented development cycle of working with C or Java. It's still faster and better than actually using C or Java, but it's not like using Lisp.

There are some tools out there to support Kawa, but a lot of them are pretty old and unmaintained. swank-kawa does still seem to be maintained, but it's been quite a while since I've been able to make it work. If anyone has it working, I'd be grateful to learn what you did. Without it, debugging Kawa code is pretty much down to reading Java stack traces and inserting print statements.

But that's an area where we, the users of Kawa should be able to help. It's pretty much up to Per to address the redefinition issue when he reasonably can, but Kawa users can help each other with tools. Tell me how to get swank-kawa to work, for example, and that will benefit everyone else who wants to use it. Or make a Netbeans addon to support Kawa--something I've considered doing, even though I'm not particularly a fan of Netbeans. Or even do what the Clojure community did and make a new and distinct Emacs mode to support interactive Kawa development (hmmm...).

Re: kawa paid support

[Per Bothner]

On 04/05/2015 10:11 AM, Dan Leslie wrote:
>
> FWIW, I've just opened a bug in Geiser noting the absence of Kawa
> support, and have begun local changes to endeavour to resolve the
> bug. Kawa strikes me as an under-appreciated Scheme, and a suitable
> competitor to the likes of Clojure, and so I'd like to bring in
> compatibility to my favourite tool set.
>
> https://github.com/jaor/geiser/issues/55

FWIW: Kawa right now is a bit rough when it comes to re-loading
definitions of existing functions without confusing other functions.
Improving this is quite high on the Kawa priority list, but until
this is done Kawa may run a bit rough under Geiser.  As a work-around
try running Kawa with --no-inline.

Also, Kawa does have some support for "images as values":
http://per.bothner.com/blog/2007/ReplPane/
I'm working on a JavaScript-based terminal emulator/console
that will support embedding HTML in the console output.
Here is a prototype - I'm working on re-writing the Java to JavaScript:
https://github.com/PerBothner/JWebTerminal
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/

Re: kawa paid support

[Per Bothner]

On 04/05/2015 10:11 AM, Dan Leslie wrote:
>
> FWIW, I've just opened a bug in Geiser noting the absence of Kawa
> support, and have begun local changes to endeavour to resolve the
> bug. Kawa strikes me as an under-appreciated Scheme, and a suitable
> competitor to the likes of Clojure, and so I'd like to bring in
> compatibility to my favourite tool set.
>
> https://github.com/jaor/geiser/issues/55

That is the kind of tooling help that would be extremely welcome.

It would also be nice to improve Emacs's syntax highlighting
and indentation handling of Kawa:  Emacs doesn't know about various
Kawa syntax extensions (both reader syntax and standard forms),
so it sometimes gets confused.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/

Re: kawa paid support

[Dan Leslie]

FWIW, I've just opened a bug in Geiser noting the absence of Kawa
support, and have begun local changes to endeavour to resolve the
bug. Kawa strikes me as an under-appreciated Scheme, and a suitable
competitor to the likes of Clojure, and so I'd like to bring in
compatibility to my favourite tool set.

https://github.com/jaor/geiser/issues/55

-Dan

Per Bothner <per@bothner.com> writes:

> On 04/04/2015 10:01 PM, Alcides Flores Pineda wrote:
>> Hello Per:
>>
>> Do you have a PayPal account or something alike? If you do, please,
>> let us know.
>
> I do have a PayPal account, linked to per@bothner.com
>
> I don't want to mislead anyone: I'm far from destitute, and I could
> probably afford to retire with some modest belt-tightening and/or selling
> of assets.  But some of these assets (properties) have emotional
> attachment. My husband and I would feel more comfortable if money was
> coming in at least approaching the rate of money going out ...  (For example
> property taxes and health insurance are substantial fixed expenses.)
>
>> Maybe you can put a link to it in your blog or somewhere. I'm
>> thinking about possible ways you can begin making money through
>> Kawa... I don't know maybe also trying to do something more or less
>> what Xah Lee is doing in his blog
>> (http://www.ergoemacs.org/emacs/blog.html selling his
>> writings/tutorials) or maybe is time for us, the Kawa community to
>> start getting more formally organized and begin to financially
>> contribute to the project, search for sponsors, setup a wiki, collect
>> and share our experiencies using Kawa, compile/write an e-book, write
>> an emacs kawa-mode, speak & blog about Kawa, port libraries from
>> other Schemes, and so on... well just some thoughts.. and my 2
>> cents...
>
> It would be nice if Kawa wasn't a mostly-one-man project.
> Of course other people contribute in various ways, and that is
> very much appreciated, but 90% of the source code and documentation is mine.
> Much of that is my own fault - I have some control-freak tendencies, and
> I'm not very good at publicity.  But I think we're getting better:
> Multiple people have contributed code, documentation, and tests; multiple
> people are writing about Kawa, and using Kawa in interesting ways,
>
>> Thank you very much for creating Kawa and for all the great work you
>> have done with this project.
>
> You're all welcome.

-- 
-Dan Leslie

Re: kawa paid support

[Per Bothner]

On 04/04/2015 10:01 PM, Alcides Flores Pineda wrote:
> Hello Per:
>
> Do you have a PayPal account or something alike? If you do, please,
> let us know.

I do have a PayPal account, linked to per@bothner.com

I don't want to mislead anyone: I'm far from destitute, and I could
probably afford to retire with some modest belt-tightening and/or selling
of assets.  But some of these assets (properties) have emotional
attachment. My husband and I would feel more comfortable if money was
coming in at least approaching the rate of money going out ...  (For example
property taxes and health insurance are substantial fixed expenses.)

> Maybe you can put a link to it in your blog or somewhere. I'm
> thinking about possible ways you can begin making money through
> Kawa... I don't know maybe also trying to do something more or less
> what Xah Lee is doing in his blog
> (http://www.ergoemacs.org/emacs/blog.html selling his
> writings/tutorials) or maybe is time for us, the Kawa community to
> start getting more formally organized and begin to financially
> contribute to the project, search for sponsors, setup a wiki, collect
> and share our experiencies using Kawa, compile/write an e-book, write
> an emacs kawa-mode, speak & blog about Kawa, port libraries from
> other Schemes, and so on... well just some thoughts.. and my 2
> cents...

It would be nice if Kawa wasn't a mostly-one-man project.
Of course other people contribute in various ways, and that is
very much appreciated, but 90% of the source code and documentation is mine.
Much of that is my own fault - I have some control-freak tendencies, and
I'm not very good at publicity.  But I think we're getting better:
Multiple people have contributed code, documentation, and tests; multiple
people are writing about Kawa, and using Kawa in interesting ways,

> Thank you very much for creating Kawa and for all the great work you
> have done with this project.

You're all welcome.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/

Re: kawa paid support

[Alcides Flores Pineda]

Hello Per:

Do you have a PayPal account or something alike?
If you do, please, let us know.
Maybe you can put a link to it in your blog or somewhere.
I'm thinking about possible ways you can begin making money through 
Kawa... I don't know maybe also trying to do something more or less what 
Xah Lee is doing in his blog (http://www.ergoemacs.org/emacs/blog.html 
selling his writings/tutorials) or maybe is time for us, the Kawa 
community to start getting more formally organized and begin to 
financially contribute to the project, search for sponsors, setup a 
wiki, collect and share our experiencies using Kawa, compile/write an 
e-book, write an emacs kawa-mode, speak & blog about Kawa, port 
libraries from other Schemes, and so on... well just some thoughts.. and 
my 2 cents...

Thank you very much for creating Kawa and for all the great work you 
have done with this project.

Sincerely.
--
Alcides Flores Pineda.

El 30/03/15 a las 17:04, Per Bothner escibió:
> A reminder: I currently have no regular paying jobs, and I'm
> basically working full-time on Kawa.  At this point I'm not
> making any money on Kawa.  It would be nice to change that ...
>
> I can offer paid support for Kawa.  That means guaranteed
> priority response if you have questions, need help, or run into bugs.
>
> I can also do custom development and enhancements - if there is
> something you're missing in Kawa, let me know!
>
> I will also accept a plain "tip" if you just want to send me money.

kawa paid support

[Per Bothner]

A reminder: I currently have no regular paying jobs, and I'm
basically working full-time on Kawa.  At this point I'm not
making any money on Kawa.  It would be nice to change that ...

I can offer paid support for Kawa.  That means guaranteed
priority response if you have questions, need help, or run into bugs.

I can also do custom development and enhancements - if there is
something you're missing in Kawa, let me know!

I will also accept a plain "tip" if you just want to send me money.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/