Re: [matplotlib-devel] Matplotlib and Numfocus Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement (FSA)

[Chris B. <chr...@no...>]

+1 -- sounds great!



On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Michael Droettboom <md...@st...> wrote:

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> * Matplotlib is a widely used, well regarded, and powerful visualization
> library that has dominated the Python visualization stack for over a
> decade. However, to maintain that position, matplotlib must continue to
> evolve. Complementary or alternative libraries are appearing at an
> increasing rate, including browser-based plotting and GPU acceleration. To
> maintain its leadership position for the next decade, Matplotlib must
> interface with these alternatives while simultaneously expanding its
> capabilities and becoming easier to use and learn. Matplotlib’s large
> existing user base (greater than 50,000) means that new developments need
> to be carefully balanced with maintaining existing interfaces.  With the
> large user and code base comes a significant maintenance and user-support
> burden.  These responsibilities currently account for a majority of the
> core-developer time spent on matplotlib and has resulted in both the code
> base and community being in a healthier state than ever before. Even 6
> years ago there was no automated testing to speak of and the number of
> contributors continues to soar on github. However, this effort is, for the
> most part, done on a volunteer basis in the nights and weekends of the core
> developers.  To go beyond this maintenance level—to make step-change
> improvements for the benefit of matplotlib’s users—will require funding for
> full-time developers. Inspired and encouraged by the example of IPython, we
> would like to begin the process of fundraising. Managing funding on the
> needed scale is a complex and time-consuming process.  Thankfully,
> NumFOCUS, a 501(c)3 charity organisation co-founded by John Hunter, offers
> a fiscal sponsorship agreement to minimize the administrative and legal
> burden on open source projects. We would like to enlist NumFOCUS as our
> agents in all legal and financial matters, including banking, accepting
> donations as a non-profit, payroll, and access to legal counsel.  As part
> of the agreement, NumFOCUS would charge a percentage of all funds raised to
> cover their costs.  The full text of the agreement is attached. To comply
> with the legal and accounting requirements of a non-profit, matplotlib
> needs to form an administrative body to interact with NumFOCUS and direct
> the disbursement of any funds.  The proposed initial members of the body,
> are myself (Mike Droettboom), Eric Firing, Phil Elson, and Thomas Caswell,
> with Thomas acting as the point of contact with NumFOCUS. In practice,
> signing an FSA will have very little impact on the matplotlib project
> itself - it will still be BSD-licensed and community-driven as it has
> always been, and the only motivation for doing this is to give us an
> opportunity to apply for funding to do more work on matplotlib. We'd like
> to canvas the community's opinion on the matter, but to put a concrete
> timeline on the discussion, we would like to propose signing an FSA with
> NumFOCUS in 3 weeks (Feb 10th 2015) unless there is a major community
> discomfort with us doing so. Cheers, Michael Droettboom *
>
> --
> Michael Droettboom
> Science Software Branch
> Space Telescope Science Institute
> http://www.droettboom.com
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