I know the core Natron team is researching funding options and having trouble seeing the costs involved. I came across a possible solution from another open-source software project, namely SynfigStudio (https://www.synfig.org/donate/).
The platform they use is Open Collective (https://opencollective.com/opensource). You can read the link to Open Collective and see they handle so much, as they say “no Foundation is needed”. They take care of the legal and invoice for you.
I wouldn’t be sharing this unless I believed in the goals and aims of the open-source movement. I have downloaded and installed a full multimedia products suite of open-source software for my business, including Natron.
I will be checking here to see what you think about this solution. Open-Collective only charges a small fee when you are paid donations. You will also be able to pay out to hired software developers when you have enough donations coming in to support that.
The last time I chatted with you was a few months ago. I will check back regularly here to see your responses.
Not really, funding options/requests has been raised by the users. At the moment we have no costs related to the maintenance of Natron (everything is on GitHub), except for our free time.
The “problem” is that we don’t have enough developers, so we are not able to develop new (major) features in Natron (or fix major bugs). I myself only have (some) weekends free to develop for Natron.
It’s always possible to collect donations etc from users through several methods, but then users expects something in return (usually), not “boring” maintenance-only releases that we currently do, and for the foreseeable future.
Natron is a niche application, so we get less users and developers than more popular applications (like NLE’s). Or maybe it’s something else, I don’t know…
All right. Maintaining it would explain why I am able to use it on Mac OS 10.15 Catalina then.
Edit: Open Source projects are helping me to save having to pay high costs for comparable software. So thanks to you and others for that, especially the time all of you give to keep these projects going.
@JonTA I think that funding content creators to create tutorials for Natron could be greatly helped by your idea. Currently, Natron’s documentation is severely lacking (the docs are basically half empty), and the inherent technical complexity of Natron makes it even more niche.
Basically, if we could get better documentation, it could make Natron popular enough to attract the attention of major developers.
@rodlie Apologies for my lack of understanding! I did not know about that earlier.
Perhaps we can embed those tutorials into the Natron website page? Like how Blender embeds its crash course (a youtube playlist) onto its website? That would make it easier for beginning users to find them.