It's that time of year again; the time when you all have the
excellent opportunity to settle your karmic debt and sponsor the Twisted project.
Actually, that time is every day of the year. Right now is just when we have arbitrarily decided to make you aware of this opportunity, so that we're not annoying you all year-round. Sometime soon we'll be taking down the current list of sponsors for 2008 — hopefully, to make room for a new list of sponsors for 2009. But without your help, that list will be empty!
Thanks to our founding sponsors, Twisted has had a great year. If you've been reading this news feed, you know that we've been able to review, respond to, and close tons of tickets this year.
As Jean-Paul Calderone previously wrote,
this is the first year we've had a year-over-year decrease in the number of open tickets; and that's despite an
increase in the number of filed tickets. We believe that Twisted is setting a great example for how other open source projects can effectively use sponsorship to fund development.
Many open source projects are perpetually crunched for volunteer labor. Twisted is no different in this respect — we could always use more help from the community. However, we are lucky to have something that most projects don't: the ability to convert dollars directly into maintenance that benefits the project.
When you contribute money to the Twisted project, you are
directly contributing to get bugs fixed, features implemented, and tickets reviewed. Last year we told the same story, but this year we have an excellent track record. I invite you to read the history of our sponsored development — just scroll down and have a look. I'll wait.
... Done?
If you prefer visual representations of our success instead, consider these graphs. Here's a graph of all tickets reviewed this year, by the handle of the person who reviewed them:
Here's the same breakdown of all tickets that were closed this year:
In case you don't already know: "exarkun" is the handle for Jean-Paul Calderone. By his own calculation, at least 75% of his work this year has been sponsored development.
This isn't to say that Twisted is being supported entirely by sponsorship: as you can see from the huge number of tickets that exarkun has reviewed, a substantial proportion of development has been coming from the community, but sponsorship has allowed us to be more responsive to the community and integrate contributions much faster. (Developers may not review their own tickets, so there's no overlap between the code JP has been writing and the tickets he's been reviewing.)
This year of sponsorship has been great for the project. But, we're coming to the end of our first year of funding, and we need your help to keep going.
Every little bit helps, from small, one-time individual donations to monthly subscriptions to corporate sponsorships. This year, we need even more help from individuals, as some of our corporate sponsors have been impacted by the current economic climate and may not be able to contribute at the same level this year.
To summarize, there are a few things you can do to help the Twisted project:
- Contribute code. Any contribution is welcome, but the best would be to attack an existing ticket in the tracker, especially one that has stalled on its way through review.
- Donate money directly. You'll find donation buttons on the front page of twistedmatrix.com.
- Donate money from your organization. Doing so gets you a voice on our sponsors-only mailing list, and can help you to set priorities for the coming year of development. You also get your logo on twistedmatrix.com, our gratitude, and last but not least, more Twisted development in the coming year!
- Help us in our discussions with larger organizations. If you're a software developer using Twisted in a big company, we need your help to convince your organization that they should be contributing. Even if not, the board of the Twisted project is small and strapped for time - we could use some help just finding the right person to talk to, and making sure that all of their questions are answered promptly. (If you'd like to help with this effort, please contact me directly.)
Thanks for your interest in Twisted.
