Builder Fundraiser

It's my pleasure to announce the Builder fundariser!

Go check it out, I'll wait.

Bastian Hougaard and Jakub Steiner put together a wonderful video for the campain. Thanks guys!

I've funded the last 4 months of development to give you and idea of what you are funding and reduce your risk. I also wanted to prove to you that I'm capable of taking on this project. I hope you agree and are willing to keep me going.

You may have seen my update on what features I recently added to Builder. It's good enough to be my editor of choice now. But at the moment, we are still a glorified editor.

That's where you come in.

Your money goes to supporting me for the next few months while I plumb the core infrastructure of Builder. My hope is that this will shortcut us to getting more contributors. I think it will be a lot easier for people to spend a couple hours here and there when you don't have to bring your own plumbing.

I anticipate most of our support will come from GNOME developers and users. If there are others outside this community that you think will find my work useful, please share my fundraiser with them. While we are focused on GNOME technologies, those technologies spread beyond the GNOME desktop. Many other budding projects are built using our technology stack. ElementaryOS, Evolve, Cinnamon, and others come to mind. Automotive Linux is a heavy user of GStreamer and therefore GObject, the foundation of our stack.

Let's share the load.

What do I want to implement?

I'll implement features from the planned feature matrix for as long as you are willing to support me. We have a milestone roadmap to give you an idea of how I intend to lead us there.

Builder is the natural evolution of my attempt to start GNOME University. We were lacking the tools necessary and this is me living up to my promise to build them. If you want to see GNOME University happen in a meaningful way, I urge you to support me.

I'm really excited about some of the features. If we raise enough money, I'll have the runway to implement the desktop simulator and remote hardware debugger. To make this feature even more exciting, I'm offering a perk of a tablet running GNOME. I really look forward to simplifying the development story when working with all this oustanding new hardware. I've been running GNOME 3.14 on my ARM based ODroid X2, which has been a lot of fun (albeit software rendered fun).

If you all choose to support me in outstanding fashion, I'll add support for writing shell extensions. This will allow developers to create and test them in a VM from the comfort of an IDE without breaking their current session.

But seriously, go look at that feature matrix.

Where does the money go?

If we reach our goal, 4% goes to indiegogo for the multi-national merchant services, hosting platform, etc. In addition to covering general life things (rent, food, health insurrance, taxes, etc) this will help me afford to speak at a conference or two. I'll be speaking about Builder and GNOME at Scale 13x but I'd also like to make it to FOSDEM after the Cambridge hackfest. Additionally, a portion of the revenue goes to having the perks created and shipped. (I anticipate in the 10-15% range, but it varies).

Corporate Sponsors

I'd really love support from companies that are building things with GNOME technologies. I've spoken to a few companies, which sounded promising. My goal is to help you make great things faster. Consider supporting me if that sounds appealing. It's a lot cheaper to support me as part of this effort than to hire someone to improve tools for your employees.

If you work for a company that would like to contribute to free software, I'd love it if you could mention this.

Try things out!

If you want to give things a try, I suggest either building from jhbuild or check out a the virtual machine I've put together. It is running Fedora 21 with a minimal jhbuild environment to host the development version of Builder. Warning, it comes in at a whopping 2 GB. The snapshot is from December 10th. I'll try to update it again this week to provide something newer.

To get started using jhbuild, try the following.

git clone git://git.gnome.org/jhbuild.git cd jhbuild ./autogen.sh make make install cat <<EOF > ~/.config/jhbuildrc moduleset = 'gnome-world' EOF jhbuild build gnome-builder jhbuild run gnome-builder

It looks scarier than it is, but this just further supports how important the new single-file application design is. I look forward to the day I can ship you a file that is self contained with all the dependencies and things just work. We intend to support this from Builder once it's possible. Your support will help me contribute to that effort.

Contingency Plans

Worst case, this doesn't pan out and I go get a job. That means that I'll have less time to work on Builder. The last few months have shown me how much more productive I can be with improved development tools. Even if this happens, I want to keep working on Builder when possible.

If you are interested in employing me post-Builder, send me an email.

Peace, Love, GNOME!

-- Christian Hergert 2014-12-29

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