69 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
69 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Sponsoring Jekyll's development"
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date: 2018-08-01 15:00:00 +0200
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author: oe
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categories: [community]
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---
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_(TL;DR: We're open for sponsorships on our [OpenCollective page](https://opencollective.com/jekyll))_
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Hi Jekyllers,
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As you may know, Jekyll is a completely free and open source project. We offer our
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software and its related plugins and documentation at no cost because we believe
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that good software should not cost anything. We're not planning on changing that,
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but today I want to talk about a different monetary aspect of open source.
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Open source developers being paid for the work they do is a rare sight. Most open source
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software is effectively the result of hundreds and thousands of hours of free labor provided
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by individuals who are passionate enough to work outside of their day job to create
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software that, ironically, is being used by almost every company that offers
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digital services. It's a problem that has gotten more attention in recent years, with
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the open source community becoming more diverse and more and more companies actively
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investing in providing monetary support for open source developers.
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Jekyll has always been a product of volunteers. Rarely has someone been paid to implement
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a certain plugin or feature. Today, we're excited to announce that we will finally
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be able to fund our contributors! __We are opening an OpenCollective to receive
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individual and corporate sponsorships__. This is not unheard of, [Hugo](http://gohugo.io)
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is also funded by sponsorships, as are many other similar projects, such as
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[webpack](https://opencollective.com/webpack), [Babel](https://opencollective.com/babel) or
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[RuboCop](https://opencollective.com/rubocop).
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OpenCollective is a service that makes it easy for open source projects to receive funding
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from individuals and companies alike. It's specifically designed for open source and
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many other projects already use it for funding.
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Sponsoring is, for us, a method to finally realize some of the more ambitious goals we've had
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with the project for years. The closest thing we want to realize is to __release Jekyll 4.0, and
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to make it as polished as we can__. In the future, we would also like to work on other things that
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will improve the Jekyll ecosystem. Here's a couple of ideas:
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- Create a comprehensive official plugin and theme directory site
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- Improve tooling built around measuring and improving Jekyll's performance
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- Improve maintenance for official plugins
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- Including the community into official decisions; making Jekyll more friendly to folks in the community
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Again, these are just some ideas, but with the help of sponsoring, they are now one step closer
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to being realized :heart:
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<div align="center">
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<img src="/img/forestry-logo.png" alt="Forestry" width="300" />
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</div>
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With that, we would like to announce our very first sponsor: [__Forestry.io__](https://forestry.io)! Forestry is
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a CMS that integrates with your Jekyll sites and lets you update content using a beautiful
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interface, and then automatically commits it back to your GitHub repository. We're excited to have
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them on board on a new, exciting step of our journey.
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Will anything change for Jekyll users? The answer is no - this step does not impact the Jekyll software
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in any aspect. In fact, you might see positive changes, such as more features and better
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performance. Surprisingly, that's what happens when you properly fund people for their work!
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If you have been a long time user for Jekyll and would like to give something back to the project,
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you can consider a small monthly donation to our [OpenCollective page](http://opencollective.com/jekyll).
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If your company heavily relies on Jekyll, do consider sponsoring us! Contact me at
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`olivia at jekyllrb dot com` and we'll figure something out together.
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Thanks for sticking with us, and happy Jekylling! :tada:
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