On Sat, Dec 11, 2021 at 06:59:31AM -0600, Luke Mauldin wrote: > Does the subversion project receive any funding from the ASF to hire > professional developers to complete more complex tasks or is development 100% > community driven and supported?
The ASF does not pay anyone for development. I think this is an unfortunate situation because many ASF projects slowly die off as funding dries up. I believe the ASF is unlikely to change this long-standing practice, even though there are other open source foundations which fund developers. The FreeBSD and OpenBSD foundations pay some development (see their financial reports), and apparently a new PHP foundataion is starting up with the sole purpose of funding PHP developers. In the past many SVN developers were employed by companies who ran with business models related to Subversion. This is the funding model the ASF is promoting. However, as of a few years ago most such companies changed direction and are no longer employing any SVN developers. Many people have moved on as a result and are no longer active. (Disclaimer: I still receive a small amount of indirect SVN-related funding via elego's SVN customer support. I occasionally use some of this time to work on various things in Subversion, even though this budget is not intended to fund development beyond customer-specific issues which can only be fixed in the code base. And it is not enough to cover complex tasks.)
