(crowd)Funding SuperCollider development?

[fmiramar]

Two more cents on the discussion.

After two recent ideas here:

SuperCollider 4: First Thoughts

Maybe a start to this would be to simply figure out which universities use SuperCollider as part of their curriculum?

SuperCollider 4: First Thoughts

Very interesting recent comments here. A few thoughts: While there are usually strong arguments for and against any given language design choice, and it is true that SC has become more of a hybrid/compromise as time has gone on, I am not sure that some particular set of ‘good design’ is really what makes a language successful. C++ is a horrible language in many people’s opinions (okay perhaps a little less horrible than it used to be, but still…) but remains immensely popular and widely used, e…

I propose that we organize a list of academic institutions that use SuperCollider and that could eventually host a foundation.

As @muellmusik mentioned, I has evaluating Processing Foundation structure which consists of:

1 - Executive Director
1 - Education Community Director
1 - Programs Manager: Fellowships & Programs
1 - Program and Communications Coordinator
1 - Finance Manager
4 - Project Leads
3 - Mentors
5 - Directors (Board of Directors)
9 - Advisors

And now some points that I am trying to estimate:

• SC community seems to be 1/25 of Processing community size (measuring by the most viewed video on YT 1M of Processing vs 40k in SC).
• Processing Foundation develop several different actions more than supporting a programming language that would be difficult at first for a SC foundation, e.g. fellowships, festivals, etc.
• Although Processing maintains three big branches (java, javascript and python), it is wrapped around comercial GPL. The scope of SC seems to be more ambitions since it relies both on developing a new audio server as well as new programming language.
• Processing 3 → Processing 4 (mainly a java 11 update, but not only) does not included the same amount of breaking changes that SC3 → SC4 would include.
• SC has more contributors on github than Processing 3 (209 x 117).
• The initial creators of processing seems to be actively maintaining currently, which is not case for SC.

Many questions here: how different is SC dev workflow from the Processing one? (I have no idea since I am a user).

Would it be possible to bring people that were part of initial developments of SC back? I don’t want to personalize this, but on Github contributor list there are many people that made tons of contributions in the past, but none nowadays. Is it possible to have these people back?

Can we have help from other pro audio FLOSS devs from other communities? Again, I don’t want to personalize, but is possible to have improvements, ports, etc from people like Jatin Chowdhurry, DragonFly reverb, Reaper, Ardour, Jack, etc?