Re: RFC - my Lightning Talk for OSCON 2005

At 1:32 PM +1000 7/23/05, Ron Savage wrote: 
Hi Darren
Just curious, but does any company fund your work?


Well, since you asked ...

No.

I have received zero funding for this, and have been working more or less full time on it since my last paid employment ended 2 years ago.

It is also 100% my own work, influence aside; no one else has worked on it.

I anticipate starting my own new business within the next few months (having the name I registered for OSCON as working for), and hope to build and sell an initially proprietary database application, for organizing general research such as genealogy. Said application would be portable over generic databases, but probably ship configured to use SQLite by default.

I decided to make a separate, open-source project out of the database access layer, because I thought it would be independently useful in a large number of other applications, and address a need on its own; and it would be a waste to use it in only one application. As a result, of course, Rosetta has a bunch of functionality I don't need myself, but that others probably would.

I also hope to make money on the open-source project directly, but first it has to be good enough that people would be willing to use it for free.

In general open source tradition, if this project attracts people because it is genuinely useful, then some of them would probably be willing to pay for support or improvements or custom solutions over it; whereas, if no one is willing to use it, it probably isn't providing value over the alternatives.

So yes, I have made zero money from this to date.

But even if that always remains the case, well, an artist mainly wants their creations to be enjoyed / used, right? While important, getting paid takes secondary priority.

But colour me optimistic.

-- Darren Duncan

P.S. No one should actually try using Rosetta until I announce developer release #3, which will hopefully be before OSCON; the end-to-end functionality won't do anything useful until then, even though 90% of the pipe is complete now.
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Relevant Pages

  • ANNOUNCE: first post-rewrite Rosetta release (v0.720.0)
    ... I am pleased to announce the first CPAN release of the second major code base of the Rosetta database access framework, v0.720.0, which is available now in synchronized native Perl 5 and Perl 6 versions. ... Rosetta is now officially a federated relational database of its own that just happens to be good with cross-database-manager portability issues, and be good as a toolkit on which to build ORMs and persistence tools, rather than being mainly about portable SQL generation. ...
    (perl.dbi.users)
  • ANNOUNCE: SQL-Routine/Rosetta developer release #2 - in Perl 6 too
    ... I am now pleased to announce the second developer release of my Rosetta rigorous database portability library, ... SQL::Routine can be used in any SQL using environment, regardless of what you use to bridge with databases. ... You define any desired actions by stuffing atomic values into SQL::Routine objects, and then pass those objects to a compatible bridging engine that will compile and execute those objects against one or more actual databases. ...
    (perl.dbi.users)