Bincrafters recently announced our intentions to take a step forward as an OSS group and seek sponsorship. We’re very honored and excited to announce that JFrog has graciously pledged to cover all our current CI costs via our new OpenCollective account!

OpenCollective

If you’re not familiar with OpenCollective, it’s a service which sprung up specifically to help OSS teams like Bincrafters deal with funding. We had originally joined Patreon to accept donations. Patreon is a great service, however we had some concerns about how to manage the money as an OSS team (and the related taxes). This video describes exactly the challenges we were anticipating when we started thinking about accepting donations, along with the additional services OpenCollective provides.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szE_00HC5h4&feature=youtu.be&t=36

If you follow our twitter you saw our recent campaign to reach 100 stars on Github in order to qualify for OpenCollective, and we did so in just 3 days. We are now members, and here is the link to our OpenCollective team profile:

https://opencollective.com/bincrafters

Corporate Sponsorship from JFrog!

Shortly after announcing our fund-raising drive, we were contacted by the JFrog/Bintray team. They have agreed to provide ongoing monthly sponsorship for our CI services! This is extremely good timing because we have a number of major projects planned for January. Our existing CI plans were insufficient and we were struggling with slow build times. Since we upgraded our CI services (sponsored by JFrog), our overall build times got much faster, and the whole process was more streamlined.

We’ve moved forward on the premium Appveyor services, but we’re having a bit of trouble with Travis at the moment. They’ve confirmed that there is no plan for Bincrafters, because we want to have public repositories but also pay for guaranteed build slots for MacOS builds. The good news is they’re working on changing their plan structure to possibly accommodate our type of organization, so stay tuned.

Other Sponsors

We are also honored to announce pledges from several different members of the Conan community. We were astonished to see that several of our own packagers pledged monthly financial contributions on top of the time they already spend! This was both amazing and inspiring.

Community Support

We’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. To our followers on Twitter and elsewhere, your support and promotion also matters, both on social media, and locally among developers you know or work with. The rate of adoption and improvement with both Conan and Bincrafters is significantly impacted by word-of-mouth communication, coming from developers who actually use and enjoy Conan. So, continued thanks to all of you.