Dear Almende colleagues,
Thanks for creating vis.js!
First of all, we really want to thank the company Almende in general and developers like @josdejong and @AlexDM0 in particular for providing the community with such a sophisticated open source library. In our commercialized world it is not a given for everybody to be so dedicated to open and free software. Thank you! We recognize that vis.js is still an almende project, even now that the project is almost exclusively driven by the community.
Current status
After the "we need your help" issue in April 2016 a lot has been accomplished. We now have contributions from almost 50 people and released a lot of new versions with countless bug-fixes and many new features. We, the support team spend countless hours answering questions, debugging bugs, implementing new features or just managing releases. Vis.js is now again an active project with a healthy user base and multiple issues filed almost every day!
Funding via OpenCollective
Now, after some discussion about this topic, we - the support team - would like to put vis.js on more solid feet to guarantee the development and sustainable maintenance in the future. After thinking about multiple options, we belive the best way to support the development-team would be to collect funds to reimburse core developers, that keep the project going, making releases and fixing major bugs. OpenCollective.com is a relatively new platform that provides transparent financing for open source communities. Projects like Webpack, Mocha and Gulp are using it successfully and its growth is very promising. We would like to bring vis.js to opencollective to collect funds for the core-development and we are inviting almende as creator and main supporter to become the official sponsor of the project. Normal improvements and bug-fixes will probably not be reimbursable, to not commercialize the community completely. We only want to ensure a more frequent release-cycle and issue management.
Separation of modules
Another topic we would like to discuss is the separation of vis into its different modules. We think it is not very often, that somebody is using e.g. the timeline and the network on the same page. Also we noticed that different developers concentrate on different modules. Therefore we would like to split the project into separate projects and make it possible for different maintainers to care for only the module they are interested in. This also would separate the bug-tracking and the releases. We recommend moving the separate modules to a new community on github. A wonderful place would be "https://github.com/visjs" that @josdejong already opened up to the support team. If you, as a company, are afraid of losing the "brand" vis.js, we propose the main standalone project "alemnde/vis" stay within the almende account but depend on the new sub-modules.
We really hope you share our passion to drive vis.js forward and will support us to secure sustainable funding for vis.js. Please let us know what you think about our proposal!
The vis.js support team
- @mojoaxel
- @yotamberk
- @wimrijnders