Project proposals for the Nix ecosystem

The Nix ecosystem is developed by many volunteers and a few paid developers. Among many other things, they maintain one of the largest open source software distributions in the world. Keeping it working and up to date would not be possible without their support.

The ecosystem is growing and our tools lately have seen a rapid increase in adoption by individuals and organisations. At the same time, many technical problems and open questions remain largely unaddressed simply for lack of time and attention. And some things are simply very unlikely to ever get done by volunteers, and need funding to get addressed.

People and companies around the community are increasingly receiving financial support from various parties in order to carry out development activities that are in high demand. Some of that is only accessible through fundraisers or grant applications, which require substantial speculative work, and for many that is an unacceptable risk, insurmountable overhead, or simply outside of their domain of expertise.

Having building blocks and complete projects ready to implement handy allows reacting quickly to funding opportunities as they arise, adjusting scope as needed. Many calls for proposals also require contextual information about Nix, the ecosystem, and the community, all of which can be repurposed.

This repository is an attempt to help developers get off the ground with fundraising for their project ideas, and focus on their specific problem statement, solution approach, and implementation plans. Keeping the reusable parts of previous efforts can also foster an attitude of "nothing is lost" despite the likely case of proposals being rejected, and encourage people to try out new things.

How to contribute

• If you apply for funding, please consider adding generic questions you had to deal with and your answers to the collection of Fequently Asked Questions.

  For public funding, reference the call for proposals the questions were answered for.

• If you develop a project proposal, please consider adding it to this repository.

  If it is accepted, it will serve as a good example others can learn from. If it is rejected, it can be reused in parts or completely when other opportunities arise.