Kivy

Introduction

The Kivy project, through the Kivy framework and its sister projects (Python-for-Android, Kivy-ios, Buildozer, PyJnius, PyObjus…), aims to provide all the tools to create desktop and mobile applications in Python, with great flexibility and ease.

Why funding

Despite its success, Kivy is not backed by any company, and for all of its existence (since 2010), none of the developers have been employed to work on improving it. While more than a few companies depend on it to build products, this rarely gives time to more than incremental improvements, bigger roadblocks can take longer to resolve.

For this reason we are asking the community to help fund the development of the framework, and associated tools, allowing it to continue thriving in a fully open source and liberally licensed (MIT) way.

The plan

We think the better use of such funding, is to try to employ core developpers full time (starting with one), to work on the project, using this time to advance the larger goals of the project. This would include:

• Resolving important (and sometime long standing) bugs reported by the community
• Reviewing and give useful feedback on pull requests to get them in a mergeable state.
• Keeping the tools up to date with a moving ecosystem (Android, iOS, but also desktop platforms, and new Python versions)
• Implementing missing features.

Every month, founded developers would:

• Look at the amount of money raised last month,
• Convert it to an amount of days that can be dedicated,
• Write a mail detailing the work that is planned for month,
• At the end of the month, write a summary about what's been achieved.

The amount of money asked is considered based on experience and geographical location of chosen developers.

Developers

We plan to start by funding Mathieu Virbel, one of the most long-standing contributors and leading visionary of the project. Mathieu contributed many of the fundamental concepts and technical foundations to make Kivy possible, and for several years has worked to build a consulting company using the framework in many different projects. This also allows him a flexible enough working environment to consider ramping up paid contributions as they come.

Once the objective to fund him full time is achieved, we'll consider next applicant on similar criteria, that is, commitment to the project, and ability to adapt to that payment model.