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Anaconda stopped funding Spyder.md

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The problem

Anaconda, Inc was supporting Spyder with a team of four developers working part time for the project for a year and a half. Unfortunately, that sponsorship ended in mid November 2017.

This document describes our main donation mechanisms, how much funding we need to support our team, how important was Anaconda's help and what the future looks like if we're unable to raise enough funds.

How to donate

We appreciate all the help you can provide us and can't thank you enough for supporting the work of Spyder devs and Spyder development.

If you want to contribute to maintain Spyder, please consider donating at

https://opencollective.com/spyder

How much funding is needed

We need a minimum of USD $35.000 per year to maintain the same conditions we had with Anaconda, i.e. four developers working part time for the project.

Please take into account that that's a small amount, considering that a single developer in USA earns USD ~$80.000 per year in a full time job. This is due to the fact that all of us live in Colombia (South America), where living costs are much cheaper than in USA or Europe.

The importance of Anaconda's funding

Thanks to Anaconda’s funding, Spyder has grown by leaps and bounds during the last year and a half (in scope and number of users), and we’d like to share with you some metrics you’re probably not aware of:

  1. Since the release of Spyder 3.0 (in September 2016), we have added ~3000 new commits, an increase of 40% with respect to the total number of commits in the entire history of the project.
  2. We are merging ~50 PRs per month. This is similar to the amount of work in the Jupyter notebook and JupyterLab, which have several developers working full time for them.
  3. We are receiving ~250 new issues per month on Github. This is similar to the most important libraries in the Python scientific stack (e.g. Pandas, Matplotlib and Scikit-learn) and much higher than the Jupyter notebook and JupyterLab.
  4. People are opening between ~2 to 6 new questions per day on StackOverflow with the spyder tag. Carlos Cordoba (Spyder maintainer) has made more than 3000 points this year answering Spyder questions alone, a 62% increase with respect to his overall score in seven years in the platform.
  5. Three new core, voluntary developers have joined the project during the last four months.

This is to show you that Spyder is in very good health and has signs to grow even more. But these numbers also make quite evident that we need a team to maintain a project with so much input from the community.

The future, without funding

Without a stable source of funding, the release of Spyder 4 will be delayed a year or more from our current schedule (June 2018). A list of already implemented features can be found here. Other major, planned features include:

  1. Add preferences to projects, which will make possible to select a conda environment and install packages in a graphical way on it.
  2. Make code completion, the evaluation of arbitrary Python code and multiline editing work while debugging.
  3. Add the ability to view any type of Python object to the Variable Explorer.
  4. Select between RStudio, Emacs and Sublime sets of keyboard shortcuts.
  5. Use the same architecture as VSCode for code completion, linting and goto definition in the Editor.

We will also keep maintaining Spyder 3, but at a much slower pace than now. Development in other associated projects (i.e. spyder-notebook, spyder-terminal and spyder-reports) will be stopped.