For the first few years of Plover's development, it was financed by donated money from Plover users (including from Mirabai Knight, the founder of the project), which went to Plover's co-founder and original developer, Josh Lifton, working at a steep discount from his normal freelance rates. Plover's current lead developer, Hesky Fisher, generously volunteers his time to Plover and doesn't take any donated money, so now instead of using donations to fund development directly, we're using it to promote Plover in other ways. We've used some of the money from donations to buy stock for
The Plover Store (more merch coming soon!), whose profits will go back into the Plover development pool. We're also slowly building a fund for the development of
Hover Plover, the free steno tutorial arcade game, which will require artists and designers as well as developers. Mirabai Knight takes no money from Plover donations.
Current funds in Plover's account:
$1,308 from donations
$187 from Plover Store sales
= $1,495 to put towards development of Hover Plover
Donations of money can be sent through PayPal:
Donations of code, documentation, artwork, and signal boosting are also very
welcome. We're also looking for ideas on revenue-raising merchandise such as
various objects emblazoned with the Plover logo. Sometime in the next year or so,
we'll be launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise revenue for Hover Plover. Stay tuned!
If you want to help work on Plover code, see the
Status of Current Tasks Page or the
Plover's Github for
information on known bugs and feature requests, or join the
Google Group to
talk about the current state of Plover development with its users and devs.
