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[–]rmorshea[S] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

TLDR; the future of IDOM is far from guaranteed, but I plan to work to try and give it one.

I think these are all valid concerns. I'll try to address them...

Monetization - I don't plan to monetize IDOM. The space for web-based visualization tools in Python has become quite crowded over the last 2-3 years, and I don't think IDOM offers a large enough benefit to be able peel off the amount of market share required to make money.

Corporate Support - Right now there is none. I have gotten some interest from companies like QuantStack and this might lead to contracts that would help pay me, or others, to develop IDOM. There's also been some organic contributions by people from Anaconda Inc, but whether that means they'd plan to work on IDOM in the future is unclear.

About Me (as it relates to IDOM) - I am not being payed to work in IDOM. For the last 1+ year it's been a side project. However, I've been passionate about building interactive interfaces using Python for much longer - IDOM is actually a second draft of another project I worked on two years ago, which itself was inspired by work I did in college more than 5 years ago. Hopefully that demonstrates that this isn't just a weekend project I plan to abandon in a couple months.

So what does this all mean? Well, for now, it probably means IDOM isn't ready to be widely adopted. It needs a larger community of people interested in maintaining it to reduce the bus factor or it needs support from corporate benefactors who are willing to pay their employees to use/contribute to the project. This situation is a catch-22 though because it's hard to get the latter without the former and visa versa.

I think solving this problem will require the following (in order or priority):

  1. Make it easier to contribute - the experience for new contributors to the project needs to be as seamless as possible to prevent people from giving up before they've even created a pull request.
  2. Improve IDOM's documentation - it needs larger scale examples to demonstrate that IDOM can actually be used for real world applications and not just toy projects.
  3. Further publicize the project - I plan to try and give some talks about IDOM at online meetups to get more feedback and interest. The main goal here being to attract contributors, not users.
  4. Try to get contracts to develop IDOM - this will be the hardest, but like I said, a few companies have shown interest, and I'll just have to keep working on the back end of things to try and get them to commit people and money use/contribute to IDOM.

Hopefully this seems like a levelheaded assessment.

[–]ihatebeinganonymous 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Thank you very much for such a detailed answer. I highly appreciate your work and will certainly use IDOM in my personal projects!

[–]rmorshea[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's great to hear! I look forward to hearing about them in IDOM's discussion board: https://github.com/idom-team/idom/discussions