wxWidgets Sponsorship

Why does wxWidgets need sponsorship?

There is an urgent need to get further ports of wxWidgets 2 underway, such as to Qt, BeOS and Windows CE. Existing ports need further effort.

Please see the Future Ports page for details.

How much do we need?

What we need is an initial financial contribution of perhaps $4,000 so that one or more developers can get the Qt port started. After 2-3 months of initial work, volunteers can continue the development effort, refine the port, and ensure it compiles on all major Unix platforms.

Sponsorship fees will be allocated to those members of the wxWidgets development team who have an opportunity to pursue the port full-time (such as myself!)

What are the advantages for sponsors?

It would be great to have contributions from companies who already depend on wxWidgets 1.xx. It's a very inexpensive way of ensuring that the many advantages of wxWidgets 2 are available to them. Contributions will act as a catalyst which will be followed by efforts from the wxWidgets team and others who have expressed an interest in helping produce this port. It's a more effective method, and cheaper, than trying to produce a commercial, closed port, since it harnesses the much-discussed benefits of open source code. That is, the reward is far greater than that which such a modest investment would normally give in a commercial context.

Also, sponsors will get links from the wxWidgets Web page to their own sites: the wxWidgets Web site is quite popular, so there's an advertising payback. Free CD-ROMs will be issued to sponsors, with the latest code.

So I urge all interested parties to contact me if they can help in any way. If you have contacts who might be able to help, then I would be glad to know about them, too.

Many thanks!

Julian Smart
23rd August 1998