[Linux-aus] [Grant Application] Comprehensive Kerbal Archive Network

[Paul Fenwick]

Hey Tim!

I want to confirm that while ckan is open source, Kerbal Space Program
itself is a closed source program made by a commercial developer? ckan
itself is currently not useful without purchasing KSP? The commercial
developer is also not able to cover the required hosting?

KSP is indeed a closed source, commercial program, made by Squad. You would
think it would be easy to ask them to cover our hosting costs, but it turns
out things are pretty complicated. Squad have Curse as their Official Mod
Partner, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s an exclusive contract
associated with this. When you fire up the game, there’s an “Add-ons and
Mods” link, and it takes you to Curse.

That ends up making it more complicated for Squad to be seen as endorsing
anyone other than Curse for mods, and funding falls pretty hard into the
endorsement category.

On our end, there’s a lot to be said for having independence. While the
sort of funding we’re asking for is unlikely to be a big influencer, we’re
able to work pretty hard in the interests of our users.

Would having *more* funds/compute resources then currently avaliable
improve things in any way? (IE Increase developer productivity, allow more
advanced features, etc)? Are you requesting the bare minimum, the current
usage, or with some plan for growth?

This request is specifically for infrastructure, and we’re asking for
funding that provides a modest capacity for growth in case we need it. Leon
may correct me if I’m wrong, but our status page
<http://status.ksp-ckan.org/> shows that we’re able to do a full mod
indexing every two hours. If we doubled our compute expenses I’m sure we
could halve that, and while that would be great for players who want to
install a mod in the same hour it’s released, adding lots of cycles gives
diminishing returns overall. In other words, we’re not starving for
resources.

There’s a whole other discussion about funding developers and new features.
but that’s not what we’re asking for with this grant. :)

~ Paul
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