<div dir="ltr"><div class="markdown-here-wrapper" style=""><p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em!important">Hey Tim!</p>
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<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em!important">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?</p>
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<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em!important">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em!important">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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em!important">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.</p>
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<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em!important">Would having <em>more</em> 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?</p>
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<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em!important">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 <a href="http://status.ksp-ckan.org/">status page</a> 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.</p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em!important">There’s a whole other discussion about funding developers and new features. but that’s not what we’re asking for with this grant. :)</p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em!important">~ Paul</p>
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