CubeSoft, Inc. has started to sponsor OSS developers as a company using GitHub Sponsors. For more information on our current activities, please refer to the Activities section.
Motivation
Our motivation as a company to use GitHub Sponsors is part of our advertising strategy, or to be more specific, to increase the name value and brand image of our products such as CubePDF, CubeVP, etc. through these activities.
As for my personal motivation, I would like to tell you a little old story about ....... I had a chance to give a presentation on CubeVP when I was looking for ways to expand its sales channels, and one of the reviewers said, "Who would want to bother paying for software that is available for free?" at that time.
I understood that it is normal for people (who are not software developers) to have a perception of what is commonly called "freeware" such as CubePDF, and one of the reasons is that I could not sufficiently communicate the difference between CubeVP and CubePDF. ...... However, apart from such understanding, I have to admit that the emotional impact of the above words was huge when they were actually thrown at me directly.
Several years have passed since this event, and fortunately, we have been receiving many inquiries and contracts for our various paid plans. Although we have yet to generate enough revenue to sustain the organization on our own, we are satisfied that we have been able to answer the questions they posed earlier with our actions.
On the other hand, this was not enough, and I wanted to do something as a sponsor. At that time, GitHub announced the GitHub Sponsors for companies service, and some companies in Japan started to contribute via the service.
I and our company have been wanting to follow this trend for some time. In the past few days, I happened to see a series of people on Twitter who I thought were "amazing", so I decided to start the project on the spur of the moment, and here we are.
About the future
In the future, we will continue to consider sponsoring libraries that we use and other initiatives that we personally think are great. At this point, we have decided to focus our sponsoring efforts on Windows software developers. One reason is that this is our main field of business, and another reason is that, from personal observation, I have the impression that there is a lack of excitement in this field compared to the so-called Web technology field.
We are still a small company and do not have a lot of money to spend on advertising, but we will continue to do so steadily.
Activities
7th phase (2023-06-07)
- @rui314 (Rui Ueyama)
He is the developer of LLD and mold proects. One of the bottlenecks in C++ development is build time, and these projects are designed to speed up the process called linking. The mold is able to link considerably faster than existing ones, making it one of the most widely used software in the world.
6th phase (2023-05-19)
- C++ Japanese Reference (cpprefjp)
C++ Japanese reference edited and managed mainly by @faithandbrave. I think this is an essential website to master C++, which has been evolving at a great speed since the August 2011 revision of C++11. We have learned that you are seeking sponsors through cpprefjp - Open Collective and we have decided to contribute. - @surapunoyousei (Ryosuke Asano)
You are the developer of a Firefox-based Web browser called Floorp. I learned about it through an article in Windows Forest (Japanese), along with a student community called Ablaze. They seem to be vigorously collecting and disseminating information related to Web browsers as well as development, and we decided to sponsor the developer as well in order to support them.
5th phase (2023-01-11)
- @faithandbrave (Akira Takahashi)
He edits and manages cpprefjp (C++ Japanese reference), boostjp (Japanese reference of Boost C++ Libraries), and actively disseminates C++ related information in Japanese. He is also the organizer of the Boost study group and is an integral part of the C++ community in Japan. We also sponsor cpprefjp through Open Collective. - @shibayan (Tatsuro Shibamura)
For many years, he has been posting information about Windows and Microsoft technologies, including Shibayan Zakki (blog). They are also quick to catch up with the latest technologies and are an indispensable source of information to help us deduce whether the technologies announced by Microsoft are promising. In recognition of these accomplishments, Microsoft has awarded him the Microsoft MVP award since 2011.
4th phase (2022-08-10)
- @Ablaze-MIRAI (Ablaze)
According to an article in Windows Forest (Japanese), the community is mainly composed of junior high and high school students. Floorp (GitHub), one of the development projects by Ablaze members, is a Firefox-based Web browser that seems to be continuously following updates on the original. I myself was involved in another project to customize a Web browser, and I was impressed by the enthusiasm and energy of the people who kept up with the updates of the fork originators, which was a very arduous task. There are numerous other projects in the works besides Floorp, and we are excited about their future. We also sponsor @surapunoyousei, the developer of Floorp.
3rd phase (2022-03-29)
- @zakuro9715 (zakuro)
Developer of Cotowali, a statically-typed scripting language that compiles into shell scripts and PowerShell. The project has been selected as a 2021 Exploratory IT Human Resources Project (The MITOU Program), and is also attracting attention as OSS implemented in the V language. This is not a GitHub Sponsor, but I became a sponsor through Open Collective because We agree with Call for Cotowali Sponsorship Opportunities (ja) and the Tweet (ja).
2nd phase (2021-12-22)
- @batzen (Bastian Schmidt)
Developer of the Fluent.Ribbon, which is a Ribbon (Office-like) UI library. Fluent.Ribbon is one of the core components in out CubePDF Utility. - @punker76 (Jan Karger)
Developer of the gong-wpf-dragdrop, which is a library to realize Drag&Drop actions in WPF. We use the library in our CubePDF Utility. - @Reputeless (Ryo Suzuki)
Developer of the Siv3D (OpenSiv3D), which is a graphic framework implemented in C++20. He is also very active in various C++ related activities. - @hiyohiyo (Noriyuki Miyazaki)
Developer of the CrystalDiskInfo and CrystalDiskMark, which are HDD/SSD utility software. These are used by people all over the world, recording tens of millions of downloads.
1st phase (2021-09-08)
- @mayuki (Mayuki Sawatari)
Author of the WeekRef.NET, which is a Web site that updates .NET related information in Japanese almost every week. He has also been actively developing some .NET related libraries. - @sayurin (Kurata Sayuri)
Current developer of the FFFTP, which is a FTP client software. He also seem to be actively refactoring their code for sustainable maintenance, and I was personally impressed by the Tweet (ja).
