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
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).