I'm trying to find another way to fund open-source scientific software maintenance for Cosmology.

There are 2 kinds of scientific software:

• paper-producing software is the core activity of scientific software developers, they do science through software, publish it as part of the scientific publication process
• foundational software is instead mostly about maintaining mature packages that do low-level operations, like reading/writing data, visualization.

Foundational software is rarely funded, it often is a burden for scientific software developers that detract effort from the development of paper-producing software, for which they are instead funded.

I have been the lead maintainer of the healpy since 2010, it is a Python package which handles reading, writing, analyzing and visualizing maps of the sky in a specific pixelization scheme, extensively used in Cosmic Microwave Background analysis. It is a low-level tool that is never specifically funded, so I take time off developing software I am funded for to maintain this package.

We recently applied to a NASA grant specifically targeted at software, we got "very good" reviews, but we were not funded. Grants are better for larger projects or for one-off large rewrites, here I am targeting long-term sustainability of the package.

So if your institution has a bit of funding that can be used for software, please support my work!

I plan to use the funding to add extra hours to my work week that I can use exclusively to support healpy, in particular there is a large refactoring in sight with breaking changes to the API toward the release of healpy 3, I'll also continue to answer questions on Stackoverflow and write tutorials.

For more details checkout my blog post

For questions contact me on Twitter, or email code on the domain andreazonca.com.