Crowdfunding Julia-based machine learning software

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#1

Hello!

We are a non-profit association developing open-source software based on Julia allowing to create, train and apply ML models through a graphical user interface without the need for programming or in-depth knowledge of ML.

The repository with our software is here.

We are participating in an idea competition where we may get financing for the development of the software. The committee asked us to do a crowdfunding campaign to prove that there is a need for such software and that donations are a viable source of income for further development.

We do not feel good about raising money for something that is not finished yet, especially if we will get the funding from that competition. Therefore, we decided to donate the collected money, if donors do not mention otherwise, to QML.jl and Flux.jl package maintainers. They made our software possible, but their packages can still use some love to become even better.

If you have some other machine learning package in mind or you would like to donate to us, then DM us on discord. We want our software developed democratically, therefore, donors and contributors get voting rights in our association.

Our crowdfunding campaign is here. If you have some problems with donation you can also donate to us using PayPal and we will transfer the donation on your behalf.

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#2

Has this been discussed with the maintainers? Who exactly will that money go to? This also is not mentioned anywhere at the link you posted, so I would not really feel comfortable just taking your word for it. If people want to donate to the Julia project, the proper way would be through NumFOCUS, which is an officially recognised non-profit organization, to either the Julia, JuMP or SciML projects.

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#3

Hi! I am one of the association members.

Yes, it was discussed with both QML.jl and Flux.jl maintainers. After the crowdfunding is over the portion of money for QML.jl will most likely be spent on paying a freelancer to help with development and in case of Flux.jl it will be transfered to NumFOCUS. Moreover, we are also a registered non-profit, which can be checked here. Enter “Open Machine Learning” into the search bar. I will try to get QML.jl and Flux.jl maintainers to post a confirmation here.

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#4

Hi, I can confirm that @a-ill contacted me regarding this, but I replied that I can’t accept money for working on QML.jl, since it is a hobby project that is constrained by my free time and me getting paid wouldn’t actually accelerate things, so I suggested paying a freelance programmer instead.

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#5

The plan is that the money collected throught this fundraise will be transferred to NumFOCUS, and then used to pay individual bounties for work on particular projects, via NumFOCUS.

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Does any julia-based GUI app (.exe/executable/installer) exists for Windows or Linux?
#6

Hi there. Why you didn’t organise the software as a standard package, project.toml, tests, etc ?

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#7

The plan is to release the software mentioned here as a standalone desktop application by (hopefully) compiling it into an executable using PackageCompiler.jl. This way anyone can use it without installing Julia and waiting for compilation. We do plan to also release a Julia package called MLGUI.jl based on the software sometimes in February.

The requirement to do a crowdfunding campaign caught us off guard. Originally, the plan was to make this work public in May, when everything is more or less done. As a result, I spent all holidays finishing main features and getting the software and package repositories in order. In a month or so both should have good documentation and be much better organised.

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