I think 'resources' there generally means "engineering resources", ie skilled people, not 'funding'.

It's not necessarily easy for an open source project to translate money into engineers. A pot of donated cash in the bank doesn't mean that the existing developers have any more time to work on the project, or that somebody new with the right skills and experience with the codebase magically appears. If one or more project members happen to be consultants who can use the money to spend six months working on Guile rather than on some other paid engagement that's one thing; but the amount of money required to make "quit your full time job to work on the project" financially sensible is prohibitively larger.

Indeed.

I can add that for some projects, funding is useful to acquire the hardware and infrastructure to host the project: code hosting, build servers, test machines, bandwidth... However I doubt this is Guile's constraint.

I am in complete agreement, in the general sense, with both you and the parent. However, I'm not proposing they hire engineers to work on the bigger pictures of Guile, and as the parent suggests, a "magical codebase" appears. From Eli Zaretskii's own email[1], there are some very low hanging fruit that can be accelerated through funds -- like solving non-GNU compatibility. We can see more tasks at the GuileEmacsTodo[2] list and the various Google Summer of Code sponserships for Guile [3]. These sponsorships have helped Guile make huge gains in the past 4 years.

My suggestion is to just keep that momentum going, year around. I know about the mythical man-month, etc, but in this case, some of this low-hanging fruit can be financed.

- [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/615347/ - [2] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo - [3] https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/details/google/g...