Outcome of our application to Sovereign Tech Agency's Direct Contributions Program

Dear friends from Automake!

A year ago I applied in the name of Automake at Sovereign Tech Agency's 
(from the German government) Direct Contributions Program. The idea was 
that a company is working on some open bugs funded by the agency.
The company reached out to us and we explained the project and the areas 
worth working on. They looked into the Autotool stack to determine what 
they could pick up. Unfortunately, it did not work out:

 > While we have demonstrated in existing projects to dive into new
 > topic areas with aplomb and produce measurable progress for a
 > variety of projects, some of which were totally not in our usual
 > wheelhouse, and while we do have surface-level, end-user experience
 > with the autotools ecosystem and building cross-platform native
 > software, after careful review, we have to conclude that Automake
 > is not a good fit for the Bug Resilience Program as it currently
 > exists.
 >
 > Our STA scope is ~40–50 person days max and we’d be able to get up and
 > running in that time, but we don’t think there’d be a lot of time left
 > to do meaningful work after that and we don’t think that would be a
 > sustainable use of the budget. We believe the STA should either pay
 > [somebody] directly, or find a 6–12 month budget to pay a capable
 > individual to really dig into the complexity of the ecosystem.

Apologies for not informing you earlier. There are other forms of 
getting funding like year-long maintainer scholarship that might be 
better suited for autotools.

Bye
Christoph