Australia is quite different, but there's tax payer funded unis here paying their Deans over 1 million a year who claim they can't afford to pay people more than $40/hour casually to record video lectures for first year business statistic classes to be delivered to over 600 students/year across multiple countries. They've also spent millions upon millions moving their campus in to the city when they already own a really good campus 10 minutes drive from the city with lots of decent free parking around even for undergrads. They also announced this year that they're so poor they're going to cut 75% of either the classes or courses next year (not sure which). People who run tax payer funded institutions like that should be thrown in jail.
Developers don't need to work for a company for the company to sponsor or donate to an open source project. Yes there would be less financial security but it's better than no financial support at all, perhaps sponsors etc. would be open to making commitments about donating $x/month or whatever for 12-24 months etc., not too different to governments promising funding for specific projects for y period of time. I'd take more companies supporting up and coming open source projects as a first step though!
Everyone has costs for things like shelter, power, food, water and other necessities, there is a need for some form of income.
I certainly think they should fund projects based on quality, as your reputation for quality increases I would hope that your ability to bring in sponsorship would be higher, though it's also a shame that people need years of their own funding to break in to open source software development properly full time. In many ways, open source development is only for the privileged/rich.
Wouldn't surprise me, but the Windows fanatics jump on anyone who questions Windows embracing Linux/open source or who bring up Microsoft's business practices back in the day (especially in relation to how much people love Bill Gates today, plenty of people would do the same as Bill with that amount of money, though unsurprisingly not that many who are willing to engage in the type of behaviour required to amass that amount of wealth in the first place).
It frustrates me that companies like Microsoft claim to love and embrace open source these days, but what smaller up and coming projects with independent developers are they financially supporting? That's the kind of support of open source I'd like to see from large companies/corporations/enterprises!
Thanks for the feedback! Nift can certainly be used without any scripting (whether it be pre/post build scripts, injecting output from external scripts or its own in-built scripting abilities with n++/f++).
I do worry that things like Lua/ExprTk etc. might scare people who just need a basic static website generator, as I think Nift should still be one of the easiest to use for basic html/css/js websites.
One thing I hope I've succeeded at is ensuring the barebones of a project is quite basic (check out what you get if you run `nsm init-html` in an empty directory if you try installing). If you want you can easily just use Nift's functionality for injecting/inputting content from files at build time then just use basic html/css/js/etc. for your website, while also aiming to be able to integrate with basically any other tool you could possibly want.
It is quite a bit of work to set up things from scratch, but as you identified it's hopefully quite easy to set up templates/boilerplate to be replicated for other projects. In that regard Nift attempts to be unopinionated.
I am not quite sure what you mean by separating markup from content either? The templating system is extremely flexible with how you can lay your files out, inject content from basically wherever etc..
It started out as basically just a static website generator but has grown in to having quite a few things.
The primary goal of Nift is still generating websites but not just static ones (and at scale, can handle generating websites with millions of pages). For generating websites you can manage projects and generate them. The best way to learn about this are probably the tutorials (https://nift.dev/resources/tutorials.html) which will both point you towards template website repositories you can fork and clone to make websites with, but also initialise a basically empty project using `nift init-html` and give you an idea of how to manage, edit, build etc. a project (you could also use Nift for things like making research papers/books with pandoc, as a pre-processor for any programming language, etc.).
Nift has its own template language n++ to use in the template/content files used to build webpages (you can use it for generating css/scss/js/ts/etc. files as well), though you can also use other template languages combined with n++ as well.
Due to being a template language, doing any actual programming related tasks with n++ is a bit verbose, so using very similar syntax and essentially the same underlying code I added a scripting language called f++. The main purpose for adding f++ was for use with Nift as a website generator, but it works fine as its own scripting language as well, and the f++ REPL works very well as a shell extension (if one installs Nift, start the shell with `nsm sh` and you should be able to use it basically the same as your normal shell, but you also have a full type system, everything from f++, Lua embedded, ExprTk embedded for mathematical expressions, etc. etc.), for example see the other comment on this post from me with a link to an f++ script and a bash script where they do the same thing and the f++ script takes 3 seconds whereas the bash script takes 3 minutes!
If anyone is interested in learning more about Nift or having a play, feel free to email me (contact[at]n-ham.com).
GitLab is also faster at cloning than GitHub. Whenever I have to clone a bunch of website repos to update templates for my website generator the GitLab repos finish cloning first even though I start them last.
Nift can build all of a basic 100k page website in ~11s and do an incremental build in ~2.25s on my 2014 11" i5 macbook air running Ubuntu 18.04, it uses under 500mb memory building the same basic website scaled to 1 million pages.