Hi all,
I’m the author of proUBC- a Web3 and ZK SDK for the SAP S/4 HANA platform using the SAP ABAP programming language. In case you didn’t know - SAP is a commonly used supply chain and finance platform of Fortune 500 companies.
Sadly - in spite of that huge ecosystem - it hasn’t been easy for indie ABAP developers looking to develop public goods using a local development environment especially since SAP removed support for the ABAP Developer edition. Generally this has forced indie ABAPers to pay for cloud deployments that can get quite expensive to run on a solo basis. Some employers are okay with their staff to use their corporate sandbox for open source work- but that dev access can be time limited and hard for newcomers to the ABAP language to acquire. Why is it this way? Because SAP is a commercial software and consumes relatively large amounts of resources that tend to correspond to the needs of full enterprise landscape and less so of an indie dev.
As a labor of love, I (and then later Provide Technologies) paid for the license and server costs to host a SAP Dev sandbox for the development / integration activities for proUBC. Too pricey for us alone right now to open to everyone - but there’s generally enough individuals around the SAP ecosystem concerned with this issue that simply pooling resources across individuals and corporations could potentially solve this.
Would love to find out if/how quadratic funding could work for this. I have contacts who could set up and host the sandbox - just as long as there’s a good way for them to be reimbursed the licensing and server costs involved. A mix of monetary contributions and git commits/PRs to open source ABAP projects would be the model to grant the dev access freely and fairly - especially for passionate contributors who would normally be priced out running SAP dev environments on their own.
SAP ecosystem devs and pros generally don’t have familiarity with Web3 (except for scorn) - but this could be a good initiative to spark some positive interest while also doing a public good for the many innovative ABAP projects and contributors listed on dotabap.org. Mine of course (proUBC) is one - but several other ones like abapGit, abap-openapi, and abap2xlsx are there as well. Several corporate partners would likely take interest in sponsoring - as cultivating a new generation of ABAP dev talent and nurturing greater understanding of using abapGit for development is a key strategy objective of theirs.
Would welcome your thoughts/feedback here and answer any questions. Thanks!
-Ryan