[gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Anna (cybertailor) Vyalkova]

Some developers were lucky enough to be employed by a company that pays
them for working on Gentoo full-time. But most are left out and their
work on Gentoo is entirely volunteer.

I thought that it could be nice if users could easily discover how to
pay donations to Gentoo developers and package maintainers.

There are a few approaches:

1) Special commands (like `npm fund`), which are never run by users so
   they are kinda useless.

2) Informing users about funding opportunities via post-install
   messages. This is relatively efficient but obtrusive and can lead to
   hate campaigns (what happened to the core-js developer).

3) Fundraising campaigns, which I know nothing about :)

What do you think?

Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Maciej Barć]

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Hi Anna!

Gentoo Foundation should take care of this problem. The issue of funding 
Gentoo developers was here for years but nobody stepped up to refine the 
funding policy.
I've also heard that GF will never touch this because it is against the 
foundation's laws, "because Gentoo cannot pay itself"... shrug. 
Hopefully somebody will correct me on this, because I wish that GF could 
found at least (non-remote) hardware for development usage.

> I thought that it could be nice if users could easily discover how to
> pay donations to Gentoo developers and package maintainers.

That is rather easy, see: "https://www.gentoo.org/donate/", my question 
is to whom does this money go to?

Another way is to check out developers' wiki pages, some of them put eg 
Paypal info there.


On 2/15/23 20:06, Anna (cybertailor) Vyalkova wrote:
> Some developers were lucky enough to be employed by a company that pays
> them for working on Gentoo full-time. But most are left out and their
> work on Gentoo is entirely volunteer.
> 
> I thought that it could be nice if users could easily discover how to
> pay donations to Gentoo developers and package maintainers.
> 
> There are a few approaches:
> 
> 1) Special commands (like `npm fund`), which are never run by users so
>     they are kinda useless.
> 
> 2) Informing users about funding opportunities via post-install
>     messages. This is relatively efficient but obtrusive and can lead to
>     hate campaigns (what happened to the core-js developer).
> 
> 3) Fundraising campaigns, which I know nothing about :)
> 
> What do you think?
> 

-- 
Have a great day!

~ Maciej XGQT Barć

xgqt@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer
(emacs, math, ml, scheme, sci)

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Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Maciej Barć]

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> That is rather easy, see: "https://www.gentoo.org/donate/", my question 
> is to whom does this money go to?

Oops, what I meant to write was that it only goes to fund that which is 
written on the side of the page, so in short mostly the Gentoo Infra's 
stuff.

On 2/15/23 23:36, Maciej Barć wrote:
> Hi Anna!
> 
> Gentoo Foundation should take care of this problem. The issue of funding 
> Gentoo developers was here for years but nobody stepped up to refine the 
> funding policy.
> I've also heard that GF will never touch this because it is against the 
> foundation's laws, "because Gentoo cannot pay itself"... shrug. 
> Hopefully somebody will correct me on this, because I wish that GF could 
> found at least (non-remote) hardware for development usage.
> 
>> I thought that it could be nice if users could easily discover how to
>> pay donations to Gentoo developers and package maintainers.
> 
> That is rather easy, see: "https://www.gentoo.org/donate/", my question 
> is to whom does this money go to?
> 
> Another way is to check out developers' wiki pages, some of them put eg 
> Paypal info there.
> 
> 
> On 2/15/23 20:06, Anna (cybertailor) Vyalkova wrote:
>> Some developers were lucky enough to be employed by a company that pays
>> them for working on Gentoo full-time. But most are left out and their
>> work on Gentoo is entirely volunteer.
>>
>> I thought that it could be nice if users could easily discover how to
>> pay donations to Gentoo developers and package maintainers.
>>
>> There are a few approaches:
>>
>> 1) Special commands (like `npm fund`), which are never run by users so
>>     they are kinda useless.
>>
>> 2) Informing users about funding opportunities via post-install
>>     messages. This is relatively efficient but obtrusive and can lead to
>>     hate campaigns (what happened to the core-js developer).
>>
>> 3) Fundraising campaigns, which I know nothing about :)
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
> 

-- 
Have a great day!

~ Maciej XGQT Barć

xgqt@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer
(emacs, math, ml, scheme, sci)

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Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 5:36 PM Maciej Barć <xgqt@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> I've also heard that GF will never touch this because it is against the
> foundation's laws, "because Gentoo cannot pay itself"... shrug.

No such legal/formal restriction exists (the bylaws even have some
provisions for employees (we don't have any)), but there are many
reasons that this can get messy.

I personally think it would make way more sense to just make it easy
for developers to list some kind of info about how to donate to them,
and just leave it all up to individuals.

Offhand some issues with Gentoo handing out "salaries" or anything
close to it are:

1. There will be endless debates over who gets how much.  Some
obviously do more than others, and so you either pay everybody the
same and hear grumbling about inactive devs, or pay people based on
activity and then have grumbling or manipulation of the metrics.
2. Gentoo just doesn't bring in that much money in the first place, so
it would be a lot of arguing over what probably will end up being $50
here and $100 there.
3. Now you have a ton of tax overhead, potentially in many
jurisdictions.  Reimbursing expenses at least in the US isn't taxed,
but when you start paying people for contributions you have a bunch of
legal issues.
4. Then you just have the general volunteer culture.  Gentoo currently
is an all-volunteer organization, and as such has a certain culture.
If you look at FOSS organizations that tend to pay substantial amounts
of people you end up with professional management and so on.  That
isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is a big change.

It just is an issue that I don't think anybody wants to go near.  If
people want to donate to their favorite dev I doubt anybody would be
bothered.  It just doesn't make sense to have the foundation operate
as a payment processor when you have lots of companies that offer
exactly that service, or things like cryptocurrency if you want to go
that route.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Maciej Barć]

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Hi Rich!

Thanks a lot for reminding the reason why the GF "payments" are a bad idea.

Do you know what is GF's stance on funding "local" dev HW? I think 
people inside toolchain/chromium/firefox or other projects requiring a 
lot of computation power to run various compilation/test configurations 
could use HW provided/sponsored by the Foundation.

On 2/15/23 23:50, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 5:36 PM Maciej Barć <xgqt@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> I've also heard that GF will never touch this because it is against the
>> foundation's laws, "because Gentoo cannot pay itself"... shrug.
> 
> No such legal/formal restriction exists (the bylaws even have some
> provisions for employees (we don't have any)), but there are many
> reasons that this can get messy.
> 
> I personally think it would make way more sense to just make it easy
> for developers to list some kind of info about how to donate to them,
> and just leave it all up to individuals.
> 
> Offhand some issues with Gentoo handing out "salaries" or anything
> close to it are:
> 
> 1. There will be endless debates over who gets how much.  Some
> obviously do more than others, and so you either pay everybody the
> same and hear grumbling about inactive devs, or pay people based on
> activity and then have grumbling or manipulation of the metrics.
> 2. Gentoo just doesn't bring in that much money in the first place, so
> it would be a lot of arguing over what probably will end up being $50
> here and $100 there.
> 3. Now you have a ton of tax overhead, potentially in many
> jurisdictions.  Reimbursing expenses at least in the US isn't taxed,
> but when you start paying people for contributions you have a bunch of
> legal issues.
> 4. Then you just have the general volunteer culture.  Gentoo currently
> is an all-volunteer organization, and as such has a certain culture.
> If you look at FOSS organizations that tend to pay substantial amounts
> of people you end up with professional management and so on.  That
> isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is a big change.
> 
> It just is an issue that I don't think anybody wants to go near.  If
> people want to donate to their favorite dev I doubt anybody would be
> bothered.  It just doesn't make sense to have the foundation operate
> as a payment processor when you have lots of companies that offer
> exactly that service, or things like cryptocurrency if you want to go
> that route.
> 

-- 
Have a great day!

~ Maciej XGQT Barć

xgqt@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer
(emacs, math, ml, scheme, sci)

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Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 6:02 PM Maciej Barć <xgqt@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Do you know what is GF's stance on funding "local" dev HW? I think
> people inside toolchain/chromium/firefox or other projects requiring a
> lot of computation power to run various compilation/test configurations
> could use HW provided/sponsored by the Foundation.

I do not speak for the Foundation, but the process for requesting
stuff like this is located at:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foundation:Funding_Request

Obviously they don't have infinite funds, but this is the sort of
thing that they've been historically doing.  Just keep in mind that
there is work involved besides just writing checks.  Ie if you want to
buy some expensive hardware keep in mind that it needs to actually be
hosted and administered and so Infra/etc would need to get involved
(and hosting has its own costs).

I'd suggest talking to them if you have an idea, preferably in
coordination with a team if appropriate or if somebody else is already
doing similar work.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Alec Warner]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 2:36 PM Maciej Barć <xgqt@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Anna!
>
> Gentoo Foundation should take care of this problem. The issue of funding
> Gentoo developers was here for years but nobody stepped up to refine the
> funding policy.

For context, I'm President, Gentoo Foundation (since 2019.)

> I've also heard that GF will never touch this because it is against the
> foundation's laws, "because Gentoo cannot pay itself"... shrug.
> Hopefully somebody will correct me on this, because I wish that GF could
> found at least (non-remote) hardware for development usage.

Perhaps this was the previous stance of the Foundation board, but has
not been the case since I have been president. I ask at least once a
year for people to file requests for us to spend money and besides
specific programs (infra, hosting, nitrokeys) we continue to accrue
cash in the bank and receive no proposals to spend it.

>
> > I thought that it could be nice if users could easily discover how to
> > pay donations to Gentoo developers and package maintainers.
>
> That is rather easy, see: "https://www.gentoo.org/donate/", my question
> is to whom does this money go to?

The money goes to the Gentoo Foundation, a New Mexico corporation run
by 5 elected developers. We publish accounting books once a year (our
Fiscal Year 2022 draft numbers are at
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foundation:Gentoo_Foundation_Finances_FY2022)

Note the Foundation is trying to dissolve itself; at which point it
will be replaced by an OpenCollective fundraising campaign; operated
by OpenCollective (a holding corporation) run for the Gentoo Community
and administered by the Gentoo Council (in the current plan.)
Foundation expenditures that support development (e.g. not [taxes,
accounting, mailbox, fees, etc.]) already get reviewed by the Gentoo
Council regularly.

https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20220213.txt (to buy
2 new servers.)
https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20220313.txt (updated
quote for 2 servers, we eventually bought this.)
https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20220508.txt
(reimbursement for SSDs I bought to sustain existing infrastructure.)

You should expect any proposal to go to the council, and the councils
vote is required to disperse money from the Foundation. Eventually the
Foundation will go away (replaced by OpenCollective) and the council
will have the same control over the funds.

>
> Another way is to check out developers' wiki pages, some of them put eg
> Paypal info there.

I encourage developers to build their own brand (perhaps professional,
or perhaps volunteer oriented.) We also have a consultants page:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foundation:Consultants that we list
people you may want to hire if you need Gentoo work done.

>
>
> On 2/15/23 20:06, Anna (cybertailor) Vyalkova wrote:
> > Some developers were lucky enough to be employed by a company that pays
> > them for working on Gentoo full-time. But most are left out and their
> > work on Gentoo is entirely volunteer.
> >
> > I thought that it could be nice if users could easily discover how to
> > pay donations to Gentoo developers and package maintainers.
> >
> > There are a few approaches:
> >
> > 1) Special commands (like `npm fund`), which are never run by users so
> >     they are kinda useless.
> >
> > 2) Informing users about funding opportunities via post-install
> >     messages. This is relatively efficient but obtrusive and can lead to
> >     hate campaigns (what happened to the core-js developer).
> >
> > 3) Fundraising campaigns, which I know nothing about :)
> >
> > What do you think?
> >
>
> --
> Have a great day!
>
> ~ Maciej XGQT Barć
>
> xgqt@gentoo.org
> Gentoo Linux developer
> (emacs, math, ml, scheme, sci)

Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Anna (cybertailor) Vyalkova]

On 2023-02-16 09:59, Alec Warner wrote:
> You should expect any proposal to go to the council, and the councils
> vote is required to disperse money from the Foundation. Eventually the
> Foundation will go away (replaced by OpenCollective) and the council
> will have the same control over the funds.

There should be more ways to donate than OpenCollective, which supports
almost nothing besides Stripe and PayPal.

Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Anna (cybertailor) Vyalkova]

On 2023-02-16 09:59, Alec Warner wrote:
> > Another way is to check out developers' wiki pages, some of them put eg
> > Paypal info there.
> 
> I encourage developers to build their own brand (perhaps professional,
> or perhaps volunteer oriented.) We also have a consultants page:
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foundation:Consultants that we list
> people you may want to hire if you need Gentoo work done.

This could be easier if tooling (like Portage, eix or p.g.o) supported
it.

Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Alec Warner]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 10:06 AM Anna (cybertailor) Vyalkova
<cyber+gentoo@sysrq.in> wrote:
>
> On 2023-02-16 09:59, Alec Warner wrote:
> > You should expect any proposal to go to the council, and the councils
> > vote is required to disperse money from the Foundation. Eventually the
> > Foundation will go away (replaced by OpenCollective) and the council
> > will have the same control over the funds.
>
> There should be more ways to donate than OpenCollective, which supports
> almost nothing besides Stripe and PayPal.
>

We currently only support paypal and cheque, so OpenColletive would be
similar. Is there a particular method you would be interested in?

-A

Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Alec Warner]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 3:02 PM Maciej Barć <xgqt@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Rich!
>
> Thanks a lot for reminding the reason why the GF "payments" are a bad idea.
>
> Do you know what is GF's stance on funding "local" dev HW? I think
> people inside toolchain/chromium/firefox or other projects requiring a
> lot of computation power to run various compilation/test configurations
> could use HW provided/sponsored by the Foundation.

Again, for transparency, I am President of the Gentoo Foundation.

I think we have traditionally two options here:
 - One is we buy hardware, it's owned by Gentoo (Foundation) and we
operate it as our asset. We typically do not deploy assets to people's
homes because there is risk (of that person going away) and because
the benefit of 'local' hardware are experienced by one person (the
person in that locality). So value-wise having a 'local' asset is very
similar to having a hosted asset.
 - The second is we buy hardware and basically give it to someone.
This has a few other problems:
   - Accounting paperwork for having that person as a vendor; the
developer should likely be treating that machine as income; paying
taxes on it, etc.
   - Ethical considerations on allocation of Foundation resources
(fairness, basically.)

We have traditionally offered hosted resources, which we have done in
the past and continue to endeavour to do.
We also have the nitrokey program, where we purchase assets and ship
them directly to developers:
 - This is an equal access program, everyone is eligible for 1
Foundation provided Nitrokey and we ensure we have enough funds to
cover the entire cost of that program.
 - Accounting and logistics-wise, the items are so small and so costly
to run logistics for, we just choose not to do it (so developers who
leave do not ship their keys back to us.)
   - It's probable that technically the developers who leave Gentoo
should record the value of the nitrokey as income, but in most
jurisdictions the cost is so small it doesn't matter anyway.

I don't believe we have enough money to buy everyone a local
development rig, and I'm not really sure that program really adds
significant value over a hosted solution, so I'd likely frame any
local development around that value-delivery conversation.

-A

>
> On 2/15/23 23:50, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 5:36 PM Maciej Barć <xgqt@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> I've also heard that GF will never touch this because it is against the
> >> foundation's laws, "because Gentoo cannot pay itself"... shrug.
> >
> > No such legal/formal restriction exists (the bylaws even have some
> > provisions for employees (we don't have any)), but there are many
> > reasons that this can get messy.
> >
> > I personally think it would make way more sense to just make it easy
> > for developers to list some kind of info about how to donate to them,
> > and just leave it all up to individuals.
> >
> > Offhand some issues with Gentoo handing out "salaries" or anything
> > close to it are:
> >
> > 1. There will be endless debates over who gets how much.  Some
> > obviously do more than others, and so you either pay everybody the
> > same and hear grumbling about inactive devs, or pay people based on
> > activity and then have grumbling or manipulation of the metrics.
> > 2. Gentoo just doesn't bring in that much money in the first place, so
> > it would be a lot of arguing over what probably will end up being $50
> > here and $100 there.
> > 3. Now you have a ton of tax overhead, potentially in many
> > jurisdictions.  Reimbursing expenses at least in the US isn't taxed,
> > but when you start paying people for contributions you have a bunch of
> > legal issues.
> > 4. Then you just have the general volunteer culture.  Gentoo currently
> > is an all-volunteer organization, and as such has a certain culture.
> > If you look at FOSS organizations that tend to pay substantial amounts
> > of people you end up with professional management and so on.  That
> > isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is a big change.
> >
> > It just is an issue that I don't think anybody wants to go near.  If
> > people want to donate to their favorite dev I doubt anybody would be
> > bothered.  It just doesn't make sense to have the foundation operate
> > as a payment processor when you have lots of companies that offer
> > exactly that service, or things like cryptocurrency if you want to go
> > that route.
> >
>
> --
> Have a great day!
>
> ~ Maciej XGQT Barć
>
> xgqt@gentoo.org
> Gentoo Linux developer
> (emacs, math, ml, scheme, sci)

Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Santiago Ferreira]

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Hello community, I'm not the most active person, I read the email list and
the forum, please keep them, last year at MozFest I found
https://webmonetization.org/ , that's the most open way that I believe that
could be good to developers, could be something to talk this year at
MozFest https://www.mozillafestival.org/en/ let's think in different ways
to promote Gentoo

Santiago

El jue., 16 de febrero de 2023 4:45 p. m., Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org>
escribió:

> On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 3:02 PM Maciej Barć <xgqt@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Rich!
> >
> > Thanks a lot for reminding the reason why the GF "payments" are a bad
> idea.
> >
> > Do you know what is GF's stance on funding "local" dev HW? I think
> > people inside toolchain/chromium/firefox or other projects requiring a
> > lot of computation power to run various compilation/test configurations
> > could use HW provided/sponsored by the Foundation.
>
> Again, for transparency, I am President of the Gentoo Foundation.
>
> I think we have traditionally two options here:
>  - One is we buy hardware, it's owned by Gentoo (Foundation) and we
> operate it as our asset. We typically do not deploy assets to people's
> homes because there is risk (of that person going away) and because
> the benefit of 'local' hardware are experienced by one person (the
> person in that locality). So value-wise having a 'local' asset is very
> similar to having a hosted asset.
>  - The second is we buy hardware and basically give it to someone.
> This has a few other problems:
>    - Accounting paperwork for having that person as a vendor; the
> developer should likely be treating that machine as income; paying
> taxes on it, etc.
>    - Ethical considerations on allocation of Foundation resources
> (fairness, basically.)
>
> We have traditionally offered hosted resources, which we have done in
> the past and continue to endeavour to do.
> We also have the nitrokey program, where we purchase assets and ship
> them directly to developers:
>  - This is an equal access program, everyone is eligible for 1
> Foundation provided Nitrokey and we ensure we have enough funds to
> cover the entire cost of that program.
>  - Accounting and logistics-wise, the items are so small and so costly
> to run logistics for, we just choose not to do it (so developers who
> leave do not ship their keys back to us.)
>    - It's probable that technically the developers who leave Gentoo
> should record the value of the nitrokey as income, but in most
> jurisdictions the cost is so small it doesn't matter anyway.
>
> I don't believe we have enough money to buy everyone a local
> development rig, and I'm not really sure that program really adds
> significant value over a hosted solution, so I'd likely frame any
> local development around that value-delivery conversation.
>
> -A
>
> >
> > On 2/15/23 23:50, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > > On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 5:36 PM Maciej Barć <xgqt@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> I've also heard that GF will never touch this because it is against
> the
> > >> foundation's laws, "because Gentoo cannot pay itself"... shrug.
> > >
> > > No such legal/formal restriction exists (the bylaws even have some
> > > provisions for employees (we don't have any)), but there are many
> > > reasons that this can get messy.
> > >
> > > I personally think it would make way more sense to just make it easy
> > > for developers to list some kind of info about how to donate to them,
> > > and just leave it all up to individuals.
> > >
> > > Offhand some issues with Gentoo handing out "salaries" or anything
> > > close to it are:
> > >
> > > 1. There will be endless debates over who gets how much.  Some
> > > obviously do more than others, and so you either pay everybody the
> > > same and hear grumbling about inactive devs, or pay people based on
> > > activity and then have grumbling or manipulation of the metrics.
> > > 2. Gentoo just doesn't bring in that much money in the first place, so
> > > it would be a lot of arguing over what probably will end up being $50
> > > here and $100 there.
> > > 3. Now you have a ton of tax overhead, potentially in many
> > > jurisdictions.  Reimbursing expenses at least in the US isn't taxed,
> > > but when you start paying people for contributions you have a bunch of
> > > legal issues.
> > > 4. Then you just have the general volunteer culture.  Gentoo currently
> > > is an all-volunteer organization, and as such has a certain culture.
> > > If you look at FOSS organizations that tend to pay substantial amounts
> > > of people you end up with professional management and so on.  That
> > > isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is a big change.
> > >
> > > It just is an issue that I don't think anybody wants to go near.  If
> > > people want to donate to their favorite dev I doubt anybody would be
> > > bothered.  It just doesn't make sense to have the foundation operate
> > > as a payment processor when you have lots of companies that offer
> > > exactly that service, or things like cryptocurrency if you want to go
> > > that route.
> > >
> >
> > --
> > Have a great day!
> >
> > ~ Maciej XGQT Barć
> >
> > xgqt@gentoo.org
> > Gentoo Linux developer
> > (emacs, math, ml, scheme, sci)
>
>

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