Hi, On Sat, 2025-12-06 at 17:47 +0100, Dominik George wrote: > > Why do we need to do that? > > > > Do we need to also reject other contributions besides monetary > > donations? For example code contributions by Google as a company or > > individual employees, both in Debian and upstream projects? > > > > Do we need to stop accepting donations only from Google or also from > > other companies? > > I'm not going to reply to that in detail, but comparing a Big Tech > company like Google with just any other company is a bit off.
There are other Big Tech companies that donate to Debian if you want to limit it to those. > Also, Google can donate as much money as they like to Debian. A pure > financial donation does not involve any promotion or endorsement. GSoC, > in contrast, promotes Google to all participants, and endorses the use > of their platforms openly, on top of the whitewashing marketing act the > whole thing is. This is not true: monetary or swag donations to DebConf promote the donor to all participants. This doesn't seem much different from GSoC. Debian also gets non-monetary donations from various Big Tech companies, including: - cloud computes resources (requires using a specific cloud provider), - CDN traffic (requires using a specific CDN), - hardware for buildds by CPU manufacturers (which obviously have specific interests), - other hardware such as GPUs by their respective vendors (limited to people wanting to improve hardware support for said vendor) Some service that Debian operates would not be possible to provide without these resources. As far as I understand this is the case for services such as deb.debian.org or CI runners for salsa.debian.org. I'm not sure the companies would donate the equal amount if Debian required monetary donations. (For example I wouldn't be surprised if there are tax/bookkeeping advantages for the non-monetary donations.) Should Debian still reject such non-monetary donations even though they obviously help Debian? I do not see a reason for this, neither for Google nor other companies. Ansgar
