That sounds good, recommend that you paste it into a Google Doc and allow people to edit or make suggestions (you'll need to adjust the sharing settings)
On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 1:11 PM, Dan Roberts <ademan...@gmail.com> wrote: > I offered on IRC to write a preliminary donation request message to base > our solicitations on. I've revised it twice as of last night, and I think > after one more revision this evening and I'll open it up to everyone else > for comment (~10PM PST). I'm not particularly happy with it at the moment, > but actually it may generate more interest if everyone hates it ;-). From > there we can revise it and begin adapting the message to different donors > (I believe potential donors deserve a personal request, the purpose of my > draft is only to get the ball rolling and serve as a starting point) > > This is not meant as a replacement for exploring indiegogo/kickstarter > though. Something like that would still be good, it just strikes me as a > mid-term project, not a short term effort to get back on track. > > Cheers, > Dan > On Nov 16, 2015 10:54 AM, "xor" <x...@freenetproject.org> wrote: > >> On Monday, November 16, 2015 10:52:16 AM Ian Clarke wrote: >> > I am pretty convinced that it would be a bad idea to allow Xor to >> continue >> > working if the project doesn't have sufficient funds. >> > >> > Aside from any potential legal problems, imagine what our pitch to >> donors >> > becomes at that point - "Hey, donate money so that we can pay off our >> > debts". Not exactly a compelling pitch :/ >> > >> > And meanwhile Xor is potentially getting himself into a difficult >> financial >> > situation. >> >> Argh, I had just messaged you that I'd like to postpone the final >> discussion >> of my offer "continue working with payment delayed as interest-free debt" >> until Thursday :| >> I need to figure out some real life stuff related to that. >> >> But well, my offer still is available though. >> Freenet is more important to me than some temporary financial hassle. >> >> Thursday will just make me figure out how bad a "no" to my offer would be >> for >> me, which is why I'd prefer to not hear the decision until then. >> >> But, as said elsewhere, even if my offer is not accepted, I will: >> 1) *not* seek a different job for now (= a year at least probably) and >> use my >> free time to resolve the major real life house cleanup/selling for my mom. >> 2) stay available to resume my job once we have funding - my mom for sure >> would accept me to reduce my efforts for her at any time. >> 3) voluntarily continue replying on IRC / the mailing lists. >> 4) voluntarily at least provide very basic maintenance for Web of Trust / >> Freetalk to prevent user frustration. So please keep bug reports directed >> at >> me :) >> >> Nevertheless, please do notice that I cannot "officially" provide >> volunteering >> anymore due to my life situation. I am only offering this to keep the >> project >> alive by dealing with urgent stuff. >> There is years work of worth at my mom's to be done, and if I do invest my >> spare motivation for volunteering, it should be for her first (yes, she'll >> pay me food, but that's about it :). So please just keep on mind that it >> would >> be a benefit if I could return to paid work ASAP, as earning money is >> something I could justify to have a similarly significant priority. >> I'll try to do my part in ensuring resuming of my job by helping at the >> fundraising efforts. >> >> > If we want >> > Xor to keep working, we need a strategy for raising more money. I think >> > this strategy will need to be to achieve specific goals that we lay out. >> >> I'd say we already have a strategy: >> >> 0a) Finish the fundraising bar on the website. Done already by the >> volunteers! >> Thanks again. >> >> 0b) Maybe deploy the next Freenet release so my work of the past 6 months >> is >> available to the users actually. Would be polite to provide the result of >> the >> previous money to the users before asking for more money. The code is >> finished >> from my side, it is just waiting for a fred release to be bundled with. >> Steve >> needs to decide whether this can happen soon, or will take too long. If it >> takes to long, we can ignore this step. >> >> 1) Put a news article on website titled "We've run out of money". Notice: >> I >> suggested the prerequisite of first writing a huge list of news sites to >> submit it to. We need to do this *first* before putting the article up >> because: "News" contains "new". If it takes us too long to submit the >> article, >> it will be old, and thus news sites will ignore it. So we need to figure >> out >> who to send it to first. >> >> 2) Submit the article to many news sites. >> >> 3) Ask those entities directly for funds: >> https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Fundraising >> >> I will try to help with all of the above, if not do them myself. But to be >> honest I would be happy if I don't have to do it alone: I'm still a >> programmer, not a marketing guy, so my social skills are limited. >> Also, there are potentially thousands of entities who could be interested >> in >> funding us, thanks to the NSA scandal. Probably too much work for one >> person >> to talk to them all. >> >> > Perhaps we could explore a KickStarter - but that would only work if it >> is >> > to achieve something big and externally very visible (such as rebuilding >> > FProxy using a modern JavaScript framework like Bootstrap/React and >> > modernizing the installers). >> >> I'm fine with KickStarter, and fine with it's requirement of setting >> specific >> goals. >> Albeit I would do KickStarter as a last resort: The requirement of >> specific >> goals is too much of a burden if volunteers are also involved. We don't >> know >> whether suddenly a volunteer appears and provides a whole new bunch of >> code. >> That code then might lack very small changes to be ready for deployment, >> so it >> might be good if I did the changes so we could get the code out. But that >> would violate the KickStarter promise of me only working on the specific >> KickStarter goals. >> Also, it is very difficult to judge complexity of software development, >> i.e. >> whether something will take 6 months or 2 years. I don't know whether >> KickStarter requires us to specify a date of delivery though. >> >> So KickStarter is OK, but as a last resort. >> However, I think the specific goals you suggested are problematic: >> >> > modernizing the installers >> >> As far as I know, they have been rewritten from scratch just recently, or >> do >> work fine: >> - The Windows installer was ported from AHK to InnoSetup. >> - The Mac installer has been rewritten by mrsteveman1 and will be deployed >> soon. >> - The Java installer, which basically is the fallback for all other >> platforms, >> seems to work. >> >> >> But the goal I'm more opposed to is this: >> >> > rebuilding FProxy using a modern JavaScript framework like >> Bootstrap/React >> >> What you suggest here would be a complete 180° turn of our previous >> strategy, >> and leave all the work towards it in a half-finished state. >> >> To understand that, let's consider the previous-to-previous strategy: >> Toad had spend years, if not a decade, upon shoveling fred code from one >> side >> to the other, i.e. upon improving the core network daemon. He for sure >> improved the network a lot: Fred is faster, more reliable, and probably >> more >> secure. >> Still, this did yield zero new major user visible features. >> By default, we still shipped no working search, no forums, no social >> network, >> no mail, no filesharing. >> Yet, implementations of forums, social networks, mail, etc. all existed >> already: >> https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Projects >> They were just too unpolished / slow to be deployed yet. >> >> So it was decided that it would be a good idea to finally give those >> features >> to the users after they had been rusting for years. >> Freenet is pretty boring anyway if it is only static HTML sites. Forums >> etc. >> are alive, and thus much more interesting. >> Thus, the previous strategy, which I said your suggestion is breaking >> with, >> was decided: >> I was assigned being the "client application maintainer" to get the apps >> out. >> Now both fortunately and unfortunately, all those apps share a single >> problem: >> Due to our anonymous nature, they need spam filtering to prevent denial of >> service - because content publishers are anonymous, censors cannot just >> kill >> them to stop them from publishing content, so they are more likely to use >> spam >> as DoS to shut people up. >> So while it is good that we have a central spam filter library (the "Web >> of >> Trust" plugin aka WoT) and thus only need to write the code once, this >> also >> meant that it's algorithmic problems had to be fixed before we could >> deploy >> *any* other apps: If WoT is dead-slow, then the apps which use it also >> will be >> dead-slow. >> >> So I have been working on fixing WoT for the past two years or so, and it >> is a >> lot closer to being ready for installing it by default. >> But it is not perfectly finished. >> So we still have no forums, social networks, mail, filesharing. >> >> And if we now do a KickStarter with the goal of "rebuilding >> FProxy using a modern JavaScript framework like Bootstrap/React and >> modernizing the installers", that would mean stopping the strategy of >> fixing >> WoT. >> And all the WoT-work of the previous strategy would have been in vain as >> it is >> not completed to the point where we can deploy the actual apps yet. >> So with what you recommended, we probably won't have forums / social >> networking / file sharing for yet another few years; and we would have >> wasted >> years upon something which we didn't complete yet. >> >> Please believe me that I'm not barely trying to make my job look >> significant >> here. >> It really just boils down to that on me: >> We spent half a decade on rewriting stuff, not on new features. We need >> new >> features now. Static HTML freesites are boring, but it's all we ship by >> default. Spending more years on rewriting the static HTML displaying >> framework >> will not improve this at all. >> And we already *HAVE* the new apps people would like to see deployed, we >> just >> need to finish WoT to get them deployable, and then to polish them a bit >> on >> their own. >> >> So anyway: Thanks for your efforts to push us to get things done. >> Let's maybe just avoid specific technical suggestions for a while: >> I feel a certain kind of burnout symptoms from all the flamewars here >> recently, and I would be happy if we could just avoid potential hot hopics >> such as "rewrite X" suggestions :) >> The whole rewriting ideas maybe are ended best with this article: >> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html >> >> Please don't feel like I'm trying to shut you up, I'm rather just looking >> to >> steer the discussion into more productive directions than >> rewrite-discussions. >> >> What would be two productive things to continue this discussion with: >> >> 1) Let's gather a list of news sites which could publish our request for >> funding. >> >> 2) Let's enhance the list of entities to ask for funds: >> https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Fundraising >> >> If you don't have a Wiki account, you can ask me for one by telling me >> your >> desired username; or just mail your suggested Wiki changes to the list. >> I'll >> add them to the Wiki then. >> >> Greetings! >> >> >> -- >> hopstolive (keyword for Ians spam filter) >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Devl mailing list >> Devl@freenetproject.org >> https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl >> > -- Ian Clarke Founder, The Freenet Project Email: i...@freenetproject.org _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl@freenetproject.org https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
