Hi all, On Thu, Jun 11, 2026 at 12:38:35PM +0200, Mark Wielaard wrote: > Based on last months budget discussions and last years financial > overview the Sourceware Project Leadership Committee wrote up an > ambitious budget and funding proposal for 2026/2027, see below. Lets > discuss if this matches community expectations and what the most > effective way is to drive this fundraising campaign.
For those that couldn't attend here is a summary. It looked liked emails with lots of dollar signs and asking for money go into spam filters, so not everybody had seen the Sourceware PLC financials overview. It is also here now: https://sourceware.org/financials.html The PLC document is based on the financials from 2025/2026 and the looking forward/looking backward discussions last month: https://inbox.sourceware.org/[email protected]/ https://inbox.sourceware.org/[email protected]/ Switching from metal to people is a good funding goal. Especially dodging RAM prices right now :) There were some worries that there aren't enough "tasks" listed for corporations to fund explicitly. But ideally sponsorships are not targetted, they are general funding for the project (to make managing the money better and easier for the project). But if there was specific contract work that would be relevant for companies, we could consider that separately. We currently have items listed per funding "source" and only list the tasks we believe we can do this year. But it would be good to list all the work we want to get done (over multiple years). We do list more under https://sourceware.org/sourceware-security-vision.html#plans Modernizing account processes, Release upload process improvements, Hardware keys, Security audit. It might be useful to just list them all. Question about spelling out the financial assumptions. For those forgejo additions we assume $60/hour (total budget for a week work), for upgrade/migration/automation tickets, we assume $80/hour (total budget 3 to 6 days of work), for the junior sysadmin (at the end) we assume $40/hour (total budget for 2.5 days for 6 to 12 months). Many of the SFC contractors are around $40/hour, we have to do special approvals if it's over $100/hour. People in north america/australia are often about $75/hour. It is normal for people to charge much lower rates for nonprofits. We might want to consider corporate sponsorship "levels". the Reproducible Builds team (who is another SFC project) uses that. https://reproducible-builds.org/donate/#benefits-of-sponsorship https://reproducible-builds.org/who/sponsors/ Then a corporation would fund for a specific "level" and not for a specific task/contract. In general people seem to agree you have to start somewhere and the current estimates are OK, but on the low end. We can be even more ambitious, ask for more than what we currently believe we can spend in a year and see if some individuals, corporatations or grant maker surprises us. We currently have a healthy reserve. We could operate for one or two years without any additional income. And for our minimal baseline we just depend on individual sponsors and some corporate in-kind (hosting) support. What is next? - Create a new sponsors page that lists incentives, levels and "bonus" targets. - Link it all together with the financials and donate pages. - Find Sourceware Ambassadors to drive the fundraising campaign.
