Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
Le mercredi 24 juillet 2013 à 15:11 -0700, Adam Williamson a écrit : On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 16:50 +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 04:40 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: The entire budget is not public so you won't get a definitive answer for a large portion of the budget. Why is it not public any reason why we the community cannot know how much we cost? I don't think there's any particular reason, but one thing is that it's not particularly obvious even within Red Hat: there isn't a single nice clear Fedora Budget, money gets spent on Fedora out of all sorts of other budgets. It may well be the case that *Red Hat* does not know precisely how much money Red Hat spends on Fedora. :) Working in IT @Red Hat, I concur, and I am pretty sure that no one has all the information to make that estimation. Network, hosting and storage are all under different budgets for different team, and all aggregated ( cause the DC where RH host Fedora server is not dedicated to Fedora, far from it ), and everybody has better things to do that splitting usage by project, and querying the right folks to get the number to start with. RH is not yet a bureaucratic behemoth where everything is precisely counted. However, a rough estimate would be easy to get, just ask for the number of servers, and multiply that by a estimated cost based on industry average. -- Michael Scherer -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/26/2013 01:07 PM, Michael Scherer wrote: Working in IT @Red Hat, I concur, and I am pretty sure that no one has all the information to make that estimation. Network, hosting and storage are all under different budgets for different team, and all aggregated ( cause the DC where RH host Fedora server is not dedicated to Fedora, far from it ), and everybody has better things to do that splitting usage by project, Not following what you mean by project. On one hand you have Red Hat the company and on the other you have Fedora the project which means two entirely separated infrastructures. yeah sure these two might be communicating heavily between themselves unless ofcourse you want to risk issues from either the company or the project being able to directly affect each other when someone screws up or something fails or something needs to be updated in either the company or the project and that's just bad administrator practices. JBG -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
Le vendredi 26 juillet 2013 à 13:32 +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson a écrit : On 07/26/2013 01:07 PM, Michael Scherer wrote: Working in IT @Red Hat, I concur, and I am pretty sure that no one has all the information to make that estimation. Network, hosting and storage are all under different budgets for different team, and all aggregated ( cause the DC where RH host Fedora server is not dedicated to Fedora, far from it ), and everybody has better things to do that splitting usage by project, Not following what you mean by project. Fedora is a project, but so does gluster, ovirt, jboss, etc. Some of them are not hosted at all by RH, or hosted externally with RH people that serve as sysadmin, either officially, fully or not fully. And some are in the same DC than Fedora. I can hardly give more details, since that's handled by a totally different departement than mine, and each community still have lots of freedom on what to choose, but for example, jboss.org, who is hosting lots of RH-sponsored project, is hosted in Phoenix, as a quick mtr show. And each project has lots of freedom, the requirement of Fedora team are not the same as jboss ( ie, Fedora would never accept jira as a bug tracker ). So by project, i mean upstream project where RH sponsored the infrastructure, fully or not fully, with hardware or not and with people or not. On one hand you have Red Hat the company and on the other you have Fedora the project which means two entirely separated infrastructures. yeah sure these two might be communicating heavily between themselves unless ofcourse you want to risk issues from either the company or the project being able to directly affect each other when someone screws up or something fails or something needs to be updated in either the company or the project and that's just bad administrator practices. They are separated on a network level (different vlans, maybe different switchs/rack, depending on the space constraint) and on organisational level but likely not in different rooms and for sure not in different datacenters for efficiency reasons ( ie, handling less datacenters is more efficient than having to deal with 5 or 6 of them ). That's the main reason to have the sponsored servers in the same place for different projects, with RH taking care of paying the local IT person when there is a problem. Please also note there is lots of servers used by Fedora that are located where no one from RH has physical access, as seen on the list of DC used by Fedora infra : https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Architecture Having served as a sysadmin for a distribution project in the past, you always see a tension between the need to have a process to grant access based on merit, technical knowledge and trust, and the harsh reality of having to pay to get to the DC when it is not located where your contributors live ( in our case, every jump to the DC costed ~ 400€ and 1 or 2 days of vacations days, due to DC being far away and opened only during weeks ). -- Michael Scherer -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 01:32:22PM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: Fedora the project which means two entirely separated infrastructures. yeah sure these two might be communicating heavily between themselves unless ofcourse you want to risk issues from either the company or the project being able to directly affect each other when someone screws up or something fails or something needs to be updated in either the company or the project and that's just bad administrator practices. You're talking about not sharing a network. The other person was discussing the money side of things. -- Regards, Olav -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
Am 26.07.2013 15:32, schrieb Jóhann B. Guðmundsson: On 07/26/2013 01:07 PM, Michael Scherer wrote: Working in IT @Red Hat, I concur, and I am pretty sure that no one has all the information to make that estimation. Network, hosting and storage are all under different budgets for different team, and all aggregated ( cause the DC where RH host Fedora server is not dedicated to Fedora, far from it ), and everybody has better things to do that splitting usage by project Not following what you mean by project split how many ressources (in hardware as well manpower) of whatever server / service / infrastructure are used for RHEL5, RHEL6, Fedora, internal Project A or Internal project B and calculate the seperated costs from the total summary why? * because people have better to do * because split synergies thid way would lead to endless discussions today you spent more time for optimize something for Project A and tomorrow fpr Porject B - and now you can start a endless flamewar if you want which positive side-effect caused by one project was bigger or simply stop such discussions and do the work with at less bureaucracy as possible signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/25/2013 12:11 AM, Adam Williamson wrote: On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 16:50 +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 04:40 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: The entire budget is not public so you won't get a definitive answer for a large portion of the budget. Why is it not public any reason why we the community cannot know how much we cost? I don't think there's any particular reason, but one thing is that it's not particularly obvious even within Red Hat: there isn't a single nice clear Fedora Budget, money gets spent on Fedora out of all sorts of other budgets. It may well be the case that *Red Hat* does not know precisely how much money Red Hat spends on Fedora. :) I contribute regularly to opensource projects (monetarily) with no issue. While I take JBG's anti-RH implications with a grain of salt, he has highlighted a lacking there. It *should* be easier to contribute, although I cannot see this happening if Fedora is a legal entity resides state-side. To clarify, I think RH is an awesome sponsor, and the resources they provide do separate us from other distros, and for that I am grateful, BUT there needs to be another way to contribute -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Brendan Jones brendan.jones...@gmail.com wrote: On 07/25/2013 12:11 AM, Adam Williamson wrote: On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 16:50 +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 04:40 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: The entire budget is not public so you won't get a definitive answer for a large portion of the budget. Why is it not public any reason why we the community cannot know how much we cost? I don't think there's any particular reason, but one thing is that it's not particularly obvious even within Red Hat: there isn't a single nice clear Fedora Budget, money gets spent on Fedora out of all sorts of other budgets. It may well be the case that *Red Hat* does not know precisely how much money Red Hat spends on Fedora. :) I contribute regularly to opensource projects (monetarily) with no issue. While I take JBG's anti-RH implications with a grain of salt, he has highlighted a lacking there. It *should* be easier to contribute, although I cannot see this happening if Fedora is a legal entity resides state-side. To clarify, I think RH is an awesome sponsor, and the resources they provide do separate us from other distros, and for that I am grateful, BUT there needs to be another way to contribute Well there are ways ... you can contribute code its not money but it helps. If you really want to spend money and for some legal reason it cannot be done easily you can do it indirectly by purchasing RH's products / services. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 7:04 AM, drago01 drag...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Brendan Jones brendan.jones...@gmail.com wrote: On 07/25/2013 12:11 AM, Adam Williamson wrote: On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 16:50 +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 04:40 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: The entire budget is not public so you won't get a definitive answer for a large portion of the budget. Why is it not public any reason why we the community cannot know how much we cost? I don't think there's any particular reason, but one thing is that it's not particularly obvious even within Red Hat: there isn't a single nice clear Fedora Budget, money gets spent on Fedora out of all sorts of other budgets. It may well be the case that *Red Hat* does not know precisely how much money Red Hat spends on Fedora. :) I contribute regularly to opensource projects (monetarily) with no issue. While I take JBG's anti-RH implications with a grain of salt, he has highlighted a lacking there. It *should* be easier to contribute, although I cannot see this happening if Fedora is a legal entity resides state-side. To clarify, I think RH is an awesome sponsor, and the resources they provide do separate us from other distros, and for that I am grateful, BUT there needs to be another way to contribute Well there are ways ... you can contribute code its not money but it helps. If you really want to spend money and for some legal reason it cannot be done easily you can do it indirectly by purchasing RH's products / services. Also anyone can purchase things for Fedora directly. So if anyone would like to pay for 500 t-shirts we'd be most grateful. This tends to be a little awkward to execute in the real world though since paying bills directly for another party is messier than just giving the other party the money to pay the bills with themselves. John -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Thu, 2013-07-25 at 10:07 +0200, Brendan Jones wrote: On 07/25/2013 12:11 AM, Adam Williamson wrote: On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 16:50 +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 04:40 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: The entire budget is not public so you won't get a definitive answer for a large portion of the budget. Why is it not public any reason why we the community cannot know how much we cost? I don't think there's any particular reason, but one thing is that it's not particularly obvious even within Red Hat: there isn't a single nice clear Fedora Budget, money gets spent on Fedora out of all sorts of other budgets. It may well be the case that *Red Hat* does not know precisely how much money Red Hat spends on Fedora. :) I contribute regularly to opensource projects (monetarily) with no issue. While I take JBG's anti-RH implications with a grain of salt, he has highlighted a lacking there. It *should* be easier to contribute, although I cannot see this happening if Fedora is a legal entity resides state-side. To clarify, I think RH is an awesome sponsor, and the resources they provide do separate us from other distros, and for that I am grateful, BUT there needs to be another way to contribute I think practically speaking the best way to achieve this would be to establish some legal entity entirely separate from Red Hat and the 'Fedora project' - which as noted upthread, technically, has no independent legal existence - to pay people to do whatever it is you want them to do on Fedora. I mean, just set up a non-profit called Coders' Collective, or something, let people donate to that, and have it be an organization whose paid employees do work on Fedora. IANAL and I am not acquainted with all the legal issues here, but from what I've heard, that sounds like the simplest way to go. All the complicated issues I've heard about are related to the question of having a legal entity _which would in some way 'be' or at least have power over the Fedora project_ - it's all about Fedora's trademarks, copyrights etc. AFAIK there aren't any issues with setting up an organization which is explicitly not that, but which just gives people who do work on Fedora some money. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 24/07/13 11:50, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: Thought's comment flames? To me, crowd sourcing seems to work because it's about some exciting new technology that people have to have and it's the only way to have it. There's a buzz, an excitement that needs to light up twitter in order to get enough people clicking through that some will put their money on the line. If it's not exciting new buzz technology then I'm not sure we would get the click through rates to make it successful/worthwhile (although I don't know what figure would make it worthwhile). In which case, it's really just a donate link and (speaking from experience) I don't think that they work very well. Canonical started putting a donation advert before you download Ubuntu on their site, it would be interesting to see whether that worked or not (as horrible as it might be). -c -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 03:50 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: Earlier this evening I was asked how I expected Fedora to function in any way similarly to how it does now without the backing of one or more organizations like Red Hat. I gave the quick answer through donations since I was not in mood to give the detailed answers ( and taint that thread even further ) however I'm about do it here to certain extent since the questioner probably did not expect me to have actually given this any thought which I actually have although I have not chiselled it into stone, making it the concrete proposal the community demands since it's just a small fraction of a larger idea or rather vision I have but I have decide it be the correct time to share that part of that vision of mine with the rest of the community to gather feedback. Under the current model I thought it is not possible to make monetary donations to Fedora (I remember Jared Smith saying something about this at a linuxconf.au a while back) Hardware, physical items, consumable media etc is OK though. Something to do with US taxes, correct me if I'm wrong. Brendan -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 07:33 AM, Brendan Jones wrote: On 07/24/2013 03:50 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: Earlier this evening I was asked how I expected Fedora to function in any way similarly to how it does now without the backing of one or more organizations like Red Hat. I gave the quick answer through donations since I was not in mood to give the detailed answers ( and taint that thread even further ) however I'm about do it here to certain extent since the questioner probably did not expect me to have actually given this any thought which I actually have although I have not chiselled it into stone, making it the concrete proposal the community demands since it's just a small fraction of a larger idea or rather vision I have but I have decide it be the correct time to share that part of that vision of mine with the rest of the community to gather feedback. Under the current model I thought it is not possible to make monetary donations to Fedora (I remember Jared Smith saying something about this at a linuxconf.au a while back) Hardware, physical items, consumable media etc is OK though. Something to do with US taxes, correct me if I'm wrong. Looks like we need to get the Fedora name out of the states JBG -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 07:33 AM, Brendan Jones wrote: On 07/24/2013 03:50 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: Earlier this evening I was asked how I expected Fedora to function in any way similarly to how it does now without the backing of one or more organizations like Red Hat. I gave the quick answer through donations since I was not in mood to give the detailed answers ( and taint that thread even further ) however I'm about do it here to certain extent since the questioner probably did not expect me to have actually given this any thought which I actually have although I have not chiselled it into stone, making it the concrete proposal the community demands since it's just a small fraction of a True gifts are largely unregulated and untaxed. larger idea or rather vision I have but I have decide it be the correct time to share that part of that vision of mine with the rest of the community to gather feedback. Under the current model I thought it is not possible to make monetary donations to Fedora (I remember Jared Smith saying something about this at a linuxconf.au a while back) Hardware, physical items, consumable media etc is OK though. Something to do with US taxes, correct me if I'm wrong. I dont think gift economy will work for us either because anything you give to the project can be seen as being given with the anticipation of return or obligations under us laws. Anyone from the legal needs to answer the question what the options are regarding the Fedora trademark and donations ( can it /needs it to be change from trademark to something else ) and what Red Hat can and cannot do ( even if it's not willing to do that ) so we can as a community focus on the options available to us. The other alternative is to simply reallocate the entire community and infrastructure outside US under a new name ( if so where? ) which begs the question if Red Hat can and will continue to support us if we do. JBG Gifts are not given with an anticipation of return: - See more at: http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-to-legally-open-a-gift-economy#sthash.xafaMsTT.dpu “The soup has been so helpful to me over the years, but I’ve never been able to return the favor. I feel I should compensate you somehow!” - See more at: http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-to-legally-open-a-gift-economy#sthash.xafaMsTT.dpuf For years, I make soup for my elderly neighbor, simply as a kind gesture. Then, I go through a rough financial time after setting my kitchen on fire. My neighbor, who just received a large inheritance, gives me $2000 to help out. These gestures do seem to arise from pure generosity and charity, so hopefully I wouldn’t have to include the $2000 in my income. - See more at: http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-to-legally-open-a-gift-economy#sthash.xafaMsTT.dpuf True gifts are largely unregulated and untaxed. True gifts are largely unregulated and untaxed. True gifts are largely unregulated and untaxed. True gifts are largely unregulated and untaxed. True gifts are largely unregulated and untaxed -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 07/23/2013 09:50 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: Earlier this evening I was asked how I expected Fedora to function in any way similarly to how it does now without the backing of one or more organizations like Red Hat. I gave the quick answer through donations since I was not in mood to give the detailed answers ( and taint that thread even further ) however I'm about do it here to certain extent since the questioner probably did not expect me to have actually given this any thought which I actually have although I have not chiselled it into stone, making it the concrete proposal the community demands since it's just a small fraction of a larger idea or rather vision I have but I have decide it be the correct time to share that part of that vision of mine with the rest of the community to gather feedback. While I *am* pleased that you've given some real thought to this, I think you may have missed the real point I was trying to make there, which also ties back to the original purpose of that thread. Fedora is hemorrhaging users to other distributions (and to closed-source platforms). I tried to note that the people maintaining the vast majority of the pieces that correspond to an operating system in Fedora (loosely the Ring 0-2 pieces in that design) are almost entirely Red Hatters. This information is based on admittedly imperfect metrics (mostly dist-git commits), but even if it's off by a 15% margin of error, the contributions still have Red Hat in the vast majority. The problem with crowdsourcing is that you have to have someone who wants your product enough to pay money to see it happen. There are definitely some pieces of your proposal that could be implemented (I've been arguing for Bug/RFE bounties for the last five years, both with Red Hat funding and later with crowdfunding). I'd really like to see FESCo have the ability to set such bounties as a way to actually influence direction in the project. So on this I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, the current Fedora user ecosystem *really* doesn't lend itself to crowdfunding because the only significant community of non-Red Hat contributors are those operating on the upper levels of the stack (the application developers and the alternative desktop developers, primarily). This tends to be a set of contributors that are fickle in the platform they work on (especially since in many cases, they are supporting multiple distributions already). In other words, if we switched to a crowdfunded model, the primary contributions would *still* be coming directly or indirectly from Red Hat. The only difference here is that now it would look like Red Hat was taking a stealth role in Fedora's governance instead of standing tall as its primary benefactor (and beneficiary). Also, you mention later in the thread about moving Fedora's name out of the USA. Given the current US climate around outsourcing, this could be a significant legal hurdle and is probably not a fight worth having right at this moment. tl;dr version: If we switched to a crowdfunding model, Red Hat would still be the primary contributor and little would change. I strongly support opening up a donation program to support bug/rfe/design bounties. I'd like to see that pool of money managed by FESCo. If people want to donate to bounties for individual upstream projects, it's probably better for them to do that directly. That would probably be a better experience on both sides (and lends itself to forging a closer relationship between the two projects). -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.13 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlHvvA4ACgkQeiVVYja6o6Oh2gCdFwg297BRIGEbDBQ14h3ul1m6 9OQAoIk0lNDlknxdXTLWTazDqdoujsKQ =Deka -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 01:50:11AM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: snip Obvious we cannot have crowd funding for every moving part in Fedora that would just be ludicrous so we need to apply that concept upon the entire project, as in Fedora would be just a one crowd founded project. snip The first issue that comes to mind (for me) is who cuts the checks? IOW, who is going to be the person responsible for the money itself, and who has oversight to ensure money's being properly managed and not siphoned off? Who decides how much gets paid for a bug bounty? What do we do if we have no funds? Do we want bug fixes to become a paid thing, and wouldn't that be a disinsentive if we were to have no money? What if upstream introduces bugs so they can then get paid to fix them? -- Darryl L. Pierce mcpie...@gmail.com http://mcpierce.multiply.com/ What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman? pgpI9xUpbWeAq.pgp Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 11:35 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote: While I*am* pleased that you've given some real thought to this, I think you may have missed the real point I was trying to make there, which also ties back to the original purpose of that thread. Fedora is hemorrhaging users to other distributions (and to closed-source platforms). I tried to note that the people maintaining the vast majority of the pieces that correspond to an operating system in Fedora (loosely the Ring 0-2 pieces in that design) are almost entirely Red Hatters. This information is based on admittedly imperfect metrics (mostly dist-git commits), but even if it's off by a 15% margin of error, the contributions still have Red Hat in the vast majority. Hmm not following On numerous occasion it has been stated that Red Hat employees are just like any other member of the Fedora community and should be treated as such with the only difference being that on their paycheck says Red Hat instead of insert some other company ( so are you saying that is not the case? And as such their in the case of the bounty donations would just be bonus to the existing salary as it might be for anyone else if that's what you are wondering. The problem with crowdsourcing is that you have to have someone who wants your product enough to pay money to see it happen. That would be ourselves and user base as in our community and it's users but for something like this to work we cannot just copy/paste the concept as is and blindly apply to the project we need to adapt and adjust it to us. There are definitely some pieces of your proposal that could be implemented (I've been arguing for Bug/RFE bounties for the last five years, both with Red Hat funding and later with crowdfunding). I'd really like to see FESCo have the ability to set such bounties as a way to actually influence direction in the project. So on this I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, the current Fedora user ecosystem*really* doesn't lend itself to crowdfunding because the only significant community of non-Red Hat contributors are those operating on the upper levels of the stack (the application developers and the alternative desktop developers, primarily). This tends to be a set of contributors that are fickle in the platform they work on (especially since in many cases, they are supporting multiple distributions already). Here to me it's seems again that you implies that Red Hatters are different from other community members so it would be good if we can establish if that is the case or not. In other words, if we switched to a crowdfunded model, the primary contributions would*still* be coming directly or indirectly from Red Hat. The only difference here is that now it would look like Red Hat was taking a stealth role in Fedora's governance instead of standing tall as its primary benefactor (and beneficiary). I dont see how or why that has to be the case. Are you implying in a such model we should keep our sponsor hidden instead of having something like a page with Platinum, Gold,Silver,Bronze for companies as is being done on flock and something similar as is being done on lwn as in *✭ supporter ✭ *displayed next to our community members name everywhere where it's displayed in our infrastructure/web? Also, you mention later in the thread about moving Fedora's name out of the USA. Given the current US climate around outsourcing, this could be a significant legal hurdle and is probably not a fight worth having right at this moment. It has been mentioned to me privately in a mail and a on this thread that the us legal and tax system would be a stopper at least while Fedora was under the trademark. tl;dr version: If we switched to a crowdfunding model, Red Hat would still be the primary contributor and little would change. Other for the fact that this would allow everyone to contribute to the project not just Red Hat which in turn would make us less depended on it ( or they spending money on us from their point of view ). I strongly support opening up a donation program to support bug/rfe/design bounties. I'd like to see that pool of money managed by FESCo. Agreed although I'm unsure if FESCO should handle that process beside the obvious points of there might be conflicts of interest, they have enough on their plate as it seems so a special Financial SIG with representative from each sub-community ( with perhaps the exception of the service sub-communities which would just fall under whomever is in charge of the finance for the project ) might better fit. If people want to donate to bounties for individual upstream projects, it's probably better for them to do that directly. I disagree we need to increase the number of contributors here within the project and sorry to say that but we cant do that if we forward everybody upstream ( which is one of the reason I have been so reluctant forward our QA community members
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 12:15 PM, Darryl L. Pierce wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 01:50:11AM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: snip Obvious we cannot have crowd funding for every moving part in Fedora that would just be ludicrous so we need to apply that concept upon the entire project, as in Fedora would be just a one crowd founded project. snip The first issue that comes to mind (for me) is who cuts the checks? IOW, who is going to be the person responsible for the money itself, and who has oversight to ensure money's being properly managed and not siphoned off? We would need to form a financial sig that handles that. Who decides how much gets paid for a bug bounty? Well no one these again are donations What do we do if we have no funds? Do we want bug fixes to become a paid thing, and wouldn't that be a disinsentive if we were to have no money? These are donation not fixed incomes per bug fix so things would remain as they already are. What if upstream introduces bugs so they can then get paid to fix them? You wont be paid to fix each bug however donation could be made to set bounty on bugs/rfe/designs as in I as a donator want or need #123456 to be fixed and I donation $1000 to make that happen other could pile on to that amount until the bug eventually gets fix then the person or the team that does so collects that bounty. JBG -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 12:37:09PM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 12:15 PM, Darryl L. Pierce wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 01:50:11AM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: snip Obvious we cannot have crowd funding for every moving part in Fedora that would just be ludicrous so we need to apply that concept upon the entire project, as in Fedora would be just a one crowd founded project. snip The first issue that comes to mind (for me) is who cuts the checks? IOW, who is going to be the person responsible for the money itself, and who has oversight to ensure money's being properly managed and not siphoned off? We would need to form a financial sig that handles that. Are these people going to be paid for their efforts, since it's completely non-technical? I'm a board member for my kids' summer swim league. And our treasurer has to deal with writing checks for things like buying bulk swim caps, tshirts, meet supplies, reimbursing people for purchases made for the team, etc. And for 8 weeks of her life that's a lot to do. To then ask someone to do the same all year round as a volunteer for a _much_ larger group is probably not going to happen. Who decides how much gets paid for a bug bounty? Well no one these again are donations So the person donating is going to pay it directly to the person who fixed the bug? What do we do if we have no funds? Do we want bug fixes to become a paid thing, and wouldn't that be a disinsentive if we were to have no money? These are donation not fixed incomes per bug fix so things would remain as they already are. Well, not really since we don't have a bug bounty in place now. ;) But if I follow what you're suggesting, then some one or group will make a payment to the person who provides patch(es) to fix a bug? If so, then why involve Fedora at all in the transaction? What if upstream introduces bugs so they can then get paid to fix them? You wont be paid to fix each bug however donation could be made to set bounty on bugs/rfe/designs as in I as a donator want or need #123456 to be fixed and I donation $1000 to make that happen other could pile on to that amount until the bug eventually gets fix then the person or the team that does so collects that bounty. -- Darryl L. Pierce mcpie...@gmail.com http://mcpierce.multiply.com/ What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman? pgpHjNDj8isES.pgp Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 12:49 PM, Darryl L. Pierce wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 12:37:09PM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 12:15 PM, Darryl L. Pierce wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 01:50:11AM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: snip Obvious we cannot have crowd funding for every moving part in Fedora that would just be ludicrous so we need to apply that concept upon the entire project, as in Fedora would be just a one crowd founded project. snip The first issue that comes to mind (for me) is who cuts the checks? IOW, who is going to be the person responsible for the money itself, and who has oversight to ensure money's being properly managed and not siphoned off? We would need to form a financial sig that handles that. Are these people going to be paid for their efforts, since it's completely non-technical? No why should they we already have non technical sub-communities existing in our project like marketing or design I'm a board member for my kids' summer swim league. And our treasurer has to deal with writing checks for things like buying bulk swim caps, tshirts, meet supplies, reimbursing people for purchases made for the team, etc. And for 8 weeks of her life that's a lot to do. To then ask someone to do the same all year round as a volunteer for a _much_ larger group is probably not going to happen. It's already happening. Who decides how much gets paid for a bug bounty? Well no one these again are donations So the person donating is going to pay it directly to the person who fixed the bug? No he would make a donation to the project directly but set a bounty offer to a bug and in turn % if that donation goes to infra for hosting and other cost. What do we do if we have no funds? Do we want bug fixes to become a paid thing, and wouldn't that be a disinsentive if we were to have no money? These are donation not fixed incomes per bug fix so things would remain as they already are. Well, not really since we don't have a bug bounty in place now. ;) But if I follow what you're suggesting, then some one or group will make a payment to the person who provides patch(es) to fix a bug? If so, then why involve Fedora at all in the transaction? For the first donation aren't limited to bug fixing only bounty offers are but to answer your question to make it finance the project, make it attractive to contribut to the project by making it fun doing so and allow people or teams to earn badges like.. *✭ supporter ✭ **✭ Bounty Offerer ✭* *✭ Bounty Hunter ✭* etc.. And to give people to earn a little side $$ with the opportunity to put food on their table ( instead for example spamming the entire world ) or in their recreational activity, education etc while contributing to the overall open source ecosystem when doing so. if you fix that bug or rfe and or work directly with upstream more or less only, or are upstream you could create account and join the Fedoraproject and collect that bounty. JBG -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 07/24/2013 08:31 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 11:35 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote: While I *am* pleased that you've given some real thought to this, I think you may have missed the real point I was trying to make there, which also ties back to the original purpose of that thread. Fedora is hemorrhaging users to other distributions (and to closed-source platforms). I tried to note that the people maintaining the vast majority of the pieces that correspond to an operating system in Fedora (loosely the Ring 0-2 pieces in that design) are almost entirely Red Hatters. This information is based on admittedly imperfect metrics (mostly dist-git commits), but even if it's off by a 15% margin of error, the contributions still have Red Hat in the vast majority. Hmm not following On numerous occasion it has been stated that Red Hat employees are just like any other member of the Fedora community and should be treated as such with the only difference being that on their paycheck says Red Hat instead of insert some other company ( so are you saying that is not the case? Sorry, maybe I was unclear. I meant that if Red Hat pulled out its contributions in favor of croudfunding, you'd lose an enormous amount of the active contributors' time. Working for bug bounties vs. working as a full-time job is a huge difference. The point I was really trying to make here was that if we went full-crowdsourcing, the effect would be basically the same as it is now because Red Hat would remain the primary (likely only) contributor to funding. And as such their in the case of the bounty donations would just be bonus to the existing salary as it might be for anyone else if that's what you are wondering. The problem with crowdsourcing is that you have to have someone who wants your product enough to pay money to see it happen. That would be ourselves and user base as in our community and it's users but for something like this to work we cannot just copy/paste the concept as is and blindly apply to the project we need to adapt and adjust it to us. Right, and what I'm saying is that if you took away Red Hat's contributions, there's absolutely no way that the remaining community could afford to keep the lights on, let alone continue to innovate. There are definitely some pieces of your proposal that could be implemented (I've been arguing for Bug/RFE bounties for the last five years, both with Red Hat funding and later with crowdfunding). I'd really like to see FESCo have the ability to set such bounties as a way to actually influence direction in the project. So on this I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, the current Fedora user ecosystem *really* doesn't lend itself to crowdfunding because the only significant community of non-Red Hat contributors are those operating on the upper levels of the stack (the application developers and the alternative desktop developers, primarily). This tends to be a set of contributors that are fickle in the platform they work on (especially since in many cases, they are supporting multiple distributions already). Here to me it's seems again that you implies that Red Hatters are different from other community members so it would be good if we can establish if that is the case or not. Well, in this instance they are. Red Hatters have a vested interest in doing their work in Fedora. Application developers as a general rule will do their development on whichever distro makes it easiest for them. They tend to be more fickle (and in my view, if they were suddenly asked to pay for the privilege of working on Fedora, they'd jump to Arch or Ubuntu or Debian or $DISTRO). In other words, if we switched to a crowdfunded model, the primary contributions would *still* be coming directly or indirectly from Red Hat. The only difference here is that now it would look like Red Hat was taking a stealth role in Fedora's governance instead of standing tall as its primary benefactor (and beneficiary). I dont see how or why that has to be the case. Are you implying in a such model we should keep our sponsor hidden instead of having something like a page with Platinum, Gold,Silver,Bronze for companies as is being done on flock and something similar as is being done on lwn as in *✭ supporter ✭ *displayed next to our community members name everywhere where it's displayed in our infrastructure/web? Well, right now that's basically what we are doing already. Fedora is an independent entity (on paper) that just happens to have funding provided almost exclusively from a single source. Perhaps I misunderstood how you were planning to display that information based on your earlier comments about Red Hat. It seemed to me that you were looking to reduce Red Hat's visibility in the project. If that was not the case, I apologize. Also, you mention later in the thread
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Stephen Gallagher sgall...@redhat.com wrote: Other for the fact that this would allow everyone to contribute to the project not just Red Hat which in turn would make us less depended on it ( or they spending money on us from their point of view ). My understanding is that Fedora is registered as a non-profit organization in the United States which I believe allows for anyone to It is not. It has been looked at numerous times and is not really feasible. josh -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 7:49 AM, Darryl L. Pierce mcpie...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 12:37:09PM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 12:15 PM, Darryl L. Pierce wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 01:50:11AM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: snip Obvious we cannot have crowd funding for every moving part in Fedora that would just be ludicrous so we need to apply that concept upon the entire project, as in Fedora would be just a one crowd founded project. snip The first issue that comes to mind (for me) is who cuts the checks? IOW, who is going to be the person responsible for the money itself, and who has oversight to ensure money's being properly managed and not siphoned off? We would need to form a financial sig that handles that. Are these people going to be paid for their efforts, since it's completely non-technical? Why is being non-technical related in any way to paying someone to do it? I'm a board member for my kids' summer swim league. And our treasurer has to deal with writing checks for things like buying bulk swim caps, tshirts, meet supplies, reimbursing people for purchases made for the team, etc. And for 8 weeks of her life that's a lot to do. To then ask someone to do the same all year round as a volunteer for a _much_ larger group is probably not going to happen. You just described a small part of what Ambassadors do now with the exception of cutting check. We do have three community members who have been doing that for a long time now as well but the number who are able to help in that way is limited by Red Hat's comfort level in letting the community participate in making direct payments. For the record I am not endorsing the proposed change here but do want to take the opportunity to thank all the Fedora folks who actually have been doing the work described above for their efforts over the years and I hope more people will be aware of those efforts now. John -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
Jóhann B. Guðmundsson píše v St 24. 07. 2013 v 10:01 +: On 07/24/2013 07:33 AM, Brendan Jones wrote: On 07/24/2013 03:50 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: Earlier this evening I was asked how I expected Fedora to function in any way similarly to how it does now without the backing of one or more organizations like Red Hat. I gave the quick answer through donations since I was not in mood to give the detailed answers ( and taint that thread even further ) however I'm about do it here to certain extent since the questioner probably did not expect me to have actually given this any thought which I actually have although I have not chiselled it into stone, making it the concrete proposal the community demands since it's just a small fraction of a True gifts are largely unregulated and untaxed. larger idea or rather vision I have but I have decide it be the correct time to share that part of that vision of mine with the rest of the community to gather feedback. Under the current model I thought it is not possible to make monetary donations to Fedora (I remember Jared Smith saying something about this at a linuxconf.au a while back) Hardware, physical items, consumable media etc is OK though. Something to do with US taxes, correct me if I'm wrong. I dont think gift economy will work for us either because anything you give to the project can be seen as being given with the anticipation of return or obligations under us laws. Anyone from the legal needs to answer the question what the options are regarding the Fedora trademark and donations ( can it /needs it to be change from trademark to something else ) and what Red Hat can and cannot do ( even if it's not willing to do that ) so we can as a community focus on the options available to us. The legal entity of Fedora is currently Red Hat. So the only way to send money to the Project is to send it to Red Hat. That of course doesn't stop you from paying people directly for working on Fedora or covering some costs that are related to Fedora. But let me add a link to this discussion: http://opensource.com/business/13/7/donations-open-source-projects I think I've got some experience with how open source projects work and there is a lot of truth in that article. Jiri -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Stephen Gallagher sgall...@redhat.com wrote: My understanding is that Fedora is registered as a non-profit organization in the United States which I believe allows for anyone to donate to it *today* if they so chose. The fact that the only donations we see are *time* rather than *money* is an interesting fact (and given Red Hat's sponsorship covering most things anyway, I think that's a better expenditure from our community members). Fedora is not any sort of legally recognized entity as far as I know. And the fact that the vast majority of contributions are time rather than money is because in order to contribute money requires one to send a check made out to Red Hat and I don't think Red Hat wants checks sent to them earmarked for Fedora which I'm sure would have interesting legal and accounting complications. This latter point may have changed very recently although I'm not aware of the details of how other organizations are making money contributions to Flock. John -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 01:23 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 07/24/2013 08:31 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 11:35 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote: While I *am* pleased that you've given some real thought to this, I think you may have missed the real point I was trying to make there, which also ties back to the original purpose of that thread. Fedora is hemorrhaging users to other distributions (and to closed-source platforms). I tried to note that the people maintaining the vast majority of the pieces that correspond to an operating system in Fedora (loosely the Ring 0-2 pieces in that design) are almost entirely Red Hatters. This information is based on admittedly imperfect metrics (mostly dist-git commits), but even if it's off by a 15% margin of error, the contributions still have Red Hat in the vast majority. Hmm not following On numerous occasion it has been stated that Red Hat employees are just like any other member of the Fedora community and should be treated as such with the only difference being that on their paycheck says Red Hat instead of insert some other company ( so are you saying that is not the case? Sorry, maybe I was unclear. I meant that if Red Hat pulled out its contributions in favor of croudfunding, you'd lose an enormous amount of the active contributors' time. Working for bug bounties vs. working as a full-time job is a huge difference. The point I was really trying to make here was that if we went full-crowdsourcing, the effect would be basically the same as it is now because Red Hat would remain the primary (likely only) contributor to funding. We already feel in QA when Red Hat re-tracks it's resource from Fedora to focus appending RHEL release. My subject clearly states an additional which is required until we have successfully implemented that model and And as such their in the case of the bounty donations would just be bonus to the existing salary as it might be for anyone else if that's what you are wondering. The problem with crowdsourcing is that you have to have someone who wants your product enough to pay money to see it happen. That would be ourselves and user base as in our community and it's users but for something like this to work we cannot just copy/paste the concept as is and blindly apply to the project we need to adapt and adjust it to us. Right, and what I'm saying is that if you took away Red Hat's contributions, there's absolutely no way that the remaining community could afford to keep the lights on, let alone continue to innovate. Which is what worries me. Here to me it's seems again that you implies that Red Hatters are different from other community members so it would be good if we can establish if that is the case or not. Well, in this instance they are. Red Hatters have a vested interest in doing their work in Fedora. Application developers as a general rule will do their development on whichever distro makes it easiest for them. They tend to be more fickle (and in my view, if they were suddenly asked to pay for the privilege of working on Fedora, they'd jump to Arch or Ubuntu or Debian or $DISTRO). By my experience only on the early stages once they mature ( as a programmers ) they choose the OS that least get's in their way and has the least hazzle to setup their development environment basically what OS get's them quickly to coding In other words, if we switched to a crowdfunded model, the primary contributions would *still* be coming directly or indirectly from Red Hat. The only difference here is that now it would look like Red Hat was taking a stealth role in Fedora's governance instead of standing tall as its primary benefactor (and beneficiary). I dont see how or why that has to be the case. Are you implying in a such model we should keep our sponsor hidden instead of having something like a page with Platinum, Gold,Silver,Bronze for companies as is being done on flock and something similar as is being done on lwn as in *✭ supporter ✭ *displayed next to our community members name everywhere where it's displayed in our infrastructure/web? Well, right now that's basically what we are doing already. Fedora is an independent entity (on paper) that just happens to have funding provided almost exclusively from a single source. Thas because it has consistently been stated in the past that the you cant so can we or cant we? Perhaps I misunderstood how you were planning to display that information based on your earlier comments about Red Hat. It seemed to me that you were looking to reduce Red Hat's visibility in the project. If that was not the case, I apologize. I have no interest in reducing Red Hat visibility in the project nor do I see how or if doing so would be somehow beneficial to the project quite the opposite advertising platinum sponsor everywhere possible, might attract other companies to to become platium sponsors for the
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 09:05:40AM -0500, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 7:49 AM, Darryl L. Pierce mcpie...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 12:37:09PM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: We would need to form a financial sig that handles that. Are these people going to be paid for their efforts, since it's completely non-technical? Why is being non-technical related in any way to paying someone to do it? It's an administrative role. I'd assume that you'd pay somebody who's going to be doing this job. If not, that's fine. That's why I asked if it was going to be paid for, since it's a lot more work than just writing checks.` I'm a board member for my kids' summer swim league. And our treasurer has to deal with writing checks for things like buying bulk swim caps, tshirts, meet supplies, reimbursing people for purchases made for the team, etc. And for 8 weeks of her life that's a lot to do. To then ask someone to do the same all year round as a volunteer for a _much_ larger group is probably not going to happen. You just described a small part of what Ambassadors do now with the exception of cutting check. We do have three community members who have been doing that for a long time now as well but the number who are able to help in that way is limited by Red Hat's comfort level in letting the community participate in making direct payments. Are they paid for their efforts? -- Darryl L. Pierce mcpie...@gmail.com http://mcpierce.fedorapeople.org/ What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman? pgpK8tHHslMay.pgp Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 9:31 AM, Darryl L. Pierce mcpie...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 09:05:40AM -0500, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 7:49 AM, Darryl L. Pierce mcpie...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 12:37:09PM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: We would need to form a financial sig that handles that. Are these people going to be paid for their efforts, since it's completely non-technical? Why is being non-technical related in any way to paying someone to do it? It's an administrative role. I'd assume that you'd pay somebody who's going to be doing this job. If not, that's fine. That's why I asked if it was going to be paid for, since it's a lot more work than just writing checks.` I'm a board member for my kids' summer swim league. And our treasurer has to deal with writing checks for things like buying bulk swim caps, tshirts, meet supplies, reimbursing people for purchases made for the team, etc. And for 8 weeks of her life that's a lot to do. To then ask someone to do the same all year round as a volunteer for a _much_ larger group is probably not going to happen. You just described a small part of what Ambassadors do now with the exception of cutting check. We do have three community members who have been doing that for a long time now as well but the number who are able to help in that way is limited by Red Hat's comfort level in letting the community participate in making direct payments. Are they paid for their efforts? No. John -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 02:08 PM, Jiri Eischmann wrote: But let me add a link to this discussion: http://opensource.com/business/13/7/donations-open-source-projects I think I've got some experience with how open source projects work and there is a lot of truth in that article. From an opensource perspective I would argue that this does not apply in our case since our focus is not upstream but rather community members or otherwise people that have enough time and experience and love a challenge and might be short on cash as well ( individual between jobs, students etc ) so while upstream might not have enought time to fix or implement an RFE or an design others might have that time and that it's those individuals that would go after the bounty. Bounty offerer would get his bug fixed or the RFE,design implemented upstream would get that at zero cost of their time as well as the overall open source ego system and the code writer(s) would earn a few bucks for beer or more. Other donations apply to the project in whole and our sub-community which is necessary to keep it running. JBG -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 02:13 PM, inode0 wrote: Fedora is not any sort of legally recognized entity as far as I know. And the fact that the vast majority of contributions are time rather than money is because in order to contribute money requires one to send a check made out to Red Hat and I don't think Red Hat wants checks sent to them earmarked for Fedora which I'm sure would have interesting legal and accounting complications. This latter point may have changed very recently although I'm not aware of the details of how other organizations are making money contributions to Flock. Cant one not just donate directly to an earmark account via paypal or direct money transfer. Do people still use checks on the 21 century where paper money is slowly becoming obsolete? JBG -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: On 07/24/2013 02:13 PM, inode0 wrote: Fedora is not any sort of legally recognized entity as far as I know. And the fact that the vast majority of contributions are time rather than money is because in order to contribute money requires one to send a check made out to Red Hat and I don't think Red Hat wants checks sent to them earmarked for Fedora which I'm sure would have interesting legal and accounting complications. This latter point may have changed very recently although I'm not aware of the details of how other organizations are making money contributions to Flock. Cant one not just donate directly to an earmark account via paypal or direct money transfer. There is no such receiving account for Fedora. Do people still use checks on the 21 century where paper money is slowly becoming obsolete? You can substitute any sort of funds transfer where I said check above. One can only contribute money to Fedora by sending it in some fashion to Red Hat. Fedora has no way to receive it. John -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: I gave the quick answer through donations Reading through this thread, it seems to me that you are wanting to change something you don't understand. While I am not a RH employee, I have been deeply involved in FOSS, including Debian and Fedora, for many years. The best I can suggest is: build that funding source, and get it to grow to an important size _without_ messing with RH as a sponsor. The cost of running Fedora is likely to be huge. Fundraising is incredibly hard, and generally fails. So I suggest you try fundraising under a name or org of your choosing with like-minded folks. If you succeed you'll be able to fund Fedora development, and it will evolve organically. This is important. Grow it organically, show how it's done, doing it and succeeding. Don't waste everyone's time trying to change how Fedora runs today, because it _works_ and you just cannot tear down something that works every time a random person claims to have a better idea. If the random person has a better idea, better be able to show how it works to gain some standing. I as a donor donating $20 would like those to run to $20? It's going to be a long road! m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: I as a donor donating $20 would like those to run to $20? It's going to be a long road! 25,000 to 50,000 of those could get us started. John -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 03:24 PM, Martin Langhoff wrote: The best I can suggest is: build that funding source, and get it to grow to an important size_without_ messing with RH as a sponsor. The cost of running Fedora is likely to be huge. Fundraising is incredibly hard, and generally fails. None ever suggested messing with out current sponsor even the subject says an additional funding source to our sponsor JBG -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 03:47 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: I as a donor donating $20 would like those to run to $20? It's going to be a long road! 25,000 to 50,000 of those could get us started. Speaking of numbers, where can the community see how much money is being spent on hosting,events etc. from Red Hat? JBG -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 03:55:41PM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 03:47 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: I as a donor donating $20 would like those to run to $20? It's going to be a long road! 25,000 to 50,000 of those could get us started. Speaking of numbers, where can the community see how much money is being spent on hosting,events etc. from Red Hat? Like http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/EMEA/Budget ? -- Tomasz Torcz 72-| 80-| xmpp: zdzich...@chrome.pl 72-| 80-| -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 04:01 PM, Tomasz Torcz wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 03:55:41PM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 03:47 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: I as a donor donating $20 would like those to run to $20? It's going to be a long road! 25,000 to 50,000 of those could get us started. Speaking of numbers, where can the community see how much money is being spent on hosting,events etc. from Red Hat? Like http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/EMEA/Budget ? That just covers Ambassador as in one sub-community The entire Infrastructure cost for the project number of servers, storage, powerbill etc ) is where the baseline lies. JBG -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: On 07/24/2013 04:01 PM, Tomasz Torcz wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 03:55:41PM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 03:47 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: I as a donor donating $20 would like those to run to $20? It's going to be a long road! 25,000 to 50,000 of those could get us started. Speaking of numbers, where can the community see how much money is being spent on hosting,events etc. from Red Hat? Like http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/EMEA/Budget ? That just covers Ambassador as in one sub-community The entire Infrastructure cost for the project number of servers, storage, powerbill etc ) is where the baseline lies. The entire budget is not public so you won't get a definitive answer for a large portion of the budget. The only part that really is public is the regional support part of the budget which can be seen here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FY14_Budget So roughly $90K is allocated to supporting Ambassadors which includes production of media, Fedora branded merchandise, and events where Ambassadors promote Fedora. I think it is fair to assume the number allocated for Flock, remaining FUDCons, other premier events (FADs), and miscellaneous items exceeds the $90K allocated to regional support. Numbers for infrastructure costs, engineering costs (including support for Red Hat folks who work on Fedora to attend Fedora events), and other groups inside Red Hat who help cover Fedora related costs from their budgets have never been public so you will have to guess at what all that costs but I would expect it is more than the total from above. John -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 04:40 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: The entire budget is not public so you won't get a definitive answer for a large portion of the budget. Why is it not public any reason why we the community cannot know how much we cost? The infrastructure cost ( with the exception of any paid manpower ) is what sets the baseline for host/run and that cost is what would determine the infra/hosting tax % or at least gives a number for a minimum we would need to aim at. The paid manpower will need to be transfered into community currency as in time which means hours which in turns gives us a guestimate on cost of volunteers ( rh paid or otherwise ). JBG -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:50 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: On 07/24/2013 04:40 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: The entire budget is not public so you won't get a definitive answer for a large portion of the budget. Why is it not public any reason why we the community cannot know how much we cost? I don't know, it isn't my choice to make to what extent Red Hat wants to do separate internal accounting for Fedora or to what extent Red Hat might make that information public. The infrastructure cost ( with the exception of any paid manpower ) is what sets the baseline for host/run and that cost is what would determine the infra/hosting tax % or at least gives a number for a minimum we would need to aim at. I suspect you could get an estimate based on needs and the cost of public providers. What actual cost Red Hat incurs piggybacking this onto part of its infrastructure may not be all that enlightening for your purpose. I expect it would cost more for you to do it elsewhere. John -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 8:50 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: The infrastructure cost ( with the exception of any paid manpower ) is what sets the baseline for host/run and that cost is what would determine the infra/hosting tax % or at least gives a number for a minimum we would need to aim at. You could work with the infrastructure team to generate some metrics on the amount of cpu/band/storage we use as part of package build churn, average and peak, during a release cycle... and then turn those non-financial metrics..into a financial goal based on utility price points published by aws or another utility provider. The actual costs being paid by Red Hat to do Fedora specific things are subsidized to an extent by their ongoing RHEL needs as well. Even if you had the actual dollar numbers, you couldn't really use them as a baseline, because anything you create outside of the RH infra to carry some of the Fedora task load will not operate in the discounted fashion. So all you can do is gather the core metrics for utility use... cpu/band/storage... and with those metrics in hand price what it would take to build and run a koji builder in the public cloud as a starting point and plan your initial crowdsourcing campaign around that pricing expectation based on the resource burn metrics we can measure and track. Start there. Figure out how to fund a builder that can handle a share of peak load. -jef -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 07:35:42AM -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote: Fedora is hemorrhaging users to other distributions (and to closed-source platforms). Do we actually know that this is the case? The statistics wiki page does show a drop of total repository connections around Fedora 15 but slowly recovering since then (assuming F18 numbers are WIP). Doesn't seem *that* bad overall. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On 07/24/2013 05:02 PM, Jef Spaleta wrote: So all you can do is gather the core metrics for utility use... cpu/band/storage... and with those metrics in hand price what it would take to build and run a koji builder in the public cloud as a starting point and plan your initial crowdsourcing campaign This is not a crowdsourcing campain ( as they are usually made up of ) this is something we would adapt,apply and build into the community platform. around that pricing expectation based on the resource burn metrics we can measure and track. Start there. Figure out how to fund a builder that can handle a share of peak load. Agree that's one way of figuring out but ( share number of servers/cpu/storage ) honestly i would have thought the infrastructure team would already know this. JBG -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 10:08 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: On 07/24/2013 05:02 PM, Jef Spaleta wrote: So all you can do is gather the core metrics for utility use... cpu/band/storage... and with those metrics in hand price what it would take to build and run a koji builder in the public cloud as a starting point and plan your initial crowdsourcing campaign This is not a crowdsourcing campain ( as they are usually made up of ) this is something we would adapt,apply and build into the community platform. You say potato... I say potatoe. I really don't care about what its fashionable to call it. crowdsourcing, microinvestments, membership dues... whatever.. i dont care. But I do find it amusingly ironic that you would dissuade me from using the word crowdsource when you picked the phrase crowd funding for the initial subject line. I don't consider that level of nitpicking over word choices particularly constructive, and as a result I take your interest in this less seriously than I would have otherwise if you had just let that slide in what is an evolving brainstorming session of an under-specified concept. Oh well, live and learn. Agree that's one way of figuring out but ( share number of servers/cpu/storage ) honestly i would have thought the infrastructure team would already know this. How about you table this discussion as it stands right now on this list, and take the next few days and talk to the infra team about what the currently know and don't know concerning the computing resource burn rate for fedora specific tasking. And see if you can help them document resource burn rates in non-financial units in a way that doesn't require a legal review as a potential financial disclosure for Red Hat as a publicly traded company. Do everything you can to the info you need, in a way that avoids requiring any action by either legal or accounting depts inside the fenceline and everyone will be happier. Even in my own academic institution where I work... the more I can avoid interacting with legal and accounting...the more productive I am and the less time is wasted. I'm not sure the discussion really constructively go forward on the idea of crowd funding as you call it, until you have the discussion with infra team and build any of the missing metrics for compute resource burn. I'm expecting there is going to be some tooling required to get metrics publish in a way that makes sense for the community to digest on a regular basis as part of informed decision making ahead of a financial contribution on a periodic basis. -jef -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: Agree that's one way of figuring out but ( share number of servers/cpu/storage ) honestly i would have thought the infrastructure team would already know this. Well, luckily you never have to know everything before you start helping. RH is doing a lot. What can *you* do, with like-minded folks? My humble suggestion Pick a piece of the elephant and start chewing. There will surely be pieces that are _complementary_ to what RH is funding (or RH'ers are doing). Non-corporate developers who can't travel to Flock for financial reasons as a quick example. That will get you in motion without forcing a conflict that needn't happen. Any sponsor/contributor joining a FOSS project helps the most when they start doing stuff that isn't being done. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
Le mardi 23 juillet 2013 à 21:03 -0500, Chris Adams a écrit : You apparently don't want anyone who is working on Open Source as part of any job (Red Hat or not) involved in the distribution you support (since you said you don't value system admins fixing things while on the clock the same either). I see the value of having people paid to work on a project, but I also see the value of having more than 1 source of such people ( you can call this the Mandrake syndrom, and I could speak for hours on the problem it caused ). Having a project dominated by 1 single sponsor is a rather suboptimal situation. -- Michael Scherer -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
Le mercredi 24 juillet 2013 à 10:31 -0400, Darryl L. Pierce a écrit : On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 09:05:40AM -0500, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 7:49 AM, Darryl L. Pierce mcpie...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 12:37:09PM +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: We would need to form a financial sig that handles that. Are these people going to be paid for their efforts, since it's completely non-technical? Why is being non-technical related in any way to paying someone to do it? It's an administrative role. I'd assume that you'd pay somebody who's going to be doing this job. If not, that's fine. That's why I asked if it was going to be paid for, since it's a lot more work than just writing checks.` So you assume that administrative mean not fun, so people will not do it for free ? On one hand, i would agree, this is quite hard to find a good treasurer, motivated, etc. On the other hand, there is lots of group doing it around you. Having someone paid for that would be kinda self defeating, and having a world wide group is the real issue, knowing the various law around the world is nightmarish. -- Michael Scherer -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
Le mercredi 24 juillet 2013 à 08:42 +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson a écrit : On 07/24/2013 07:33 AM, Brendan Jones wrote: On 07/24/2013 03:50 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: Earlier this evening I was asked how I expected Fedora to function in any way similarly to how it does now without the backing of one or more organizations like Red Hat. I gave the quick answer through donations since I was not in mood to give the detailed answers ( and taint that thread even further ) however I'm about do it here to certain extent since the questioner probably did not expect me to have actually given this any thought which I actually have although I have not chiselled it into stone, making it the concrete proposal the community demands since it's just a small fraction of a larger idea or rather vision I have but I have decide it be the correct time to share that part of that vision of mine with the rest of the community to gather feedback. Under the current model I thought it is not possible to make monetary donations to Fedora (I remember Jared Smith saying something about this at a linuxconf.au a while back) Hardware, physical items, consumable media etc is OK though. Something to do with US taxes, correct me if I'm wrong. Looks like we need to get the Fedora name out of the states You could just use a NGO outside of US. We used to have Fedora EMEA, and we have Borsalinux-fr. There is no need to have it done officially by the Fedora project or anything. And that's what was done for Mageia before the association got a legal entity, using another partner association in France as a proxy for money. I think Debian also do something similar for debconf, with SPI. -- Michael Scherer -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 16:50 +, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: On 07/24/2013 04:40 PM, inode0 wrote: On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: The entire budget is not public so you won't get a definitive answer for a large portion of the budget. Why is it not public any reason why we the community cannot know how much we cost? I don't think there's any particular reason, but one thing is that it's not particularly obvious even within Red Hat: there isn't a single nice clear Fedora Budget, money gets spent on Fedora out of all sorts of other budgets. It may well be the case that *Red Hat* does not know precisely how much money Red Hat spends on Fedora. :) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor
You apparently don't want anyone who is working on Open Source as part of any job (Red Hat or not) involved in the distribution you support (since you said you don't value system admins fixing things while on the clock the same either). Here's one of Fedora's Core Values: Friends We believe success comes from a strong community, made of people from around the world, working together. There's a place in Fedora for anyone who supports our values and wants to help. By collaborating with each other openly and transparently, and with a strong, supportive partnership with our sponsors, we can achieve great things. If that doesn't agree with your goals, then IMHO you should find another distribution. This will be my only post in this thread. -- Chris Adams li...@cmadams.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
