Hi David, Thank you for your extensive and personal email. It is good to hear the back story of these projects now and then.
I have to admit I'm in the same boat as Vicente, I would like to contribute, I can commit work time, but the sheer volume of the project is intimidating at least and makes it hard to get started. So I would be willing to support development financially, preferably in a way that gets most of the money to the people who do the work, or the ones that pay their paycheck. That however is not solving the real problem, the lack of commiters to the project. Ideally there would be a way for lesser gods, like myself, to take small bites of the project, instead of eating the whole elephant. The question obviously is, is that even possible? Met Vriendelijke Groet / With Kind Regards Bart van Leeuwen From: "David Blevins" <david.blev...@gmail.com> To: users@tomee.apache.org Date: 19-03-2024 03:20 Subject: Question: Can I donate to an Apache project? (was Re: Will Tomee be discontinued ?) > On Mar 16, 2024, at 9:02 AM, Vicente Rossello <cocorosse...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > I've tried a few times to do some contributions to the project, but testing > the TCK or solving almost any issue is really hard, and very far from what > I'm used to do in my daily work. And now I don't have much time... family > and work consumes almost all my time. > > I really find this project relevant in the jakarta EE and I would love to > see it keep going. What I can do is to make some donations. I guess that > the donations should go to apache, my question is can I fund this specific > project? Also I see that donations are tax deductible in the US, does > anyone know if this is possible in Spain (or even any country in Europe)? First, I just want to say on a personal level, I find your email touching. Most people only ask what can I get and not what can I give. The world needs more people like you. Donations to Apache aren't used to fund development of Apache projects. The foundation in terms of being a corporation is actually incredibly small; less than 10 employees and contractors combined. The funding Apache gets goes to that very tiny crew and covers infrastructure, legal, the conferences Apache coordinates and some limited marketing. Everything else including the board of directors are all volunteers. What that means is there is no way for you to sponsor "the project", you would have to single out individuals and sponsor them directly. I've used Github sponsors to sponsor a few of the people I saw contributing, such as Daniel Dias, Richard Zowalla and Thomas Andraschko. They take 10% and and handle tax. I agree with your perspective on not wanting to sacrifice family time for open source. Unfortunately it is the main source of contribution for most Apache projects and the main reason people burn out and stop contributing. I used to encourage people to contribute in their spare time and did so myself. TomEE 1.0 to 1.5 were created and shipped by people working in their spare time. We would frequently use vacation time to hack on open source together, cut releases, etc. The 1.5 release was actually cut while Jean-Louis was in the hospital while his wife was giving birth to their second kid and I was on vacation helping. On my side I ended up having to quit my job in order to get permission to work on TomEE in my spare time after having gotten in some hot water for taking a week off to cut the 1.0. I later learned Jonathan Gallimore had to apply similar pressure to his employer to get the permission to also work in his spare time. There was some occasional employer support. Atos/Worldline was supportive as they used OpenEJB and had a smart manager, Jean-Francois James, that saw benefit in allowing some contribution on company time when they had a specific need (this is where Jean-Louis Monteiro, Romain Manni-Bucau worked). IBM was very supportive of me in the 2005 - 2010 range when Geronimo was active as long as it benefit Geronimo and my contributions did not compete with Geronimo (which of course they did and that ultimately meant I had to work on my spare time most of the time). That's the very delicate balance that built TomEE. I no longer encourage individuals to sacrifice personal/family time to work on Open Source projects, I don't feel it is ethical anymore. I admit that I also do not find it ethical for you as an individual to sponsor other individuals. It's that the majority of contribution comes from individuals contributing in their family time (not going to call it "spare" time), while the majority of consumers are for profit companies. I can't advise people to use their remaining time after work to contribute to Open Source. This primarily benefits the employer using the software and comes at the expense to your family. Nor can I advise people to use the money they earned working for their employer to sponsor an individual contributor. Yes, the contributor benefits, but there's no denying you're essentially helping cover the cost of the open source software your employer uses and using money your family needs to do it. When a company moves onto an open source project to save money and that project is only possible because of individual contributors, it is essentially the families of those contributors who enabled that savings. Essentially cost has been shifted from the employer to employees and their families. Unless of course the companies and for-profit consumers also contribute. Then I no longer have any issue. Then it's as open source is mean to to be: everyone who uses also contributes. Open source is like stone soup. It's a shared cost model. Everyone shares the cost by contributing a little and everyone eats. Without that, however, it isn't a beautiful story where everyone shares and everyone eats. It becomes a story where the townfolk all give their last carrots and potatoes to make soup for the wealthy. None of this is because people are evil, just that open source is very new and our relationship to it is very young. The true benefit of open source is you can shift from high-cost proprietary software while not having to do everything in house either. You can share that cost with others, which will be a fraction of what you all paid collectively. The true benefit of an Apache open source project is that as a contributor, your relationship to other contributors is equal and fair and all matters are voted and have board oversight to correct if things become unfair. Those of you using TomEE at work should have a conversation with your manager so you can all talk and see what you can bring to the project. If you are unsure how to have that conversation, we can talk about it. I'm ok to help people offline as long as you're willing to pay it forward and help others with this like I helped you. I don't recommend taking time/money away from family. -David
