Comments on: A call to support open source software projects

By: stormy

stormy — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:31:04 +0000

We should be applying for grant money … Sun just got a large accessibility grant from the EU. I’m happy to help find and write up grants but I need project people to propose projects that would match calls for grant money …
HP, Sun, Novell, Intel and others do support us now at $10,000/year plus support for events. We could ask them to give us more, and many of them do. For example, Intel gave us $30,000 last year.

By: Mad

Mad — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:30:01 +0000

I think everyone who works for a non-profit foundation ought to justify their salary.
When someone’s compensation is sucking up nearly $100,000.00 of a donation pool annually, there’d better be some serious and tangible changes taking place in the organization, driven by that person.
Maybe those changes won’t be directly reflected in foundation income; that’s fine as long as the benefits are real and well documented. They should be obvious and unquestionable to the casual observer.
Also. $100,000.00 per annum is an Affluent Person’s Salary. Many GNOME contributors are university students, unemployed, or living in far less-than-ideal conditions. Hubert Figuiere, for instance, is a kick-ass GNOME developer who’s unemployed right now. How does he react? He writes GNote! Is Stormy worth more to GNOME than him? Really? (Disclaimer: I just read Planet GNOME. I don’t know him personally. I have never spoken to him.)
Time to shake up the GNOME Foundation’s governance methods. Some really bad decisions being made there.

By: stormy

stormy — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:28:59 +0000

We need to decide if we (as a Foundation and a community) want to apply a business model around GNOME.
As an example of a business model that might apply, several people are talking about creating training that the Foundation could deliver or could contract out and collect royalties.

By: stormy

stormy — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:27:10 +0000

You can adopt more than one hacker by signing up more than once. Several people have done this already – thanks!

By: Robert Smol

Robert Smol — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:00:28 +0000

Good points, I would only say:
Donating money is just one of ways how to participate in the community, there is nothing wrong with that and it should be embraced. And it is always optional, sw still costs 0$ but donations can improve the whole sytem.
Paying developers straight should be available as one of the options, but not all parts of system enjoy the same level of popularity, yet all are needed. Organizations can help to oversee the whole project and distribute money where needed.
Now tell me, is there currently a way how to adopt more then one gnome hacker?

By: asdf

asdf — Sat, 02 May 2009 08:43:33 +0000

I don’t think stormy really needs to justify her salary..I think the GNOME board is probably aware how important money is to their organization, and if they believed it was ill spent, she wouldn’t be in the position she is in.
THAT being said. I believe what miro is doing is a good idea, but far too over priced, for a long long time linux and free software have been sold to users as 0 cost$ even though that may not be what the free was intended for, now asking users to pay the same amount per month 4$ at the end of the year, would buy them a nice commercially supported piece of software. To me that amount is to great to convince people. I applaud these efforts to make money, but I don’t envy the job who’s it is to do )
Sometimes I wonder how short opensource developers are selling themselves though, even if money is raised for these hackfests and conferences, what do the developers get out of it? If they currently don’t hold one of the few jobs provided by opensource, how do they justify spending this time instead of with family friends or other hobbies, I think a model to raise money for developers not just the organizations is key, but the product must be amazing, so far nothing even compares in linux world to what microsoft and apple produce. Ah well, good luck!

By: Robert Smol

Robert Smol — Sat, 02 May 2009 01:20:42 +0000

Personally I think you are doing excellent job, the problem is the we need to raise more money. It is almost unbelievable whole GNOME runs with such a low budget.
Is there anyway GNOME can attract some money from goverment? Even EU? many developers are from EU and EU is sometimes having programs for spnsoring various activities. In the end EU is one of the legislative leaders in switching to Opensource (many migrations happening in Germany, France, whole parliament runs on Ubuntu).
How about the vendors, wouldn’t be HP, Dell, IBM, Oracle, Citrix, ACER (and all the netbooks providers) be happy to provide some help? In the end it helps them create viable options for negotiating with MS (we all remember what contracts MS dicated to its OEMs).
Can Universities help? I mean there are lot of open source fans there.
At the same time it is great opportunity to see how community will take care of things. Everybody little, makes a lot

By: Ranish

Ranish — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:52:28 +0000

A measured response to an incendiary post, Stormy.
One way to reduce the ‘damage’ potential of stats like Mad’s would be to conduct your work in a way that allows external scrutiny.
For instance, I see lots of twittering, identi.ca’ing, and mildly interesting blog posts from you, but not much detail on your day-to-day efforts. A lengthy post about why people might go to conferences, for instance, makes me wonder “who has time to formulate lengthy blog posts about this stuff”?
Shorter posts about things you’re doing to further the Foundation’s goals, your successes, and your failures would better allow the community to evaluate your worth. I think too much of your blogging is about your job description. Tell us about your work.

By: stormy

stormy — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:04:28 +0000

Some of the money from sponsors is due to my work. (I recruited Google, and last year Intel and Canonical gave much less.) I also am trying to bring in more sponsors, but with the economy the way it is, it’ll be a while before they sign up.
That said, my job is not to focus on 100% fundraising (although it is part of my job.) I was hired to do marketing, business development, help run the foundation day to day … http://www.stormyscorner.com/2009/01/what-do-i-do.html.
If you don’t approve of how the Foundation uses its money, then now’s the time to speak up … during the next election of the board of directors.
If you are a GNOME Foundation member, you can run for the board of directors or vote for someone who supports your view.

By: Mad

Mad — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:58:05 +0000

Stormy’s salary:
Base $96,000.00 per year
%25 bonus to be paid out of funds above expected income
Stormy’s travel budget:
$20,000.00 ($2,645 used to date)
The top three sponsors of the GNOME project are:
Google: $30,000.00
Intel: $30,000.00
Canonical: $27,000.00
Therefore, the top three donors don’t even fully pay for Stormy.
According to the GNOME Foundation budget, Stormy is the single biggest outlay. She costs more than the total spent on Hackfests, Events, and Marketing combined.
What the hell is going on here?
See for yourself: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2009-April/binDvlf3ZJovM.bin , save as a .ods file, open with openoffice.