Hi, In case you were wondering, Apache Flex and the entire Apache Software Foundation and the other 300+ ASF projects are funded by generous donations. Some donations are in terms of people: I get paid by Adobe to work on Apache Flex but Adobe doesn't write a check to the ASF specifically for other costs of hosting Apache Flex. But some companies and individuals do write checks to the ASF. Big donations are termed as sponsorships and those folks are recognized here [1]. This money pays for servers that host Git, manage mailing lists, host our website, distribute releases, and pays for accountants, legal and PR people, among other things.
All projects are encouraged to encourage its users to donate to the ASF. On our website [2], we have the "About Apache" menu item that has the "Donation" option that takes you to [3]. Historically, any donations could not be "directed" or "targeted". Instead any money you donate to the ASF goes into the general fund and is used however the Apache board sees fit. There was no way to specify that the money you want to donate should be used to help Flex. However, in January 2015, the board decided to entertain proposals for directed donations. No project has made a proposal so far, but I want to see if our community is interested in proposing the following: The Summary: I want to see if we can get enough donations from the community to pay for all costs of having Flex at Apache. How much money that is isn't clear. My guess is that Flex is a below-average consumer of ASF resources. Our share of the costs could be as little as $1000/year. My reasons for spending time on this are several. 1) The ASF is growing and so are expenses. Expenses rarely change based on the economy, but donations can. If a time ever comes to discuss cutting expenses, I want to protect Flex by being able to make a case that we don't cost the ASF any money and in fact, help. 2) We should be donating money to the ASF, but how many of you do? I don't myself. And would it be easier to justify if the money went directly to Flex? It would for me. 3) I am currently paying for one of our CI servers. If we could get directed donations to pay for it, we might be able to upgrade to a faster server. I would personally donate more since I would get a tax break on the donation. And anyone who wants to pitch in can help and at least in the US, get a tax break. 4) There are certain resources we share in the ASF like JIRA that are not, IMO, optimally set up for us. We can't create custom JIRA fields, for example. And more than one person has tripped over the Infra-centric buttons on each JIRA issue. 5) I, and I think several board members, want to understand if handing off more server responsibilities to the project would scale to other projects and help the bottom line or hurt it. Next Steps: I have already gotten tentative approval from the board to pursue this idea. I've received plenty of words of caution from the various directors, including Infra, but nobody has said "don’t do it". First, we need to discuss this a bit more and decide if we as a project want to do it. I can't just present it myself. We have to have a vote. Then we would present the vote-approved proposal to the VP Fundraising. Then we'd have to actually try to implement it. At any step we could get blocked. It may turn out to be too difficult to get our own bank account under the ASF umbrella that we would need for the donations to be considered as going to a non-profit org. Or nobody will donate and we'll abandon the idea. Or the cost of accounting for these small donations will be considered to high. Microsoft may not accept payments from that bank account for its Azure server. If this idea starts to work for Flex by funding the CI server I currently pay for, we would look into expanding what runs on that server and see about offloading all of our builds from builds.a.o to that server, running our website from that server, hosting JIRA on that server, maybe more. There are Infrastructure integration issues that might be fatal. But having control over flex.a.o or maybe having flex.a.o map to flex.org that runs on that server might give us the opportunity to run web-services on that server and provide client/server web experiences to our customers via FlexJS. Having a friendlier JIRA interface may be more beneficial. Thoughts? -Alex [1] http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html [2] http://flex.apache.org [3] http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html
