Hi, > However, in January 2015, the board decided to entertain proposals for > directed donations.
This proposal doesn’t see to match with what in that board report [1] as it's for $50,000 sized experiments. Are you sure you get board support and VP funding approval for this proposal? > 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. Why not talk to Infra they should be able to help and give up a better server? Sure Is it easier to setup up one ourselves short term, but long terms costs may be greater. My concerns: - I’m not sure it’s in line with ASF mission of “for the public good”. If the ASF only accepted project that could pay for themselves it would be very different to what it is today. - The PMC will need to spend more volunteer time on setting up and maintaining and updating servers. - Security and the risk around self hosting, particularly if we offer non static services on it. What happens if our server gets compromised. Would that damage our project and the ASFs reputation? What would the board do in this situation? - Bus factor. If the person who’s set up a critical piece of the infrastructure leaves the project that knowledge is lost. - Risk to uptime of services. If a server goes down who can fix it quickly it not like we have people on call or have monitoring systems (or we could but that’s more cost). - Administration of donations, who has access to the bank account, auditing and legal responsibilities around what we can and can’t spend it on. Would we need to pay for professional services here? - Risk towards the ASF 501(c) status, is anyone here an expert on US tax law and what we can and cannot no in that regard? Would we need to pay for legal services here? - Risk of outside influence / perception of non neutralitily to companies who directly donate Now I'm sure that most of these can be sorted up but my first impression is seems like a lot of effort, risk and potentially increased costs over what we currently have, but if you want to run with it and manage to get support from the rest of the PMC, the board and VP funding then go for it. Thanks, Justin 1. https://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2015/board_minutes_2015_01_21.txt
