My thoughts: Conceptually, I like the idea of donating to projects (and in our case Flex). The direction of Apache seems to be moving to a more project-centric approach like we’re seeing with ApacheCon. That makes sense to me in general as Apache has grown quite a bit and diversified a lot in recent years. Large companies have business units with funds earmarked for them, and it seems logical for projects to have a certain level of autonomy in terms of justifying their own existence. (I’m not saying that every project needs to be “profitable”, but it also should not be shackled because it’s owned by the foundation.)
Having earmarked money which has a foundation tax seems like a win-win to me. In all likelihood, project-specific donations will increase over-all donations to the foundation which could be very good to projects in particular and the foundation as a whole. Either way, it seems to me like a worthy experiment. However, the details seem like they are pretty sticky: 1. How would these donations handled for a financial and technical perspective? 2. How are decisions made on how to spend the money? 3. What would be the guidelines on what is a “kosher” expense? 4. Practically, what expenses do we have that would benefit from earmarked donations? 5. Could donations be given with the expressed desire for it to be used for a specific purpose? (i.e. if Acme company wants to invest in better docs for a project, is that okay?) 6. Would recognition for donations be allowed? (i.e. company logo on a project homepage for donations above $XX) Re: Infra. Chris has some good points, but the pain points that Alex brings up are real. Finds don’t necessarily mean that we need to run the infrastructure ourselves. There’s no reason why project funds cannot go to Infra to pay for resources that Infra can not otherwise justify. That would give us the best of both worlds: we are guaranteed the resources we need, while not having to manage them. Of course, if a project would feel the need to manage something on their own, I see nothing wrong with that. Re: #4 I think we could REALLY benefit from professional documentation and possibly design. We could also benefit from conferences/hackathons. Of course this goes into the question of #3 and #5. AFAIK, paying for professional services is currently a major no-no. The question to me is whether that’s something that’s set in stone or not. I think things when they go down this track can spiral pretty quickly. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try this, but we need really clear guidelines fro the board on which steps to take, and when… > On Feb 10, 2017, at 11:46 PM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com> wrote: > > 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 >
