I offered on IRC to write a preliminary donation request message to base our solicitations on. I've revised it twice as of last night, and I think after one more revision this evening and I'll open it up to everyone else for comment (~10PM PST). I'm not particularly happy with it at the moment, but actually it may generate more interest if everyone hates it ;-). From there we can revise it and begin adapting the message to different donors (I believe potential donors deserve a personal request, the purpose of my draft is only to get the ball rolling and serve as a starting point)
This is not meant as a replacement for exploring indiegogo/kickstarter though. Something like that would still be good, it just strikes me as a mid-term project, not a short term effort to get back on track. Cheers, Dan On Nov 16, 2015 10:54 AM, "xor" <[email protected]> wrote: > On Monday, November 16, 2015 10:52:16 AM Ian Clarke wrote: > > I am pretty convinced that it would be a bad idea to allow Xor to > continue > > working if the project doesn't have sufficient funds. > > > > Aside from any potential legal problems, imagine what our pitch to donors > > becomes at that point - "Hey, donate money so that we can pay off our > > debts". Not exactly a compelling pitch :/ > > > > And meanwhile Xor is potentially getting himself into a difficult > financial > > situation. > > Argh, I had just messaged you that I'd like to postpone the final > discussion > of my offer "continue working with payment delayed as interest-free debt" > until Thursday :| > I need to figure out some real life stuff related to that. > > But well, my offer still is available though. > Freenet is more important to me than some temporary financial hassle. > > Thursday will just make me figure out how bad a "no" to my offer would be > for > me, which is why I'd prefer to not hear the decision until then. > > But, as said elsewhere, even if my offer is not accepted, I will: > 1) *not* seek a different job for now (= a year at least probably) and use > my > free time to resolve the major real life house cleanup/selling for my mom. > 2) stay available to resume my job once we have funding - my mom for sure > would accept me to reduce my efforts for her at any time. > 3) voluntarily continue replying on IRC / the mailing lists. > 4) voluntarily at least provide very basic maintenance for Web of Trust / > Freetalk to prevent user frustration. So please keep bug reports directed > at > me :) > > Nevertheless, please do notice that I cannot "officially" provide > volunteering > anymore due to my life situation. I am only offering this to keep the > project > alive by dealing with urgent stuff. > There is years work of worth at my mom's to be done, and if I do invest my > spare motivation for volunteering, it should be for her first (yes, she'll > pay me food, but that's about it :). So please just keep on mind that it > would > be a benefit if I could return to paid work ASAP, as earning money is > something I could justify to have a similarly significant priority. > I'll try to do my part in ensuring resuming of my job by helping at the > fundraising efforts. > > > If we want > > Xor to keep working, we need a strategy for raising more money. I think > > this strategy will need to be to achieve specific goals that we lay out. > > I'd say we already have a strategy: > > 0a) Finish the fundraising bar on the website. Done already by the > volunteers! > Thanks again. > > 0b) Maybe deploy the next Freenet release so my work of the past 6 months > is > available to the users actually. Would be polite to provide the result of > the > previous money to the users before asking for more money. The code is > finished > from my side, it is just waiting for a fred release to be bundled with. > Steve > needs to decide whether this can happen soon, or will take too long. If it > takes to long, we can ignore this step. > > 1) Put a news article on website titled "We've run out of money". Notice: I > suggested the prerequisite of first writing a huge list of news sites to > submit it to. We need to do this *first* before putting the article up > because: "News" contains "new". If it takes us too long to submit the > article, > it will be old, and thus news sites will ignore it. So we need to figure > out > who to send it to first. > > 2) Submit the article to many news sites. > > 3) Ask those entities directly for funds: > https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Fundraising > > I will try to help with all of the above, if not do them myself. But to be > honest I would be happy if I don't have to do it alone: I'm still a > programmer, not a marketing guy, so my social skills are limited. > Also, there are potentially thousands of entities who could be interested > in > funding us, thanks to the NSA scandal. Probably too much work for one > person > to talk to them all. > > > Perhaps we could explore a KickStarter - but that would only work if it > is > > to achieve something big and externally very visible (such as rebuilding > > FProxy using a modern JavaScript framework like Bootstrap/React and > > modernizing the installers). > > I'm fine with KickStarter, and fine with it's requirement of setting > specific > goals. > Albeit I would do KickStarter as a last resort: The requirement of specific > goals is too much of a burden if volunteers are also involved. We don't > know > whether suddenly a volunteer appears and provides a whole new bunch of > code. > That code then might lack very small changes to be ready for deployment, > so it > might be good if I did the changes so we could get the code out. But that > would violate the KickStarter promise of me only working on the specific > KickStarter goals. > Also, it is very difficult to judge complexity of software development, > i.e. > whether something will take 6 months or 2 years. I don't know whether > KickStarter requires us to specify a date of delivery though. > > So KickStarter is OK, but as a last resort. > However, I think the specific goals you suggested are problematic: > > > modernizing the installers > > As far as I know, they have been rewritten from scratch just recently, or > do > work fine: > - The Windows installer was ported from AHK to InnoSetup. > - The Mac installer has been rewritten by mrsteveman1 and will be deployed > soon. > - The Java installer, which basically is the fallback for all other > platforms, > seems to work. > > > But the goal I'm more opposed to is this: > > > rebuilding FProxy using a modern JavaScript framework like > Bootstrap/React > > What you suggest here would be a complete 180° turn of our previous > strategy, > and leave all the work towards it in a half-finished state. > > To understand that, let's consider the previous-to-previous strategy: > Toad had spend years, if not a decade, upon shoveling fred code from one > side > to the other, i.e. upon improving the core network daemon. He for sure > improved the network a lot: Fred is faster, more reliable, and probably > more > secure. > Still, this did yield zero new major user visible features. > By default, we still shipped no working search, no forums, no social > network, > no mail, no filesharing. > Yet, implementations of forums, social networks, mail, etc. all existed > already: > https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Projects > They were just too unpolished / slow to be deployed yet. > > So it was decided that it would be a good idea to finally give those > features > to the users after they had been rusting for years. > Freenet is pretty boring anyway if it is only static HTML sites. Forums > etc. > are alive, and thus much more interesting. > Thus, the previous strategy, which I said your suggestion is breaking with, > was decided: > I was assigned being the "client application maintainer" to get the apps > out. > Now both fortunately and unfortunately, all those apps share a single > problem: > Due to our anonymous nature, they need spam filtering to prevent denial of > service - because content publishers are anonymous, censors cannot just > kill > them to stop them from publishing content, so they are more likely to use > spam > as DoS to shut people up. > So while it is good that we have a central spam filter library (the "Web of > Trust" plugin aka WoT) and thus only need to write the code once, this also > meant that it's algorithmic problems had to be fixed before we could deploy > *any* other apps: If WoT is dead-slow, then the apps which use it also > will be > dead-slow. > > So I have been working on fixing WoT for the past two years or so, and it > is a > lot closer to being ready for installing it by default. > But it is not perfectly finished. > So we still have no forums, social networks, mail, filesharing. > > And if we now do a KickStarter with the goal of "rebuilding > FProxy using a modern JavaScript framework like Bootstrap/React and > modernizing the installers", that would mean stopping the strategy of > fixing > WoT. > And all the WoT-work of the previous strategy would have been in vain as > it is > not completed to the point where we can deploy the actual apps yet. > So with what you recommended, we probably won't have forums / social > networking / file sharing for yet another few years; and we would have > wasted > years upon something which we didn't complete yet. > > Please believe me that I'm not barely trying to make my job look > significant > here. > It really just boils down to that on me: > We spent half a decade on rewriting stuff, not on new features. We need new > features now. Static HTML freesites are boring, but it's all we ship by > default. Spending more years on rewriting the static HTML displaying > framework > will not improve this at all. > And we already *HAVE* the new apps people would like to see deployed, we > just > need to finish WoT to get them deployable, and then to polish them a bit on > their own. > > So anyway: Thanks for your efforts to push us to get things done. > Let's maybe just avoid specific technical suggestions for a while: > I feel a certain kind of burnout symptoms from all the flamewars here > recently, and I would be happy if we could just avoid potential hot hopics > such as "rewrite X" suggestions :) > The whole rewriting ideas maybe are ended best with this article: > http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html > > Please don't feel like I'm trying to shut you up, I'm rather just looking > to > steer the discussion into more productive directions than > rewrite-discussions. > > What would be two productive things to continue this discussion with: > > 1) Let's gather a list of news sites which could publish our request for > funding. > > 2) Let's enhance the list of entities to ask for funds: > https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Fundraising > > If you don't have a Wiki account, you can ask me for one by telling me your > desired username; or just mail your suggested Wiki changes to the list. > I'll > add them to the Wiki then. > > Greetings! > > > -- > hopstolive (keyword for Ians spam filter) > > _______________________________________________ > Devl mailing list > [email protected] > https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl > _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list [email protected] https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
