Re: non-financial donations (was: call for help: partners program)
also sprach Paul Wise p...@debian.org [2015-03-16 12:52 +0100]: Re financial donations, I'd personally like to see more focus on something like having 20k or more individuals donating $10 a year and most of them listed on contributors.d.o, as opposed to turning Debian into more of an advertising organisation, which seems to be the end of the spectrum we are headed towards. I don't think Debian should become an advertising organisation. We have identified some ways in which we could use money that IMHO requires a cash flow. So I am merely advocating finding ways of generating that cash flow based on our product and brand, without losing the soul. The problem with 20k × $10 / year is collection. We can let Paypal do this, but I am sure we would find people strongly opposed to Paypal here. But we'd need to use such a provider, working globally, but then you are looking at losing 5–10% of those funds to them. Anyway, the two are not at all in disagreement. Someone giving $10 to Debian every year should be treated with the same diligence as someone giving 20k, especially since the $10 are likely to be a larger cut of their budget than 20k for BigCorp. -- .''`. martin f. krafft madduck@d.o @martinkrafft : :' : proud Debian developer `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems if you stew apples like cranberries, they taste more like prunes than rhubarb does. -- groucho marx digital_signature_gpg.asc Description: Digital signature (see http://martin-krafft.net/gpg/sig-policy/999bbcc4/current)
Re: non-financial donations (was: call for help: partners program)
On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 6:33 PM, martin f krafft wrote: If Debian had a wishlist, we could let partners join by donating hardware on this list — until the need is higher and we cannot wait and have to buy the hardware ourselves, so this would need to be actively managed. We have a hardware wishlist but there is nothing on it yet and no-one replied to my calls for adding things to it (on IRC, d-d-a). https://wiki.debian.org/Hardware/Wanted https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/03/msg4.html The previous hardware wishlist became obsolete because it was writeable only by the web team. There is also the DSA wishlist but half of it is obsolete since zack created sources.d.n. https://dsa.debian.org/hardware-wishlist/ Looking at my hardware-donations@d.o archive, we've been offered mostly hardware that we can't use for one reason or another; out of warranty, too slow/ancient, donor didn't follow-up with suggestion to contact porters or we had no use for them. So far only one of eight has been accepted and that was from the manufacturer and was very new hardware. IIRC, the partners program was meant for continuous support every year like supplying machines as-needed for port X rather than one-off donations. Re financial donations, I'd personally like to see more focus on something like having 20k or more individuals donating $10 a year and most of them listed on contributors.d.o, as opposed to turning Debian into more of an advertising organisation, which seems to be the end of the spectrum we are headed towards. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/CAKTje6Hoa2QBavjbZcRURfca=+wk-7e0ageeitjlhesj6l-...@mail.gmail.com
non-financial donations (was: call for help: partners program)
also sprach Lucas Nussbaum lea...@debian.org [2015-03-16 09:45 +0100]: Also note that one of the tricky parts of the partners role is the ability to consider non-financial contributions (e.g. hardware, hosting, sprint hosting, etc.). This is largely orthogonal, but must not be forgotten. The pending partners inquiries are all of that nature. Well, this is indeed a very hard subject, and also includes hardware donations. There's the easy case, which is when Debian needs something and then there's demand and presumably a market price (hardware donations and hosting). If Debian had a wishlist, we could let partners join by donating hardware on this list — until the need is higher and we cannot wait and have to buy the hardware ourselves, so this would need to be actively managed. Wrt sprint hosting, I'd refrain from asking the potential hoster for a price to use their offices before accepting them for free, so here I'd rather use some sort of formula that takes into account geographic location (travel costs), amenities provided, food, etc. to determine the actual worth of the hosting to us. I'd reject sponsors who want to give us products instead of cash when there's no concrete need. The biggest challenge IMHO here is though not the valuation of a single donation and slotting it in with our offerings. Instead, I think the biggest challenge are the different lifetimes, e.g. gold partnership lasts one year and let's just say we would award it in return for a specific SAN by SANManufacturer Ltd. with a 5 year SLA. What then? Does the partner get degraded the next year? All in all, I think the way to solve this is by fixing the rules in the brochure and not to make exceptions, i.e. to become a dependable and predictable peer to our sponsors. And to get there, we probably need to engage with them and shape the product, which will be a longer process. -- .''`. martin f. krafft madduck@d.o @martinkrafft : :' : proud Debian developer `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems i love deadlines. i like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. -- douglas adams digital_signature_gpg.asc Description: Digital signature (see http://martin-krafft.net/gpg/sig-policy/999bbcc4/current)