Re: Question to all candidates: Ongoing/future legal projects
On Fri, 2022-03-25 at 11:41 +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote: > I still want to work towards having an expenditure policy, ... > The idea would be that there's some clear document that makes it > really easy for someone to know whether they can apply for something > or not, and I think if it hits a few checklist items that makes it a > braindead yes, then we shouldn't even require DPL approval. We have these documents related to that: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL#Money https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/AskingForMoney https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/SponsoringGuidelines These were written by Stefano Zacchiroli in 2010 when he was DPL, he added the hardware guidelines in 2012 and since then only very minor edits have been made by non-DPL folks. Are there any expenditure requests you have approved that would not fit into the categories listed on the existing expenditure guidelines? What changes to the existing expenditure guidelines would you make? -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Question to all candidates: how is Debian doing?
Hi Lucas On 2022/03/17 17:54, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: As someone who used to care a lot about Debian, but who hasn't been able to pay much attention to the project lately, I was wondering: I don't think anyone would hold it against you that you've got busy with other stuff, having a life outside Debian is also considered very healthy these days. How is Debian doing currently? Excellent question! A few weeks ago I saw a headline "Is Mozilla ok?", and while I've thought about it on different levels for a while, it was the first time that I thought in the exact words "Is Debian OK!?" and mean to write something about it (possibly in a blog post, possibly in a "bits from the DPL" mail), but as with this mail, it ended up in various forms of drafts and I never made it half way with it, at least not yet. So starting with a tl;dr, I think Debian is doing ok. It's not doing great, but it is ok. When we ask how Debian is doing, it's also useful to qualify what we're asking. Is the Debian project (our structure, project members, larger community...) ok? Is the Debian distribution (what features our users need, severity of bugs, are we living up to our promises, etc...) ok? On the positive side, we are chugging along quite well. Packages (and lots of new packages) get uploaded, old crud eventually gets deleted (last release was pretty good in this front), bugs get fixed, since 2005 the project has managed to release every 2 years, the website team has great plans to make the website more friendly (*poke to www team to make some public update please*), we finally have a functioning community team (after some iterations and speedbumps), we now have the fasttrack project (although still quite young) to deal with things that move to fast for our usual archives, we're slowly but surely improving community processes that people have complained about for a while (like our current and previous GR to improve voting). Our finances are also really good, our donors show lots of confidence in us. Our corporate sponsors are already great, but I'm constantly amazed by the generosity of our individual donors! There are people who donate a $1000 at a time, some a few $100 every month, and sometimes even a sporadic $4 donation from the same person. It's all very valuable and appreciated! One person even donated $100,000 worth of shares to Debian (was worth $140,000 when I checked last week) which was extremely generous. Even though we've been spending a lot, our available funds are also the highest they've ever been, last year we surpassed the $1m mark in available funds for the first time. That's great. As DPL, that allowed me to feel comfortable saying yes to every single request every DD has made (which I did, and even some none-DDs. I'll focus on the challenging aspects further down since that is a seperate question. What are the recent successes I might have missed? I'll list just a few things since you got busy, there's probably a lot more. We're getting a bit better at working with industry. We have a person from Lenovo helping out with hardware support on their latest hardware, we just today had a DD join from Microsoft, and Microsoft also covered our LWN subscriptions for the last year (thanks!). There's lots of ways big Linux users out there are helping us out, Hetzner gave us a huge discount on our backup server hosting, Lenovo gave us a significant discount on some servers we bought for DSA hosted stuff, and the list goes on. Our local groups initiative is also taking form again. I can't wait to see more from this, covid put a real dampener on this, but between the Debian reunion even in Germany and DebConf22, I hope there will be some great local team packs made that can be sent around the world well before the end of the year. We've moved from Alioth to Salsa (GitLab instance) in 2017. This created a big leap forward in how easy it is to make contributions to Debian. Since then, Gnome, KDE, and many other free software projects have also implemented a GitLab instance, it's now a very familiar and common way to do things in the free software world, and I think this was a significant and important change for us, even though it came with its own set of speedbumps and challenges too. We've gained a riscv64 port. Along with the lowrisc project to make a fully open source CPU, it opens up the possibility to have a truly and fully free hardware and software stack using Debian. It seems like it may still be some years before you could easily buy a phone/e-reader/router/laptop/desktop/server/etc with a riscv64 cpu that can run Debian, but the foundations are being laid, and I consider that critically important. Hardware is increasingly being locked down, and we don't know how long it will be before you have to contact your manufacturer in order to get an unlock code in order to install an alternative operating system on a typical laptop (as
Re: Question to all candidates: Ongoing/future legal projects
On 2022/03/25 11:41, Jonathan Carter wrote: For example, I requested $217 for a one-time SSD & RAM upgrade to help operate lintian.d.o in November of 2021. My request was not granted. I didn't even receive a response from Jonathan (other than a request for more information, with which I complied) even though I followed up on my request. That's odd, I usually approve them fast (as in, within 24h) because it's a quick and trivial mail, but I can't find your request in my reimbursements folder at all. I'm in meetings now but will take a look later on if it reached the dpl-archives at all. It's not in the dpl mail archives either (nothing from you in November, no request nor a follow-up). I even checked the rest of the year, mails from you on other topics in other months are there though. I've asked the treasurers to check if they have seen your request too, but from what I can tell in my local folders and on the leader@ archives, it doesn't seem that your request ever reached me. -Jonathan
Re: Question to all candidates: Ongoing/future legal projects
Hi Felix On 2022/03/25 02:18, Felix Lechner wrote: For example, I requested $217 for a one-time SSD & RAM upgrade to help operate lintian.d.o in November of 2021. My request was not granted. I didn't even receive a response from Jonathan (other than a request for more information, with which I complied) even though I followed up on my request. That's odd, I usually approve them fast (as in, within 24h) because it's a quick and trivial mail, but I can't find your request in my reimbursements folder at all. I'm in meetings now but will take a look later on if it reached the dpl-archives at all. My idea for a Disbursements Committee was thus born by a simple desire for greater accountability (or, at a minimum, a response). Plus, if elected, I could never issue that $217 check to myself. I disagree about some of your previous statements to make it more difficult to spend money, I still want to work towards having an expenditure policy, which I still hoped to finish the last month or so, but there was just really too much going on. The idea would be that there's some clear document that makes it really easy for someone to know whether they can apply for something or not, and I think if it hits a few checklist items that makes it a braindead yes, then we shouldn't even require DPL approval. So, I would go for making it even easier to spend money than not to. During my 2 terms we went from having around ~$750k in available funds to having about ~$1.25m now. Every time I mention what we've been spending on (like DSA upgrades, hardware for DDs, etc), we get more donations. As long as this is the case, I have no problem with DDs spending any money they want to if it helps them make Debian better. After all, this is literally the only reason why someone donates money to Debian in the first place. So, I don't believe that the Debian funds should be preserved like some kind of treasure. We should make it as easy as possible for people to give us money, and as easy as possible for DDs to spend money, all within our legal and social frameworks, of course. As for your question about "huge wasteful spending," yes, I do worry about Debian's expenditures in light of Jonathan's comment that he is happy to "give a lawyer a lot of money." [3] Happy is a loaded word that you chose there. If I have to spend money on lawyers to protect the project and its members I will do so without hesitation. I'd /rather/ not have to spend that at all, and find it disappointing that you would even hold that against me. I have worked with teams of lawyers. They get expensive fast. Well, at least there's one thing we agree on. Either way, the right person to address your question is Jonathan, whom I copied as a courtesy. Jonathan ran on financial transparency platforms in both the 2020 election [4] and again in 2021. [5] Besides the updates I've sent out on our financial status every few months, that's not something that will get better soon in the next term. That's to no fault of me (or a next DPL), I've had a bunch of meetings with the treasurer team and TOs to talk about this, and there's a lot of things that need to be fixed along the way in order for us to get the accounting that we need. I'm sure we'll get there. Our TOs have indicated that they are willing to switch accounting systems, use the same expense codes, etc to help make it easier to aggregate data much faster (as in, possibly even almost real-time). That's a whole rabbit hole on itself, but I do believe having a basic incorporation of Debian, along with better agreements with our TOs will be a good starting point to get our financial reporting on the standards that we want them. -Jonathan
