Re: [gentoo-nfp] What could the Gentoo Foundation do with money?

[William L. Thomson Jr.]

On Sun, 2008-05-25 at 02:17 +0200, Luca Barbato wrote:
> William L. Thomson Jr. wrote:
> > For more of a fun thread. I am just going to list a bunch of ideas I
> > personally have had wrt to what Gentoo could do with money. They are not
> > listed in any particular order.
> >
> >      1. Provide all devs with a base development system
>
> Oh cool, wait no. There is a direct adopt-a-dev stuff people could think
> more personal and fun.

Oh yeah, I forgot because the list is empty, and all devs have
everything they could want or need. Right, what was I thinking.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/userrel/adopt-a-dev/

I bet the request to fulfillment rate is quite low. But yes it works so
lets keep doing things that way. Forget considering any others.

> >      2. Sponsors devs to travel to events, seminars, summits, etc
> >      3. Sponsors devs for educational purposes, certifications, college,
> >         trade courses, etc
> >      4. Hold an annual Gentoo Conference for all developers and users
> >      5. Pay for infra services
> >      6. Buy bitchen hardware and toys for infra
>  >      8. Increase schwag and freebie stuff to give away at events
>  >      9. Sponsors development via Gentoo summer of code, or fall,
>  > 	  winter, or spring summer of code.
>
> meh, non core stuff sponsors usually provide.

Really who? Who does anything like that other than Google? Again back to
the sponsors. So go find one or more. If it's so easy, then we should
have these things already.

> >      7. Buy new hardware to install/certify Gentoo on ( PS 4, new procs,
> >         big iron, etc)
>
> Usually certification happens from the other side...

Right, FYI I got that concept from a Redhat employee and engineer. It
does not happen from the other side. It's called vendor relationships,
and we have 0 like RH, Suse, Ubuntu, and others have.

Notice how Ubuntu and Sun partnered to have Glassfish certified for
development purposes on Ubuntu. We have NO JEE anything. Not even for
development. Much less JEE severs for people to run.

Your comments, oh just find a sponsor or someone to do it. Well despite
years of calls for help, efforts by a few contributors. We still have no
JEE server, no JBoss, no Glassfish, no WebLogic, etc. The first two are
FOSS, but HUGE, and require 1-2 dedicated maintainers.

Which even if maintained 100%, neither Sun or RH would certify their JEE
server on Gentoo. Last I checked some of Sun's certification TCK or etc
process required payment. It's not a free certification process.

> >     10. Donate/contribute to other projects and charities
>
> We donate already patches, space and so on.

This is a thread about $. Nice way to tweak things to your point of view
though.

> >     11. Purchase membership for Gentoo in other foundations ( Gentoo
> >         being a member of Gnome foundation, or etc )
>
> Depressing.

To you. So that also means no representation in Gnome. So when Gnome
does something that benefits other distros. We just have to sit there,
like it, and take what we get.

> >     12. Provide hardware to devs working on certain areas, device
> >         drivers etc ( like buying a bunch of video cards for those
> >         supporting binary drivers, or odd/expensive hardware )
>
> Usually hw is provided by the people making it for that purpose.

Really, so AMD/ATI and nVidia provide us hardware now? We have no users,
using any ATI or nVidia card right now. Good to know.

Also our livecd's have drivers ready to go for any RAID, SCSI, etc cards
out there.

> >     13. Buy licenses to commercial apps so we can package and make
> >         ebuilds available for them.
>
> AHAHAHA no, the commercial app corp could provide us with a license if
> they want us to package their stuff.

Yep, and so how many have done that? Who does that effect us or our
users?

> >     14. Provide FREE release media
>
> Why?

Um, have you ever looked into the costs. Per others comments, it was a
lose $ deal. So why not just do it for free entirely. It's cool, users
would like it. More people would be able to install and run Gentoo.

But yeah, getting people free install media to a free OS. That's
completely stupid. My bad.


> >     15. Marketing and promotional materials ( flyers to hand out at
> >         events, banners, booth displays, etc )
>
> The best advertising is the word passing from happy users to other
> people willing to try it.

Yeah, people at trade shows love to hear our words. They are so quick to
run and install Gentoo just because of our words. The remember Gentoo
hours later after they have visited several other booths, and gotten
media from them.

But yes our word of mouth stuff is so much better than any media. Heck
we don't need banners or anything in a booth. What was I thinking, we
can really grass roots this. I will bring some cardboard and write on it
Gentoo for LWE in August. Why didn't we do that sooner.

-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.
amd64/Java/Trustees
Gentoo Foundation