Re: [gentoo-project] Encourage donations to Gentoo developers

[Alec Warner]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 3:02 PM Maciej Barć <xgqt@g.o> wrote:
>
> Hi Rich!
>
> Thanks a lot for reminding the reason why the GF "payments" are a bad idea.
>
> Do you know what is GF's stance on funding "local" dev HW? I think
> people inside toolchain/chromium/firefox or other projects requiring a
> lot of computation power to run various compilation/test configurations
> could use HW provided/sponsored by the Foundation.

Again, for transparency, I am President of the Gentoo Foundation.

I think we have traditionally two options here:
 - One is we buy hardware, it's owned by Gentoo (Foundation) and we
operate it as our asset. We typically do not deploy assets to people's
homes because there is risk (of that person going away) and because
the benefit of 'local' hardware are experienced by one person (the
person in that locality). So value-wise having a 'local' asset is very
similar to having a hosted asset.
 - The second is we buy hardware and basically give it to someone.
This has a few other problems:
   - Accounting paperwork for having that person as a vendor; the
developer should likely be treating that machine as income; paying
taxes on it, etc.
   - Ethical considerations on allocation of Foundation resources
(fairness, basically.)

We have traditionally offered hosted resources, which we have done in
the past and continue to endeavour to do.
We also have the nitrokey program, where we purchase assets and ship
them directly to developers:
 - This is an equal access program, everyone is eligible for 1
Foundation provided Nitrokey and we ensure we have enough funds to
cover the entire cost of that program.
 - Accounting and logistics-wise, the items are so small and so costly
to run logistics for, we just choose not to do it (so developers who
leave do not ship their keys back to us.)
   - It's probable that technically the developers who leave Gentoo
should record the value of the nitrokey as income, but in most
jurisdictions the cost is so small it doesn't matter anyway.

I don't believe we have enough money to buy everyone a local
development rig, and I'm not really sure that program really adds
significant value over a hosted solution, so I'd likely frame any
local development around that value-delivery conversation.

-A

>
> On 2/15/23 23:50, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 5:36 PM Maciej Barć <xgqt@g.o> wrote:
> >>
> >> I've also heard that GF will never touch this because it is against the
> >> foundation's laws, "because Gentoo cannot pay itself"... shrug.
> >
> > No such legal/formal restriction exists (the bylaws even have some
> > provisions for employees (we don't have any)), but there are many
> > reasons that this can get messy.
> >
> > I personally think it would make way more sense to just make it easy
> > for developers to list some kind of info about how to donate to them,
> > and just leave it all up to individuals.
> >
> > Offhand some issues with Gentoo handing out "salaries" or anything
> > close to it are:
> >
> > 1. There will be endless debates over who gets how much.  Some
> > obviously do more than others, and so you either pay everybody the
> > same and hear grumbling about inactive devs, or pay people based on
> > activity and then have grumbling or manipulation of the metrics.
> > 2. Gentoo just doesn't bring in that much money in the first place, so
> > it would be a lot of arguing over what probably will end up being $50
> > here and $100 there.
> > 3. Now you have a ton of tax overhead, potentially in many
> > jurisdictions.  Reimbursing expenses at least in the US isn't taxed,
> > but when you start paying people for contributions you have a bunch of
> > legal issues.
> > 4. Then you just have the general volunteer culture.  Gentoo currently
> > is an all-volunteer organization, and as such has a certain culture.
> > If you look at FOSS organizations that tend to pay substantial amounts
> > of people you end up with professional management and so on.  That
> > isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is a big change.
> >
> > It just is an issue that I don't think anybody wants to go near.  If
> > people want to donate to their favorite dev I doubt anybody would be
> > bothered.  It just doesn't make sense to have the foundation operate
> > as a payment processor when you have lots of companies that offer
> > exactly that service, or things like cryptocurrency if you want to go
> > that route.
> >
>
> --
> Have a great day!
>
> ~ Maciej XGQT Barć
>
> xgqt@g.o
> Gentoo Linux developer
> (emacs, math, ml, scheme, sci)