Re: [gentoo-project] Is an umbrella organization a good choice for Gentoo?

[Michał Górny]

On Wed, 2020-08-26 at 19:39 -0700, Alec Warner wrote:
> If the objective is to compare the cost of the Foundation to an umbrella;
> I'm all for it!
>
> My primary critique of the blog post is in the financials and income
> forecasting. I have two major objections.
>
> (1) The foundation makes more than simply individual donations. The
> methodology where we ignore a large portion of revenue seems rather
> arbitrary to me.

Any model is 'rather arbitrary' by the very definition of it.  I've
never claimed it's perfect or precise.  I've explicitly considered
the worst case scenario.

>  I might work on a more numerical model. Really what I
> think we want is some moving average of past years (by revenue source) and
> we say things like "well we make an average of Y$ from source Z, and we
> made this over a period of A years, so we can forecast some of this revenue
> into future years." It would be a discounted model, but I don't think it's
> valuable to discount these extra sources of revenue to 0. Or to put this
> another way; why don't we discount individual paypal donations to 0 also?
> The answer appears to be because we have a historical model that says we
> are likely to get some recurring donation revenue...which then leads me to
> ask why we are not applying this same heuristic to other revenue sources
> for the Foundation? So in short, I don't agree with only using paypal
> donations and we should forecast other revenue sources.
>

I've included all sources in the chart to let people decide. The main
thing about 'small donations' is that they're distributed over a lot of
people.  So yes, arbitrarily it makes sense to assume that all of people
donating to Gentoo won't suddenly stop doing that.

The problem with 'big donations' is that they're bound to a single
entity.  They're a binary thing.  Either we get them, and we have lots
of money, or we don't and we don't.  One year a person donates $15000
and we're rich.  Another year only $5000, and our revenue halves.  Yet
another year there's no such donation.  Yes, surely you could try
averaging it and assuming that *maybe* next year there will be another
$5000 donation and it will even out.  Or maybe not because it was just
one person donating.

Commission and interest are small enough we can skip them for now.

GSoC money is somewhat constant lately but it all hangs on decision of
one entity.  Google says we're in, cool.  Google says we're out,
we don't have that money.  And it's not exactly that our GSoC project
count is improving.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny