Re: [gentoo-project] Fundraising for incremental service level

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 6:27 AM Andrey Utkin <andrey_utkin@g.o> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 10:15:43AM +0100, Andrey Utkin wrote:
> > The funding should go directly to people taking the extra responsibility and
> > doing extra work. I imagine funding should go directly to a lead person if
> > possible, or through a legal entity in their control.
>
> Modulo a crowdfunding platform.
> In fact I think crowdfunding platforms are extremely useful in this case and
> should be used.
> I didn't mean users must *send* money directly to Gentoo developers.

Crowdfunding platforms/etc require a legal entity to receive the
money.  That could be an individual or a corp or whatever other
variations on these exist in the local jurisdiction.

Contrary to what you said earlier the Foundation can actually legally
disperse money to its members, but there are a lot of rules around
this and considering we have enough trouble with the books as it is, I
imagine there isn't going to be a lot of excitement about doing
something like this.  In general though the Foundation can pay a
reasonable fee/wage for a service rendered, pay vendors, and so on,
and these people could happen to be Foundation members.  You just have
to do everything right because these sorts of things are more likely
to be scrutinized.

If you want to take the Foundation out of it, then who is getting the
money?  If it is the individual project lead/etc then they're going to
have to handle all the taxes personally around this (both declaring
money received/etc as required, and declaring money paid out - and I
couldn't tell you what the requirements are around this when the
person being paid is in another country), and of course we run the
risk that they run off with the money.  If it is a legal entity then
we're basically running a second Foundation in one way or another.
I'm not saying we can't do that - maybe it would make sense to, but it
isn't like that is effort-free as we've seen with our existing
Foundation.

I personally think that we probably should be doing more rather than
less with things like bug bounties and the like.  The challenge though
is that once you start getting a fair bit of cash flow it can change
the atmosphere in an organization.  Just look at how many FOSS
projects started out as a bunch of people committing to some CVS repo,
and today have 3 layers of lawyers and PR types at the top with a
bunch of programmers basically treated as cogs in a machine at the
bottom.  The org might be non-profit, but it definitely doesn't have
the atmosphere of a community project.  As the amount of cash flow
goes up you start attracting business types and the ability to funnel
money around gets more done than the ability to inspire technical
contribution.  That ends up putting more project managers in
leadership and fewer code monkeys.  It probably does result in more
stuff getting done, but as I said it comes with a culture change.

-- 
Rich

-- 
Rich