[oi-dev] is there a vector for donating to OI?

Fri Sep 7 10:53:36 UTC 2012

On Sep 7, 2012, at 3:14 PM, Jonathan Adams <t12nslookup at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7 September 2012 06:01,  <garrett.damore at dey-sys.com> wrote:
>> I have no problem with illumos handling earmarking.  In the future, I'll
>> want to take a percentage of such donations for illumos general use, but I
>> expect it to be reasonable -- perhaps 20% or 25% - and that seems not
>> inappropriate given that OI uses illumos as its base anyway.
> 
> I am not sure about the 20% mark ... it seems high to me since OI
> projects could and should support the community outside of OI.
> 
> I understand that for small donations this might _seem_ reasonable,
> and that while there is little or no governance of OI it is hard to
> see how this funding is spent in a sensible manner, but 20% is a large
> slice of any cake.

Ultimately, I'm concerned about the health of illumos itself.  We (the initial board members of the foundation) expect to spend significant amounts of money for benefit of all illumos -- including having money that can be used for projects which tend not to be commercially interesting.  (For example, these funds might be used for the graphics drivers or WLAN work, etc.)

I'm thinking about funds that might be spent also on things like common build and test infrastructure, expanded project hosting, etc.  This stuff is *expensive*.  If we only do bounties, then the project will probably die.  (I've proposed to the illumos board a rough spending allocation of 30% for bounties/development, 30% for infrastructure and supporting tech, 30% for marketing, and 10% for administration overhead.  (We need to hire a project admin - what would in other terms be an "Executive Director" for the illumos project -- this has to be a person without other commercial affiliations in the community  so we really probably do need to pay someone to do this work.  I don't expect it to be a lot though. :-)

You need think about this in the context of large commercial sponsors.  I think 20-25% is the right figure for giving back to the central organization.  Think about this way:  Ultimately, illumos represents greater than 20% of the effort and code base (at least the code base that is actively maintained by this community and not just incorporated verbatim).  My fear is without this we could wind up with a lot of funds earmarked, but ultimately have a central organization that is financially unhealthy.  That wouldn't be a good state to be in.

Ultimately *right now* there is no preallocation.  But when the bylaws are settled there will be an amount that will be agreed upon by the foundation board members.

Of course OI is free to set up its own foundation (but this is non-trivial), and of course its possible for a sponsor to give directly (e.g. by hiring developers, etc.)  But that will come without involvement of the illumos foundation.

> 
> I know I've already said my peace and am happy for the Illumos
> Foundation to take and earmark the funds (it seems by far the sanest
> option IMHO) and I could see a 10-15% cut straight to Illumos, I would
> prefer not to see it any higher than that.

Again, the illumos Board will set the percentage here.  It will most likely be a percentage for all earmarks (e.g. if someone wants to give money to fund development of virtualization, then the foundation will take a cut for the general fund.) 

I'll pass on your concerns to the board about the sizing, although again I don't agree for the reasons I've elaborated.

> 
> I would expect any projects, that OI specifically gets involved in,
> that affect the Illumos kernel, will benefit Illumos directly and
> because of this the OI ring-fenced funding will benefit Illumos too,
> but indirectly.

Possibly very very indirectly.  Its hard to see that in very much detail, since I don't know how funding will be applied within OI.  I'd *recommend* that effort/money ought to be given to improving the quality and release engineering as a priority over just integrating yet more packages.  But that's just my opinion.

> 
>> As far as deciding how it gets spent outside of the earmark - I think the OI
>> community will still need to appoint someone or a small body of people, to
>> determine the further allocation of the earmark.  That sounds like
>> governance to me -- even if not much.
> +1
> 
> my first preference, as I've said, would be bounties, although as was
> suggested some contribution towards transport funds for specific OI
> dev's to Illumos events might help the bitterness in the community.

Maybe.  I think there are other ways too… OI needs some unsexy tasks done -- like release engineer, QA, etc.   In fact, I think these are far more urgent than just adding new packages.

	- Garrett

> 
> Jon
> 
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