Fedora and the world

[Max Spevack]

On Thu, 15 May 2008, John Poelstra wrote:

> Or I wonder if it would be easier for someone that wants to 
> financially help Fedora to sponsor an activity directly that benefits 
> Fedora?
>
> For example, if a company or person X wanted to help Fedora they could 
> pay a replicator (or whatever they are called) directly to produce all 
> of the media for Fedora X to be handed out events.  This gets Fedora 
> out of having to handle the funds and allows internally allocated 
> funds to then be used for other purposes.
>
> Perhaps this would cause other accounting/reporting problems... I 
> don't know.

John, you are definitely right about this.  Right now, if someone wants 
to contribute money to Fedora, the best way that they can do it is to 
replace a cost that we are about to incur on our behalf.  For example, 
if some organization wanted to pay for the FUDCon Tshirts, we'd just ask 
them to pay the bill directly for it.

Much, much easier than trying to get money into Red Hat, earmarked for 
Fedora, etc.

We're making baby steps progress to fixing all of this.  The first has 
been a the multi-year project of getting Fedora organized internally, 
with an actual "team", a proper budget (see 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CommunityArchitecture/Expenses), etc.

Next will be the question of "how can someone give money to Red Hat, and 
guarantee that money is spent on Fedora?"  We've had some initial 
conversations with legal about it, but it's not currently an "A level 
priority" that is being pursued and tracked weekly.

If the Fedora Board would like it to be, it certainly has the ability to 
request that some combination of me, Greg, and Paul can change our 
priorities around to make it happen.

>From my perspective, having a guaranteed budget over which the Board, 
FAMSCo, and the Community Architecture team have autonomy has us in 
pretty good shape.

--Max