Corporate sponsorship ( was Re: Going passive )

[Matt Domsch]

On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 11:39:30PM +0000, Robert 'Bob' Jensen wrote:
> I away start with a joke, I know some don't "get" my sense of humor
> but it is part of who I am and what part of what makes me so hated
> by some. "I can't help but wonder if some $100,000 servers are
> included in that 'several $M US' ;)"

Nah, our servers don't tend to run quite that much apiece, but I'm
always open to large purchase orders. :-)

> The above should not be taken in any way as pointing at Matt's
> employer, it is simply a coincidence that I am replying to him, Matt
> is a fair, honest, decent man in my experience. We all know that we
> will never see numbers from Red Hat concerning their actual
> expenditures to Fedora so even suggesting "several $M US" is an
> insult IMO. Not based in provable facts, seeing that Matt is not
> internal to Red Hat I doubt that he is qualified to make such a
> claim.

With respect and courtesy, I think it's quite easy to get there just
from externally observable fact.

1) The Fully Burdened Labor Rate (not direct salary rate, but
   including salary, benefits, overhead, etc.) for tech companies tends
   to be in the $120-200k/year range (Google yields a few quick
   examples [1][2][3])

2) Red Hat clearly employs 8 or more employees who work full time on
   Fedora efforts.  Infrastructure + CommArch alone gets you at or above
   8, and that hasn't included most of spot's engineering team.  In
   addition, quite a few people are paid at least for a fraction of
   their work hours to contribute to Fedora.  I won't try to guess at
   those numbers though.

3) There are other costs, such as the CommArch budget of $209k [4],
   and Infrastructure services (servers, bandwidth, data center space,
   ...)  which I don't know what they are, but non-zero.

Collectively, I expect that the person-hours of work, similarly
valued, contributed by the large Fedora community is greater than the
sum of these direct costs incurred by Red Hat, but clearly no other
single entity directly contributes as much.


[1] http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/RISC-Migration-TCO-White-Paper2.pdf
    page 7
[2] http://download.intel.com/business/resources/reports/keepingnotebookspastprime.pdf
    page 11
[3] http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2006/02/0602JensenPutnamRoetzheim.html
[4] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_Architecture_expenses


Thanks,
Matt