Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 07/24/2013 11:35 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> While I*am*  pleased that you've given some real thought to this, I
> think you may have missed the real point I was trying to make there,
> which also ties back to the original purpose of that thread.
>
> Fedora is hemorrhaging users to other distributions (and to
> closed-source platforms). I tried to note that the people maintaining
> the vast majority of the pieces that correspond to an "operating
> system" in Fedora (loosely the Ring 0-2 pieces in that design) are
> almost entirely Red Hatters. This information is based on admittedly
> imperfect metrics (mostly dist-git commits), but even if it's off by a
> 15% margin of error, the contributions still have Red Hat in the vast
> majority.

Hmm not following

On numerous occasion it has been stated that Red Hat employees are just 
like any other member of the Fedora community and should be treated as 
such with the only difference being that on their paycheck says Red Hat 
instead of <insert some other company ( so are you saying that is not 
the case?

And as such their in the case of the "bounty" donations would just be 
"bonus" to the existing salary as it might be for anyone else if that's 
what you are wondering.



>
> The problem with crowdsourcing is that you have to have someone who
> wants your product enough to pay money to see it happen.

That would be ourselves and user base as in our community and it's users 
but for something like this to work we cannot just copy/paste the 
concept as is and blindly apply to the project we need to adapt and 
adjust it to us.

>   There are
> definitely some pieces of your proposal that could be implemented
> (I've been arguing for Bug/RFE bounties for the last five years, both
> with Red Hat funding and later with crowdfunding). I'd really like to
> see FESCo have the ability to set such bounties as a way to actually
> influence direction in the project. So on this I agree wholeheartedly.
>
> Unfortunately, the current Fedora user ecosystem*really*  doesn't lend
> itself to crowdfunding because the only significant community of
> non-Red Hat contributors are those operating on the upper levels of
> the stack (the application developers and the alternative desktop
> developers, primarily). This tends to be a set of contributors that
> are fickle in the platform they work on (especially since in many
> cases, they are supporting multiple distributions already).

Here to me it's seems again that you implies that Red Hatters are 
"different" from other community members so it would be good if we can 
establish if that is the case or not.

>
> In other words, if we switched to a crowdfunded model, the primary
> contributions would*still*  be coming directly or indirectly from Red
> Hat. The only difference here is that now it would look like Red Hat
> was taking a stealth role in Fedora's governance instead of standing
> tall as its primary benefactor (and beneficiary).

I dont see how or why that has to be the case.

Are you implying in a such model we should keep our sponsor hidden 
instead of having something like a page with Platinum, 
Gold,Silver,Bronze for companies as is being done on flock and something 
similar as is being done on lwn as in "*✭ supporter ✭" *displayed next 
to our community members name everywhere where it's displayed in our 
infrastructure/web?

>
> Also, you mention later in the thread about moving Fedora's name out
> of the USA. Given the current US climate around "outsourcing", this
> could be a significant legal hurdle and is probably not a fight worth
> having right at this moment.

It has been mentioned to me privately in a mail and a on this thread 
that the us legal and tax system would be a stopper at least while 
Fedora was under the trademark.

>
>
> tl;dr version: If we switched to a crowdfunding model, Red Hat would
> still be the primary contributor and little would change.

Other for the fact that this would allow everyone to contribute to the 
project not just Red Hat which in turn would make us less depended on it 
( or they spending money on us from their point of view ).


>   I strongly
> support opening up a donation program to support bug/rfe/design
> bounties. I'd like to see that pool of money managed by FESCo.

Agreed although I'm unsure if FESCO should handle that process beside 
the obvious points of there might be conflicts of interest, they have 
enough on their plate as it seems so a special Financial SIG with 
representative from each sub-community ( with perhaps the exception of 
the service sub-communities which would just fall under whomever is in 
charge of the finance for the project )  might better fit.

>   If
> people want to donate to bounties for individual upstream projects,
> it's probably better for them to do that directly.

I disagree we need to increase the number of contributors here within 
the project and sorry to say that but we cant do that if we forward 
everybody upstream ( which is one of the reason I have been so reluctant 
forward our QA community members directly upstream always ).

We also want to be the downstream distribution of chose for upstreams so 
we need to somehow make it attractive for them participate in the 
project and this could be one of those factors.

Bounty hunters they themselves could donate a portions of their bounty 
upstream themselves if they wanted to.

Ofcourse no bounty would be paid out until it has been accepted by upstream

JBG
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