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

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 07/24/2013 08:31 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> 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?
> 

Sorry, maybe I was unclear. I meant that if Red Hat pulled out its
contributions in favor of croudfunding, you'd lose an enormous amount
of the active contributors' time. Working for bug bounties vs. working
as a full-time job is a huge difference. The point I was really trying
to make here was that if we went full-crowdsourcing, the effect would
be basically the same as it is now because Red Hat would remain the
primary (likely only) contributor to funding.


> 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.
> 

Right, and what I'm saying is that if you took away Red Hat's
contributions, there's absolutely no way that the remaining community
could afford to keep the lights on, let alone continue to innovate.


>> 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.
> 

Well, in this instance they are. Red Hatters have a vested interest in
doing their work in Fedora. Application developers as a general rule
will do their development on whichever distro makes it easiest for
them. They tend to be more fickle (and in my view, if they were
suddenly asked to pay for the privilege of working on Fedora, they'd
jump to Arch or Ubuntu or Debian or $DISTRO).


>> 
>> 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?
> 

Well, right now that's basically what we are doing already. Fedora is
an independent entity (on paper) that just happens to have funding
provided almost exclusively from a single source. Perhaps I
misunderstood how you were planning to display that information based
on your earlier comments about Red Hat. It seemed to me that you were
looking to reduce Red Hat's visibility in the project. If that was not
the case, I apologize.


>> 
>> 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 ).
> 

My understanding is that Fedora is registered as a non-profit
organization in the United States which I believe allows for anyone to
donate to it *today* if they so chose. The fact that the only
donations we see are *time* rather than *money* is an interesting fact
(and given Red Hat's sponsorship covering most things anyway, I think
that's a better expenditure from our community members).


> 
>> 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.
> 

Well, most of the time, FESCo members are pretty good about abstaining
from votes when they have a conflict of interest, but I'm sure we
could work out the governance of such a system in a reasonable fashion
if this is an approach we end up taking. One might argue as well that
the Board is essentially already the Financial SIG.


>> 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
> 

Perhaps the aforementioned "Financial SIG" could also be responsible
for contacting upstreams about proposed bounties before they go live
publicly to confirm that the upstream would accept a (properly
designed and compatible) contribution. That way we can simply reject
bounty submissions if upstream plans to refuse the fix.

Also, we'd need to work out when exactly to collect the money for the
bounty (and when to refund it). I'd suggest that in order to ensure
that no one gets screwed out of it, the bounty should go into an
escrow account for one year. If no one has accepted the task in that
time, it should be refunded to the bounty poster unless they opt to
extend it another year. Similarly, after a bug has been accepted, they
should have a year to complete it (or request extension) or else it
gets refunded to the bounty poster. Seem reasonable?

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