Debian Financials BoF

So [clears throat] I'm Paulo. I'm from Brazil and I'm a de Deian developer. Um just it's important to say that I'm not I'm not in any treasure I'm not in the treasure Debian team. So and I'm not in in any tr organization for Debian. So I can't I don't have details many details about how is how is this financial financials on Debian the Deian Deian financials I can't speak for the trusted organization I don't know anything about how is how much how how much money we have how many money we have on on Debian but since Deb in Kurichiba in Brazil. It was in 2019. I have helped you with this some parts of of financials or treasure for Deb 19. I was responsible for the financial part. So usually I like to help with that with help with financials, help you with uh spending and and get money and have money for our events on the last the last years. I organized I helped to organize to the minab in Brazil like conf was the event this year. So for the main debuffs we with the experience I had on deb 19. [clears throat] I try to use this experience on on our main debs and basically we have uh in Brazil we have three ways to to have money to organize the main debs. One is from sponsors like we have here in Deb. We had some sponsors in Brazil on the last uh this years on the last three years. We have some money from Debian especially since since Boris last year we started to offer buseries for some for some people go there especially Debian Deia contributors to go to our main deb in Brazil we offered busteries like we have here at Deb uh for sure it's using a much smaller size for for that much much less money for that too. And uh we since we have experience with donations we open a every year we open a crowd founding where some people can donate money for the deb. So basically people can we we try to organize on a very easy way not with a lot of bureaucracy but basically ask you can donate any money you want any amount that that you want to donate and uh we will list your name on our website. We put your name there but we don't we don't quote how much money you donated. It's just for uh a page for two things for this these people. I usually can open here to show uh it's in Portuguese donations and we start to we define some goals for it to see ah our first goal is to cover a bronzy tier. this when we reach this goal, we we change for um bronze and um silver tiers. And then the last one is the three gold, bronze, silver and gold tiers. And they people like to donate for us. Usually they are Brazilians there for our event. And then we list the names here. all the names here. Uh if you if you don't want to to have your name listed, you can ask us and we remove your name. In Brazil, we have two ways to donate. One is using something like PayPal. Using PayPal and we have a way that that's it's something Brazilian something that you can it's a wire transfer basically. wire transfer but it's easier with less bureaucracy for transfer money to the association. We have association there. I forgot to say uh we have association Brazil to to to receive the donations receive the sponsorships and pay the the expenses. So I I I was seeing that for Deb conf this year it was there were a lot of discussion about uh to have a money enough to use for the conference. Um I know every year we can see every year um even with the sponsorships Debian needed to put some money for organize the event especially I believe especially because of the the buseries so Debian needed to transfer money from the the tr organization to the deb normal you can say but in the in a maybe in a deal It was better if Debbie Conf could have make the opposite. Have more money to to get more money to give to Debian. Deb giving money to Debia instead of Debian give to Deb conf. I know this is very hard. I think maybe almost impossible. I was look at the accounts in Brazil in 2018. We have uh in the end of the event, we have a little uh money sparing. We could get more money than we spent, but we we're not counting with the busies. If we put the busies, it's the same. It's the same like all the other years that had to put money on the on the event on the transfer money for the deb. Um during the discussion some some some on one day I gave a suggestion to maybe we could open a crowdify fun for de for de confidence year unfortunately I almost have no answer about that it's just one a small talk about that is possible but this this idea was not uh not implemented I believe because uh a lack of time from the organ organizers that is it's normal we know that but maybe for the next year we can think early about this idea to have a crowd funding I don't know if this is something from Brazil but I noticed that most of we have we have we don't have a a lot of contributors in Brazil with packaging or translation or all kind of things that you can do for Debian. But Brazilians feel like very happy to donate money for Debian or for our for Deb in this situation because it's something that you can make easier than make a package or or help with translator. Some people I I I saw a lot of I heard a lot of people say, "Oh, I can't I can't help I don't know how to package. I don't have time to translate. At least I can donate money for the good of the event for the event can be uh can be realized can be take the event can take take place. So maybe we can have the same idea around the world. Maybe people can donate money for Debian in benefit of the Debian conf because it seems more to me it seems more um concrete when you donate the money for the event for for this event get uh happen then just give money for Debian because we if you give money to Deb don't know very well what will happen with this money what Deb use this this this amount that you donate maybe donate for de conf is more concrete I easier donate for the our local event and then on this small discussion about crowdfunding for that conf uh we knew that SPI has a page for donation that probably we can talk with them to open um open a page submit donations for Debian more regular or for Debian for Deb conf I don't know if it's better one or another but I would like to suggest you if you can have a crowdfunding for the next deb especially uh there are some pages about how to donate money to Debian for the trusted organization maybe you need to spread the word about that say people that they can they can donate money for Debian and u basically for now this is my ideas and you can open for discussion right there is a one here the microphone >> there's one here okay uh so I can see two potential problem one is you mentioned that it works for local mini devcon I'm afraid that for bigger events it's much much less personal much less because donating for local Brazilian mini debcon is good I know the people this is my culture this is my something depcon global depcon for many people might be felt like it's global it's big it's much less concrete especially when you have already so many sponsors so why should I as individual person give something when you have so many spans the sponsors. Second problem could be uh you already shown the page with four different organizations. So even if we should uh open this crowdfunding how should I give money? Should I give to France to Debian Switzerland to Debian Debbian to SPI to something else? So before opening we should discuss how to streamline is especially as this is global event. So you could open this for people from European Union, from US, Canada, many different countries. So it could be potential problem for Yeah. organizational problem. >> Yeah. Good things to to think about. So, you guys probably don't know it, but uh I've been it's been years. I'm trying to find a way to have an OpenStack cloud for Debian use in general. Uh it could speed up many things. uh for example I find it uh not as as good as it should be in the current state where we have to run things in other cloud providers for with donated VMs think it be much more healthy if it was on our own infrastructure so uh and then for example I I've tried to give VMs from my employer employer like if you didn't know fasttrack is hosted have in formaniac we're giving two VMs to the reproduc reproducible build project but all that is very small scale and that's not what I want uh so I've asked uh famous French company uh with three letters to to to offer us some uh hardware to host that unfortunately it didn't didn't work and I went through many hoops and then I'm still there with no funding And I think probably one the only way to do it would be to do a massive crowdfunding saying okay I need $300,000 for hardware and maybe $100,000 for the hosting in three racks during that that many years. I haven't done it yet because I want to have your opinion about it because I see a direct conflict between me doing that to do a small part of the Debian infrastructure against the general donation we in in the Debian project for doing many other things like running the current infrastructure running them com having food for lunch and these type of things. So I'm if I took the microphone is to have your opinion guys if you think it would be a good idea to start such crowdfunding with the direct uh objective to do only that which is having hardware and hosting space to do a cloud for Debian. How what do you think about this idea? Someone asked there microphone >> who's going to run it. I think that's the main problem. Yes. Yes, it is. >> So that there's there's also that is that when when you do hosting there there's the physical access to the servers. Um, I think it would be professional and and the good thing to do to ask a hosting provider to do that for us, have enough spare hardware in in the facility so that they have the spare for us and they could do it operated 20 24/7, 7 days a week. That's my objective. Of course, that will also cost some money, but I think that's the only reasonable way to do it. Okay, so that's for the hardware access and for maintaining the cloud itself. There's myself, some other people that also contributed to the OpenStack packaging that are volunteering for that. Uh I have some other people that would be okay to do the networking part. So I think that that would be covered at least at the software level and for where to host [sighs] uh how to get the service that is not uh this I I haven't uh approached the problem yet because I think it's only a question about having enough money to ask for a service provider to do it for us. Uh just he is asking for to talk first. He has it for a long time. >> Okay. Uh just uh I guess uh I wanted to comment that on that because my perspective uh is um I'm uh I guess I'm here from AMD. So hey, we're a platinum sponsor. I figured a way to get uh get some money to uh to Debian for that. Um and and part of that though uh part of the reason why that is is because um you know the amount of uh money that I've gotten from Debian uh for buying out hardware is would have been putting us in maybe maybe a silver tier or possibly even gold tier already just on like the amount of money coming from Debian to uh for hardware for our CI infrastructure. Um, and so, you know, now at least we're we're net positive and contributing out to Debian. Um, but I was making a lot of like uh it wasn't just it wasn't just Debian that I was trying to like solicit hardware and solicit uh donations from for this continuous integration infrastructure. Um, you know, I've been reaching out to universities. Uh, so the University of Oregon is doing some hosting for us. The University of Calgary is doing some hosting for us. Um, various different companies are have been donating hardware. I I think there's uh organizations that we could reach out to uh that, you know, maybe we don't actually have to pay for all like like all of that. Uh maybe maybe there's uh ways to do it a little bit um you know where where they can provide services as a donation. If I can just very quickly, we are not there yet. We don't even have money to to buy hardware. So that's it. Let's first think about having hardware and then we think later where to host it. If we don't have the money, let's not discuss that. >> Well, I I I don't know. Like you can't you can't actually even go out and buy hardware until you know where you're going to put it. Like >> this. >> So look, um hi, I'm Bale. Um let's drag this conversation back from the sort of uh open cloud or CI thing to a more general question that was asked that I wanted to try and answer which is you know how do you go about choosing the thing that you decide to run a crowdfunding kind of campaign for? uh you made an excellent point that for something like a mini Debcon in a particular country, I think it's very easy for people to understand what the the trade-off is. what's the benefit of the contribution they're making. And the thing that I have over the years drawn from that kind of observation is that it works a whole lot better to spin up crowdfunding campaigns for specific objectives and not for the good of the project or for the good of having a conference once a year or something. So, it's not clear to me that spinning up a crowdfunding campaign for quote unquote Deb makes sense, but spinning one up to do something specific within the context of Deb, you know, to make meals available or something would probably be more successful. Even then, I'm not completely convinced. It still seems to me that it makes and and in your question, if you wanted to use crowdfunding as a mechanism to raise money to build that kind of infrastructure, I would very much have it be specifically articulated as to what the thing is that you're trying to accomplish and what it's going to cost and why that's the benefit. I think that makes the whole decision process on the part of the people who might put money forward much easier to comprehend. >> Yeah. for for deb I believe we have two questions here that is um donate for the event for the for the benefit of the event you can have your name listed there as someone that you are not a related to a company you are not a company owner or don't work or any company and then we want to contribute to the event even if you are donating 10 a 10 or $10 or 50 Brazilian eyes you are contributing some way. I think this is something good even if if a small if a small amount that you can donate but other question is what is the worst thing that can happen if you open a a crowdfunding for that for decom the worst thing that people don't donate I believe but if you open this possibility you can say okay h we are accepting money for companies and for as you say in Brazil physical people not related to companies but I think there is no bad side for accepting money for from people. I think people that pe people that can donate will feel h will feel happy with that and uh yeah this is my my point of view about for deb specifically for the event specifically but I think it's good for for Brazil we said h we are we are receiving money to buy for for the busies specifically we receive money to help with food accommodation and travel and the other expenses that we have. We don't we don't close the what what kind of expenses we have but we say expenses expenses in general and it helps I I believe for the be confident to help too but the most part the most important part I don't feel it will be something bad for the event I think >> um so I don't know if there's been any updates to this since uh since last time I checked but um you know I've seen people say you know should I donate to Debian and then the answer was well no because you know five six years ago they said Debian said that they had all the money that they need um and I don't know if we have actually you know said that that's no longer true and my understanding at least is that's no longer true. >> Yes. Yeah. There are some discussion about that from the last year to now. Yeah, last year we have a discussion about from with the treasure team on decon of Korea and there are some emails talking about that that we are spending money and uh I think if in some years in this in this situation that you are going now the money will end. I understand that if you are transfer money to debs and and we are spending that we because we are spending more that we are gathering this is the issue pro basically >> yeah and and I mean I saw that uh but I I I don't know like we we we probably need to communicate that uh very clearly to the people donating um or or who are considering donating Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I saw when I I talked about crowdfund and someone said I don't agree with Debian ask money for I said the normal people I could I wanted to say I said I think I wrote regular people. I was talking people in general people that are not the contributors or something like that and someone said I don't agree with that. I think Debian shouldn't ask money for people. I don't know why he didn't like that but he he doesn't like this idea but for me it's something normal I believe. Any opinion about that? I think one important thing is if I spend like €10 to Debian I want to make sure that I help Debian with it. But um we have I in the future we may have some major financial problems and then €10 or even €100 do not solve any problem for Debian. And so if I like to spend something I would also spend for a small event where I know even this small amount of money will help those people to change to improve something. But uh saying crowdfunding for Debian and um if I see correctly 7,000 rand uh no not randale is like $1,200. So this not this does not change anything for the Debian project as a whole and even for Debcon uh I think this amount of money does not make any change and that's a problem if people spend money but then they see oh the deb costs like one 200,000 I spent something to it but was it worse to spend it there to this huge event did I change something with my donation I see. I see some. >> Thank you. Uh I found the way we vote at Debian really useful. The Kors and Schulz method is really useful for our societies and our democratic humanity. Why not correlated uh these devote uh solution or package with um found crowdfoundings? What do you think? What would be the idea exactly more with more [clears throat] details do you think? >> Oh, it was just south. >> Okay. Yeah. >> Uh yes. Uh just for context, I'm OSD. I'm the Debian France treasurer. Uh so we have seen for the past few months uh in Debian France an influx of um let's say unprompted donations. Uh we believe that this stems from an announcement that was made by my uh by the president of Deian France when he submitted his uh financial report last year. well a few months ago for the previous year. Uh so yes, I do agree that spending small amounts uh yeah is not clear how much uh it helps or how much it affects the project. Uh it would make sense to have like a more coordinated uh donation seeking effort. I don't know like we don't have many experts in fundraising in the room as far as I know. We have people who do it for depth like at a punctual level and I don't know how we get from that monstrous effort of doing it every year uh to some like sustained partnerships that would work on a multi-year level some stuff and I don't know how we get from here to there. But yeah, I think being more transparent about our finances helps people realize like what's needed and Yeah. Good. Usually we ask money uh for sponsors for deb. Do you think it would be a good idea ask for start campaigns for ask money for companies and people in general? not thinking about the event specifically but uh if you can we have a page how to donate to Debian but if you should looking for companies to donate in this time that you are not organizing we're not looking for sponsor for the decon for the next debone have your opinion about that if it's good if head is it working? Okay, good. Uh so basically I got from hearing this discussion I got the feeling that we have two biggest uh needs in Debian to spend money. So what you mentioned depcon big one and smaller ones and what Ziggo mentioned uh hardware and running our infrastructure. So if we want to we should in my opinion we should discuss in wider auditorium or something how how this how this money is spent what are our needs whether we need to to have new hardware whether we can ask for donations for VMs from commercial clouds whether we should join somehow those two sources together and so on and maybe as Nicola mentioned uh we should have more transparency What is our current situation? Whether we are getting in slightly good direction but not great in worse direction if it's current trend continues will we be broke in two five years or something so because now we everybody has their own ideas which is interesting but I don't know what whether it as Thomas said whether it would make sense to donate to Debian Debian decon hardware goal or something €50 or something. Will it make difference? Will it make sense whether I should donate for hardware, for VMs in the cloud, for Devcon, from me on Devcon or something? Because now it is good that you started this discussion, but I have the feeling that we need more concrete numbers, ideas, discussions. >> Yeah. And that's all. >> We know that you money is going out, but money is not entering. We know that. We don't know how many how much money is is the the difference between them. This discussion is just a start for sure. But far as far as I know the money is ending. So basically what we can do for that what kind of solutions you can find. I mean I'm I'm specifically talking about money in this case. um because the there is the idea that you can ask for donation of hardware VMs and everything but in this specific case I'm talking about money and if someone have other ideas that you can start to discuss that the discussion you the discussion discussion will not end here for sure but it just say start anybody I think I I think this crowdfunding would be a good idea for local smallsized collecting money. But this is a different problem to what we need in Debian for hosting conferences and improving or changing our infrastructure and on the big scale. So we want to or we like to have more money to do bigger changes there. We have the problem there. We do not have a common sense what is needed in infrastructure for example who will run it and so on. So even if we would collect a lot of money then we all know we will have some discussions how to spend it, how to organize it, which team should get which money. Um but sure it's needed and we already list some partners on the web pages. Currently these are only companies that give us hosting for free or network connection and show there were ideas should we ask the companies or should we in the future at some time say if you want to be listed on the web page as a partner of the Debian project you should donate or give us money for this and this would be in a larger scale. till then the crowdfunding and I think really good idea for small local events but not for helping the project and the Debian project uh as a whole >> as long as we're talking about this there are a couple of other observations I'll throw out one is that um it's very interesting that part of the reason Debian has trusted organizations in different places around the world holding assets on behalf of the project is that moving money across international borders is sometimes difficult and always expensive. And there is a challenge associated with running any kind of fundraising campaign on a large scale for the project as a whole with figuring out what the right logistics are so that particularly in the case of small donations they don't just get consumed with money exchange fees and things like that. So that's one thought to sort of keep in mind as we think about how and when to try and do this kind of activity. The other is is to not forget some of the lessons of the past. I've been around the project long enough to remember, for example, the Dunk Tank experiment. And we've learned some lessons over the years. And I think that particular experience is one that we would never knowingly try to repeat. And the big mistake there was somebody deciding sort of who was going to be inside or outside of the of the benefit of the money that was being raised. I think it's really important again to to sort of focus on what it is we're trying to accomplish, why that particular thing is something that it makes sense to ask individuals to put money forward for. And I think the farther you get from small local objectives, the harder it is to justify trying to take that directly to individual contributors. Um, I have lots and lots of thoughts about having corporate sponsorship of Debian in a large way other than in support of Debcon, but I think in some ways that's a very different conversation and maybe much too big to try and have in the few remaining minutes. >> That's something that you you arise now. I I remember um as Brazilian if I want to donate to deb using PayPal for instance I have to pay some tax or I I can pay in dollar to convert the Brazilian eyes but I need to pay 3.5% of tax and when we we started to receive money in our local association it was easier to be able to donate because it was Brazilian hair to a local to a local association it was much easier than send me money to to outside. Someone raise a delay. Ah yes. >> Yeah. Few things maybe. So I think we have to differentiate I think but also that has become clear in the discussion. Local events is probably the way to go with local events is having local groups, local associations who raise money. People know them, people trust them. It works on a small scale. But Debbin as a project and this has also come through in the discussion has big expenses which just won't go away. And it's also just takes a lot of time and effort to kind of try to cover these expenses on a per project per year basis. It's always the same work. It's always reaching out to people. It takes a lot of time. Can we learn from other foundations or associations how they do it? I mean, be mentioned that he didn't want to go into the corporate sponsorship packages. corporate sponsorships are easier in particular if they are recurring. Um, but I was also thinking of the Python Software Foundation where also individual members can become donors and that would also be a recurring income stream. It's something different having one-time donations of 50, €10, they matter only if it's a large membership base. If you get,000 or 10,000€10 donations, that's very that's serious money. If you get one or two, it doesn't matter. And if you can scale that also with the fact that they're recurring, um it's kind of easier and also has less of a time burden for for volunteers. Have there been discussions in that direction already in Debian? Um uh I just um so now we are just want to shift the f. Uh so currently indeed our money is draining like the balance is going down at a certain rate but from my understanding this there has been a few changes in the past year that is actually causing this. So uh from one reason Debcom is actually losing money. So Deon is paying for Deco, but my understanding is that this wasn't the case until 3 years ago. So like before COVID, basically all Deons were making money pretty much kind of or breaking even enough. >> Yeah. >> I I don't know before >> but they weren't a huge drain. Let's say there is. So there is that and also on the hardware side there are good reasons. So now like Debian is actually buying hardware and paying for hosting in several cases. But this also changes in the past was pretty common for companies to donate hardware or donate housing and I mean this changes for certain reasons and but this is also very expensive. So I mean it was fair because we had a lot of money and we spent it and we can spend it but maybe we should revaluate this. I don't know just M >> well just uh answering a bit of what you you were saying h it's not that before covid dev turned a profit we we we were basically balancing one expensive dev with one cheap devcom and the thing is we had three more or less expensive devs in a row because of different reasons for each of them I hope and we can go back to having cheaper devs but that's not something that we can very easily control because we don't know the budget until much later in the process. H some things will be expensive next year. Yeah, for sure. Uh but the thing is of and it also helped that for two years we didn't have any travel costs. Well, yeah, but we also have some other uh big expenses that uh that are not travel or hardware related that well we we are aware of them. Erh so uh well I mean uh we I I guess I I agree with what has been said so far that uh it's important that we seek like a long-term relations with providers that can either give us money or give us services that would be worth that that money. >> Yeah. Yeah. For example, I seems to have understood that one reason we are buying hardware is that like the provided donations were didn't come with the expected assistance or that kind of thing. I don't know feels like uh I don't know if it's a good reason for the money that's compared to Okay, we need to end somebody somewhere else to talk. [clears throat] I'm convinced that if we know who to contact in let's say the 500 biggest uh NASDAQ company it would be easy to raise money because they all have some fund to spend in this type of donation but that's the thing I don't know it's like on the SPI website there was just earlier on the screen I think that Bloomberg gave 10,000 to posgress that's an example example of one company that has infrastructure, runs OpenStack and runs Debian probably and would probably be interested in helping us and I'm sure there are dozens of such companies that we should be able to think about. Maybe we could collectively think about that. Well, you're right. From direct experience, the 500 companies have money. It's just getting to know the right people. As soon as you have the right people, yeah, money appears. So, the problem is also that the people change regularly. So, you need to chase them constantly. uh just for for end of the talk uh discussion GA do you think it's interesting for Argentina have a crowd funing specifically for Argentina or >> to have what specifically >> a crowd funing for de coffee Argentina the things in Argentina are currently quite in a flux so we are negotiating with a couple of local organizations and uh we we have to see What are the conditions for importing money to Argentina? We right now I cannot give you a uh a definitive answer. >> Sure. >> So I I see the time's up. >> Yeah. >> So >> thank you