Re: Membership dues [ was: Re: Advisory Board Letter ]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Bart Decrem <bart@eazel.com> writes: 
> Now, if there's consensus that having a $100,000 budget and/or
> having one paid staff person, is a Bad Idea, then obviously we
> should change the proposed membership structure.
> 

Hmm, I was originally indifferent on this issue but I do have some
concerns after talking/thinking about it. The problem is that things
can get out of control -

 - the main reason you need a staff person in the first place is
   because you are spending and receiving a lot of money, right? While
   if we just have the occasional donation, go to a couple shows, buy
   a hard drive, we can get by on volunteer time, and the foundation
   tends to be self-limiting

 - the budget is $100,000 with 5 companies; what about with 50
   companies? At that point the GNOME foundation will have far more
   money than it should have. We do _not_ want the OSF here.

 - If we start relying on the budget, then corporations can threaten
   to withdraw support, and we'll have to care about that, even 
   if the corporation isn't contributing to the GNOME codebase

 - the board is going to have a hard time preventing things from
   getting out of control. If you eliminate the fee later, companies
   that already paid will be upset. And people don't naturally like
   saying no to money.

 - the full-time administrative person is probably going to get bored, 
   and go around thinking of ways to get more money and then ways 
   to spend it, which tends to create an ever-growing foundation (in
   my experience, this is what nonprofit foundation people _do_, their 
   main role in life is to go around getting money and then spending
   it, and that's just not the point of the GNOME foundation)

Then you have a board with real "power" due to the dependency we've
created on funding for the foundation (though judging by the OSF,
mostly power to get in the way). What we should have instead is a
board that provides leadership to the people who already have an
interest in GNOME. 

I would like to see companies contribute by putting their engineers to
work on GNOME, or buying a contract or two for needed things on
sourceexchange or cosource, or hiring someone to write some docs, etc.
Heck they could even buy T-shirts and computer case stickers for all
the GNOME hackers.

The foundation's money supply should really only be money someone
happened to give us, such as the Beanie award - honestly, we haven't
been able to think of ways to spend that - in the early days of GNOME,
we got a donation from SPI of only a couple thousand or so, and we
couldn't figure out how to spend that either. But the foundation helps
hold that money in trust, until we think of something useful to do
with it.

Unless we get order-of-magnitude increases in funding and make the
foundation into its own development house, hiring permanent
developers, etc., I don't see how more money is going to get us
anywhere... and hiring developers sounds like a Bad Idea to me. The
biggest donors would be able to strongly influence GNOME development
directions, among other disadvantages.

Havoc