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

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Thanks for the thoughtful and genuinely informative post. Very nice.

Frank Hecker <frank@collab.net> writes: 
> * Development. Several mozilla.org staff members are also Mozilla
> developers, but IMO this is not necessarily core to mozilla.org's
> function. I think that development is the one function which absolutely
> doesn't need to be done by a central foundation staff.

Agreed.
 
> * Project administration. Maintenance of the core project "assets",
> including the CVS repository, bug database, project web site, mailing
> lists and newsgroups, IRC servers, and so on; this includes basic
> sysadmin stuff plus other added-value activities, e.g., collecting and
> analyzing project metrics.  (Depending on how you count them,
> mozilla.org has 2-3 people handling this sort of thing.) As with
> development, much of this stuff could be handled by a combination of
> volunteers (e.g., for creating web site content) and corporate donation
> of people and systems. Alternatively a lot of it could be contracted out
> to a third party, similar to the way foundation-funded development could
> be done, with funding through the foundation and contractor selection by
> a board-appointed panel.
>

I think we do pretty well on this now with informal arrangements, and
we're looking at some easy ways to make it better. Not a problem that
needs solving via the foundation.
 
> * Press/analyst relations. Speaking to the press and industry analysts
> who want interviews, official statements, etc. This is not too demanding
> in terms of the time required, and could be done by someone like a board
> member. I wouldn't have a foundation staff person for this purpose
> alone, but if you're going to have a foundation staff person at all then
> it makes sense for them to take on some, perhaps most, of these
> activities, as well as related activities like representing the GNOME
> project at conferences, etc.
> 

I would like the board to do this.

> * Corporate support. This is something mozilla.org has seen a great
> demand for (and hasn't been fully able to meet the demand). We've seen a
> number of corporations come to the Mozilla project wanting to
> participate in the project and use Mozilla in their own products, and
> asking for some sort of help; requests include training in the technical
> internals and external APIs of Mozilla, advice on how to best
> participate in the project, information on Mozilla licensing and other
> business issues, and so on. (Yes, they could read the FAQs, but there
> are lots of corporations who want a real person who can give them the
> information in a neat little package -- with the ability to ask
> questions on the spot -- as opposed to them going out and searching for
> information and asking questions in public project forums.)
> 

Here I think we need to let companies step up and handle it. For
example, collab.net or the community could advise them on
participating in open source, Red Hat offers ISV support and GTK/GNOME
programming classes, Helix does contract work, etc. 

But even with 1 or 2 staff members, we'll need companies to help
provide this type of thing, I would guess.

>  Also, corporations typically want someone who can "speak for the
> project", as well as someone who is perceived as relatively
> independent and is not associated with a competitor or potential
> competitor.
> 

Only the board can really do this.

Honestly I think anyone who wants to participate in the project first
has to get hit with the open source clue stick, and then they have to
just dump their engineers into our channels of communication (mailing
lists, IRC) and tell them to use said channels and get the work
done. ;-) This is the only way it happens.

Individuals who join open source projects and want to be hand-held
never end up doing useful work, and neither do companies... sad but
true. I have never gotten a patch from someone who sent me mail saying
"I want to contribute, tell me what I can do." I have gotten tons of
unsolicited patches from people that just did something after
informing themselves via reading the code and the mailing lists.


Anyway, that's a digression... overall I guess the point is, companies
are not going to be able to pay the annual fee and then sit back,
we're still going to need active participation and contributions. The
annual fee probably discourages further small donations, also ("why do
they need a server? we already paid 20K!").

Why not decide first if we want an administrative assistant type of
person as Telsa described, and then if we do, figure out how to get
the minimum necessary funding to afford one, and no more.

Havoc