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

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Hi everyone,

Let me try to summarize where we are.

Rusty, Maciej, Frank, Telsa and myself see a lot of tasks that need to get
done for GNOME to take over the world (as it were).  And we can see that
*some* of those tasks might be most effectively handled by a Foundation staff
person.  There's a bunch of administrative tasks that need to be handled, and
PR/marketing tasks, and we may want to help ISVs adopt Gnome, and find ways
for new hackers/developers to join our community etc.

Havoc, Dave, Mike, Rusty, and a number of other people have expressed strong
concerns about the Foundation being distracted from its original mission,
about it becoming too bureaucratic, about giving corporations too much
influence, and about creating a self-perpetuating machine who's mission in
life will be too keep feeding itself.

It's clear that we are nowhere near consensus that having a foundation staff
is a good thing.

So I think it makes sense to move slowly as we add structure to GNOME.  We've
gone from very little structure to a steering committee.  Now, let's have the
board of the foundation be elected by the hackers and take on the sorts of
tasks that the steering committee had started tackling.  Let's also create an
advisory board that will be a forum for companies and other organizations to
get involved with GNOME.  Once we get that done, there's plenty of other
important work to be done.  Many people have pointed out the importance of
having a standards committee - so that might be a high priority future item.
Maybe at some point in the future, we'll want to get more aggressive as a
community about marketing GNOME, or assisting ISVs etc.  We can deal with
that then.

Still, it's always nice to have some money available.  It allows us to do
nice things such as buy computers for hackers who need them, staff booths at
tradeshows, buy servers if we need to pay, pay bills when we have a press
conference etc.   And I think there's nothing wrong with asking corporate
members of the advisory board to pay a membership fee, if they can afford to
do so.  So I propose that we have the following membership fee structure: $0
for non-profit organizations, companies with less than 10 employees and other
companies who request a fee waiver; $10,000 for other corporate members.
This addresses many of the concerns people have raised:
1- it ensures that we're never going to exclude companies or organizations
from joining the advisory board based on their ability to pay
2- it reduces the total amount of money that will be available, thereby
limiting our ability to hire staff or otherwise create bureaucracy, and
making sure this foundation doesn't become a money-hungry beast
3- it still gives us funds that we can use as necessary.  I suspect this
membership structure would probably generate $70,000 or so in the first
year.  We'll end up spending that money on conference calls, computers, legal
fees, press conferences etc. If we have a hard time spending this money, we
can always donate it to the FSF :)

How does that sound?

Bart


Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 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
>
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