Re: Technical and legal aspects of pitivi's crowdfunding campaign.

[Mathieu Duponchelle <mduponchelle1 gmail com>]

Hello,

>Hi,

>>Le vendredi 13 décembre 2013, à 19:37 +0100, Mathieu Duponchelle a écrit :

>>Hi everyone !

>>Following a discussion with Karen Sandler and other members of the

>>gnome engagement team in the #engagement channel on gimpnet,

>>it was decided that a mail to that list would be necessary, to

>>expose the legal and technical aspects of the crowdfunding campaign

>>we are about to start around the pitivi video editor.

>I might have missed some info about this campaign, but it's the first

>time I hear about it: it would be good if you could summarize the goals

>and so on :-) Anyhow, I wish you the best!

So, the Pitivi team, composed of its 3 current maintainer decided a while back to try to launch a fundraising campaign with the ambitious goal of bringing the pitivi video editor to a robust state, making sure all the components of its stack are solid enough to support its ambition of becoming a professional grade video editing software. The plan is to have 2 phases during the actual development time:

• Work package 1: Stabilization to reach the long awaited 1.0 release

• Work package 2: Implement top-wanted features (backers should be allowed to vote so we can determine what these are?)

You can find a quick overview of the plan at http://gstreamer.bugsfree.org:8080/#plan and all the full detailed version at http://gstreamer.bugsfree.org:8080/the-plan -- Keep in mind that this is still Work in Progres, and if we would be glad to get some feeback from you.

The team behind this initiative is composed of:

• Jean Francois Fortin Tam, designer, bug triager, manager and maintainer of Pitivi, he is in the Gnome community since 2005 and you probably already know him.

• Mathieu Duponchelle, GSoCer in the Gnome project in 2011 and 2013, he has been working on pitivi since then, and thanks to his GSoC project (again under the gnome umbrella) in 2013, we finally managed to release a 0.91 beta release based on the new stack we have been building for 2years+ (namely GES, GI, Gst1.0 etc...)

• Thibault Saunier,  GSoCer under the gnome umbrella in 2009 and 2010 he has been the main developer of pitivi, and GES since 2011

You can find some more details about us at: http://gstreamer.bugsfree.org:8080/#about-us

If you have more question about the project/who we are etc. we would be happy to talk with you, we are always connected on #pitivi.

>>One quick question:

>>On our side, there are two options we could go for, with

>>different charges and laws associated :

>>1) We can create a non-profit association.

>>2) We can create a regular Limited Liability Company (LLC),

>>  SARL in French.

>Have there been any thoughts about a third option: actually having the

>Foundation hire the people?

>There are probably several downsides (in terms of costs; in terms of

>legal paperwork, as I understand that this is about French people and

>the Foundation is still kind of US-centric for that matter; in terms of

>involvement from the Foundation; etc.). But on the other hand, it might

>make sense to at least think whether it's a good idea for the Foundation

>to employ developers.

I am not sure what you have in mind here, the solution we are proposing should be pretty straight forward in term of paperwork for the Gnome fundation.

Best Regards,

Thibault Saunier.

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 7:37 PM, Mathieu Duponchelle <mduponchelle1 gmail com> wrote:

Hi everyone !

Following a discussion with Karen Sandler and other members of the
gnome engagement team in the #engagement channel on gimpnet,
it was decided that a mail to that list would be necessary, to
expose the legal and technical aspects of the crowdfunding campaign
we are about to start around the pitivi video editor.

Presentations of the team, our plan etc are available on the website
we are currently developing and creating content for, bear in mind
that it's still work in progress at the time. I'll post a link to
that website soon, Thibault Saunier is not at his home and can't
can't make it available right now.

We've been happy to learn the GNOME committee had voted unanimously
to help us handle the funds we'll get through that campaign for multiple
reasons :

+ First we are not very keen on using proprietary services such as
  kickstarter and indiegogo, as they are not part of our ecosystem.

+ Second, pitivi has always been a very "gnome-centric" app at
  the technology level, all of our main components are GLib based
  and we intend to go on that way, so this partnership seemed like
  a logical continuation to us.

As for our pay, we intend to go for quite low standards for
CS engineers, and require 2500 euros a month, working 7 hours
21 days a month, which translates to a 17 euros hourly rate.
I don't have official average salaries for CS engineers to submit,
but as an example I'm currently making 3000 euros a month at my position.
Money isn't really the issue for us, as we are ready to get less
in exchange of doing what we really want, but we of course have
charges of our own to assume (house, food, etcaetera).

On our side, there are two options we could go for, with
different charges and laws associated :

1) We can create a non-profit association. The law in France
  states that in a non-profit association, there needs to be
  a president and a secretary, which can't be paid for their
  activities. This is not a complete obstacle, as we could find
  people to assume these charges, but it's certainly something to
  think about. On the charges side, associations can only hire
  regular salaried people. You can calculate what it
  will cost for the organization this way :

    If we want to get 2500 euros in our pockets at the end of the month,
    the cost will be 2500 * 1.87 == 4675 a month.

2) We can create a regular Limited Liability Company (LLC),
  SARL in French.
  In France, companies can hire regular salaried people of course,
  but they also can remunerate "managers" under a different status,
  which is called the "Régime social des indépendants", roughly
  translatable to Social Status of Independent workers.
  Under these conditions:

    If we want 2500 euros in our pockets at the end of the month,
    the cost will be 2500 * 1.45 == 3625.

  The drawback for us is that it means we won't have an
  "assurance chômage", ie we can't get money if we get unemployed.
  That's not a problem, as we don't plan on getting unemployed
  anytime soon.

So with this explained, we will not go the non-profit way.
As much as we think it would make sense, the French laws and
charges associated with that status make it impractical in
our case, which is to be a lightweight organization with
as much money as possible going into actually funding
the development of our video editor.

As for Gnome, the legal situation will be exactly the same,
that is the funds would be transferred to the company or
the association as "grants" ("subventions" in French), with
no legal difference.

That's it for this mail, I'll write a mail in the engagement
mailing list and link it there explaining our "engagement"
approach more in detail.

I am of course available to share my limited knowledge of
taxes and laws in France, if anyone has more insight about
the subject I'm hopeful he will chime in !