Re: Highlight individual project fundraisings

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan vanberkom codethink co uk>]

On Fri, 2017-09-29 at 11:51 +0200, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:
> Hi,
>
> There are a number of GNOME or GNOME-related project fundraisings:
>
> For GIMP:
>       https://www.gimp.org/donating/
>       https://www.patreon.com/pippin
>       http://film.zemarmot.net/en/
>
> PulseAudio: https://www.patreon.com/tanuk
> GTK+, Corebird, ...: https://www.patreon.com/baedert
> And now GtkSourceView: https://liberapay.com/GtkSourceView/
>
> (Are there others?)
>
> Those projects are useful to GNOME. But none of them have reached
> their
> funding goals. GNOME has a nice website, it would be nice to
> highlight
> the above fundraisings on the website, and/or writing a news article,
> talking about them on social media, etc.
>
> But… when someone donates to one of the above fundraisings, the GNOME
> Foundation doesn't receive any money. So there would be in some way a
> "competiton" with https://www.gnome.org/support-gnome/ . So maybe the
> GNOME Foundation doesn't want to highlight other fundraisings on the
> website. But this would come in conflict with the goal of the GNOME
> Foundation which is to "further the goals of the GNOME Project".
>
> Any thoughts?

Hi Sébastien,

I think that the sponsorship for development, especially for otherwise
entirely volunteer driven projects, is certainly an important topic
that I wish we had solved many years ago.

Indeed, I might have had more incentive to attempt to fundraise for
Glade in the past had the foundation been more supportive, even to the
point of offering infrastructure or at least endorsement and guidance
to assist us in setting up successful fundraising.

Regarding competition of fundraising for the *development* of
individual projects - I don't think competition with foundation
fundraising is an issue; as there is no conflict of interest.

When people sponsor the foundation, they expect to be paying for
infrastructure, operational overhead, occasional legal advice,
conference and hackfest budget, etc.

The problem here I think, is as soon as there is overlap, a conflict of
interest does arise (e.g. we should not be endorsing sponsorship of
GIMP specific conferences and hackfests running independently of
GNOME). This would be particularly dangerous because it could invite
factionalism within a community which draws strength in unity (the
foundation would be weakened by any other "sub-foundations" assuming
foundation-like roles, we should not encourage this).

So, I would love to see a solution for public funding of developer
hours, but we should be careful of the dangers surrounding this.

Regarding Philip's concerns about competition between projects under
the GNOME umbrella, I whole heartedly disagree that this is an issue,
rather a competitive environment is one where talent is fostered and
projects thrive; let's encourage a healthy and competitive environment.

Equal opportunity, diversity and non-discrimination are great values,
and they are by no means in conflict with a healthy and competitive
environment, we shouldn't be getting these wires crossed.

I can see your concern with user-visible vs. non-visible projects, e.g.
libraries vs. user visible apps, but I feel this is also a non issue
because in fact; we have always had an easier time to find funding for
the development of our platform - and as long as we continue to produce
a platform that is competitive and remains useful to a wide variety of
applications outside of just the "GNOME Desktop" use cases, this will
remain true.

It would seem to me at least, it is the user visible apps within GNOME
which have been left behind in funding, and need to resort to public
fundraising, because (almost) nobody is building products and
generating revenue with these highly GNOME Desktop specific user facing
Apps.


Best Regards,
    -Tristan