[kaffe] Kaffe Party/Documentation/Tools/Pizza/Development fund?

[Jim Pick]

On Fri, 22 Aug 2003 17:02:29 +0100
Toad <toad at amphibian.dyndns.org> wrote:

> It seems to me that a significant number of people would donate hard
> cash to a Kaffe fund of some type, as long as there was sufficient
> transparency in its use (we solved this problem at Freenet by setting up
> a 501(c)(3); it pays my salary now; other projects, handling less money,
> have dealt with this differently e.g. Wine). There are various things it
> could be used for; I suspect you know them better than I do. At FP.org,
> we use it mainly to pay for me (but I work rather cheap by US
> standards - $18K/annum at present), and for web hosting. Does Kaffe need 
> any particular technical resources at the moment? Is there anything else
> that money could be used for for the clear and unambiguous benefit of
> Kaffe as a free software project?

My personal preference is to not have to handle money.  I did add a
"sponsorship" page to the website to try to raise some money to pay for
the colocated server costs -- the server is colocated at
communitycolo.net, which is a 501(c)(3) itself.  I haven't gotten any
outside offers of sponsorship yet, though.

Speaking for myself, I'm just doing it in my spare time for fun.  When
Transvirtual was still alive, it was sort of related to my job, but
Transvirtual is gone now.  I don't think the "free software business"
model worked very well -- I think Kaffe will do best as a pure
community-run free software project.  I don't think I'd personally be
motivated to work on it for grants of money -- I already have a pretty
good career here in the Silicon Valley area.

If somebody did want to give money, I'm sure some contributors might be
able to use it.  Since a lot of work is being done on Kaffe in an
academic environment, maybe a scholarship would be a nice thing to be
able to offer to some starving student...

Cheers,

 - Jim

ps.  I'm running a freenet node on Kaffe right now - it looks like we
currently have problems with the garbage collector, and FEC decoding in
fproxy.  Hopefully, we'll have NIO soon, so we'll be able to run the
latest builds.  I'll update my freesite with details as soon as some of
the problems are solved.