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

On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 11:09:19AM -0700, Jim Pick wrote:
> 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.

Indeed. The love of money is the root of all evil. The lack of money is
the root of all starvation :)
> 
> 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"

"business" is the problem. I work for a nonprofit. We don't have
shareholders. We don't need most of our cash to walk out the back door
to overpaid upper management and shareholders who are not necessary in
the first place without the need to buy offices etc. Cathedrals of
inefficiency, just like the copyright system they created :)

Okay, that may start a flame war... please respond to me personally if
that is your intent :)

> 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.

Well, in that case, there will always be commercial software, and it
will always have the power to pass stupid laws to ban free software, and
we won't be able to do anything about it because we will work for the
corporations agitating for the stupid laws (even if we work in
hardware). On a more practical level, yes, it does not make sense to
just give money to people who would have worked on the project anyway.
They will end up squabbling about it and causing all sorts of problems.
One possible solution would be bounties for fixing a particular bug or
getting a particular application or IO subsystem working. The problem
with this is that progress is generally from many sources. I see that it
has worked pretty well for my own project, because of some slightly
bizarre circumstances, and we have seen fairly rapid progress. Of course
we have a lot of press coverage, and we are a "cool", rather
politicized, whether we want to be or not, project... So the question I
wonder about is whether money would be of any use to a different
project, one that I personally would give moderate amounts if it
produced a clear benefit. Since what we did is out of the question, not
having an unemployable programmer in your mist (stupid me for not going
to university... I'd have fucked it up though...), is there anything
else that it could be used for?
> 
> 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...

Well, I would like to give some money, if there was a use for it.
What's a scholarship, exactly? Paying the full $50,000 tuition fees for
somebody to go through uni? That could pay my personal salary for three
years, or a typical UK programmer's for a year. So I presume you meant
something else :)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
>  - Jim

-- 
Matthew J Toseland - toad at amphibian.dyndns.org
Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/
ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so.
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