[Foundation-l] Funding for the newly elected Board Members

Mon Jun 21 18:01:09 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Why not just provide direct links to the PayPal accounts of every active
>developer who has contributed x amount of code on the Foundation's fundraising
>page? Kinda like a tip jar. I was planning on asking the developers about this
>soon anyway. 
>
>And/or we could also have a separate software development PayPal account that
>we could offer bounties from (the current PayPal account would be for general
>fund expenses - mostly server related). On top of that, we could have a legal
>defense fund account as well. 
>  
>
I like this approach---let the people giving the money decide where to 
spend it.  We could have various funds:
* A server fund
* An advertising fund
* A developer-compensation fund
* A specific-software-feature bounty system
* An administrative expenses overhead fund (office space, travel, etc.)
* A print-version-expenses fund

This would be a lot better, IMO, than going the normal route of 
non-profits and having a gigantic slush fund, which is both less 
transparent and engenders less donator confidence, especially given that 
over time a larger and larger percentage of the money in such slush 
funds tends to be siphoned off to things less and less directly related 
to the actual mission of the nonprofit.  I know I personally don't 
donate to most non-profits, and advise others not to donate to them, 
because I know they eat a huge percentage of their budgets (often over 
30%) in paying themselves salaries, plane tickets, restaurant meals, and 
so on.  Documented transparent donations are another matter altogether: 
if people can donate $50 to a server fund, and be sure it will be used 
to buy servers rather than someone's lunch, that's much less shady.

In the limited cases we've tried it, this seems to have worked out 
pretty well.  If the Foundation had given Brion money to buy a notebook, 
that would've been a little bit questionable.  It would've been 
defensible, given his enormous contributions to the coding and 
sysadminning and so on, but it still would've been questionable. But 
since instead people decided separately if they wanted to give their 
personal money to Brion to buy a notebook, then there's really no 
controversy, and everything is completely transparent and above-board.

-Mark