NHibernate donation campaign

[Ayende Rahien]

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.  We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don’t feel I should benefit from the donations.

Donation Matching

Moreover, my company, Hibernating Rhinos, is going to match any donation to this campaign (to a total limit of 5,000$), as a way to give back to the NHibernate project for the excellent software it produced.

Why should you donate?

If you are a user of NHibernate, you gained a lot from build on such a solid foundation. We ask to you to donate so that we can make the project even better. If your company uses NHibernate, ask it to donate to this campaign.

[Tuna Toksoz]

As this is to drive NH development, have we ever thought of applying for Google Summer of Code? It may drive students into opensource as well as find some good future committers.
The student will also receive stipend and this is funded by google.


Tuna Toksöz
Eternal sunshine of the open source mind.

http://devlicio.us/blogs/tuna_toksoz
http://tunatoksoz.com
http://twitter.com/tehlike

[Ayende Rahien]

I have no idea how to get there.

We did speak with the CPF people about doing something similar, though.

[Steve Strong]

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.� Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.� I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.� I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?� Any committer? Only "active" committers?� What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?� Is it split by number of commits?� Number of lines of code changed?
• Who owns the bank account?� Who has visibility of it?� Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?� Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?� Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.� Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.� Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.� I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.� If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.� We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don�t feel I should benefit from the donations.

[Davy Brion]

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that... 

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.  Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.  I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.  I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?  Any committer? Only "active" committers?  What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?  Is it split by number of commits?  Number of lines of code changed?
• Who owns the bank account?  Who has visibility of it?  Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?  Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?  Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.  Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.  Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.  I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.  If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.  We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don’t feel I should benefit from the donations.

[Fabio Maulo]

Can we take the recent past and no so recent past, of NHibernate "donations", as example of a possible funds management ?

2010/2/3 Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com>

--
Fabio Maulo

[Ayende Rahien]

Davy,

Infrastructure is easy. I can provide servers from my company.

Time is more expensive, I think.

[Ayende Rahien]

Were there any donations

[Steve Strong]

Personally, I'd be inclined to agree.� As soon as we try to split the cash, it's going to get ever so complex which was kind of the point of my previous email - if we do want to "pay ourselves" then we're going to have to deal with all of that and more (don't mention tax, anyone).� If we think there's gonna be enough cash to clear our mortgages then perhaps it's worth it, but since I suspect it's more likely to be the occasional beer & pizza I'd rather avoid the overhead.

Having the cash to fund other things (such as technical writers, software licences etc.) would be easier to manage and, providing we spend it wisely, do no end of good to both NH and the community.

I've dealt with various clubs and organizations before where money was involved, so understand the complexity that it can lead to.� Having said that, I've never done it on an OSS project, so I'm happy to be convinced in either direction :)

On 03/02/2010 21:22, Davy Brion wrote:

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that...�

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.� Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.� I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.� I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?� Any committer? Only "active" committers?� What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?� Is it split by number of commits?� Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?� Who has visibility of it?� Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?� Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?� Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.� Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.� Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.� I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.� If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.� We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don�t feel I should benefit from the donations.

[Fabio Maulo]

What was around one year of Sergej full time development ?

What was 3 man-moths (or even more) full time development donated by iMeta ?

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

--
Fabio Maulo

[Davy Brion]

actually, tax is a very important issue here...

we all take licenses pretty seriously when it comes to software (i'd hope), and getting money for writing open source software should be held to the same standard.  that means that anyone who gets money for contributing to open source should declare that money on their taxes... in the end, depending on the countries of the contributors, about 20 to 40% of the donated money is just going to be wasted on taxes.

if we spend it on infrastructure, we probably wouldn't have to waste anything on taxes... but maybe some kind of non-profit organization would have to be founded first, i'm not sure on that...

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

Personally, I'd be inclined to agree.  As soon as we try to split the cash, it's going to get ever so complex which was kind of the point of my previous email - if we do want to "pay ourselves" then we're going to have to deal with all of that and more (don't mention tax, anyone).  If we think there's gonna be enough cash to clear our mortgages then perhaps it's worth it, but since I suspect it's more likely to be the occasional beer & pizza I'd rather avoid the overhead.

Having the cash to fund other things (such as technical writers, software licences etc.) would be easier to manage and, providing we spend it wisely, do no end of good to both NH and the community.

I've dealt with various clubs and organizations before where money was involved, so understand the complexity that it can lead to.  Having said that, I've never done it on an OSS project, so I'm happy to be convinced in either direction :)

On 03/02/2010 21:22, Davy Brion wrote:

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that... 

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.  Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.  I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.  I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?  Any committer? Only "active" committers?  What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?  Is it split by number of commits?  Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?  Who has visibility of it?  Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?  Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?  Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.  Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.  Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.  I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.  If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.  We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don’t feel I should benefit from the donations.

[Davy Brion]

that solely depends on a person's motivations

[Ayende Rahien]

inline

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes. 

Sadly, I agree.

 

Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.  I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.  I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?  Any committer? Only "active" committers?  What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?  Is it split by number of commits?  Number of lines of code changed?

That is something that I would like to see discussed here.

Ideally, I would like to see some form of committers getting money for work they do. Trying to nail it down by the numbers would only encourage what is basically cheating. Optimizing to make the numbers work vs. the good of the project.

Maybe some form of time commitment from people to do work on NH? I am not sure.

Another option would be to literally put money on features.

I would love to see Search & Shards go into production ready status, and I am sure that if we had someone pushing them full time, that can happen in a short amount of time.

My company's contribution is going to be directly to Fabio, with the expectation that will allow uninterrupted work on NHibernate.

• Who owns the bank account?  Who has visibility of it?  Is it available for public viewing?

I don't want to get into a situation where there are funds to be managed long term. That would require us to setup a more formal way of managing things.

Perhaps we should, but that isn't the way things are now. 

• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?  Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?  Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Regarding sponsorships, the only way it would make sense to do so if there was something to get back from having more visibility/users.

Currently, if we have another 100,000 more users, do any of us really care?

Spending money on marketing is literally throwing it away, since we have no was to recoup that.

 

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.  Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.  Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.  I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related. 

I am not saying that this won't change at some point, but at the moment, my company can sponsor my own involvement in the project, so it makes sense to spread the money to allow other people to spend more time on it.

 

If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

I am NOT doing that out of some sense that commercial interests preclude involvement in this. I am doing this to increase the pot available for the other committers, since I don't currently need an additional monetary incentive to work on NH.

 

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.  We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don’t feel I should benefit from the donations.

[Ayende Rahien]

Fabio,

IIRC, Sergej was hired by JBoss, then shortly after put to work on other things. 

iMeta's donation was of time, not money. That makes it easier to manage.

[Ayende Rahien]

Taxes are relevant no matter what income source you have.

I am saying that we need to split it up into several issues:

* Infrastructure costs - As far as I can see, my company can cover things like servers and such.

* Paying committers - seems to be more complex than I initially thought

* Paying other people for tasks for us - tech writers, for example. 

[Davy Brion]

my problem with the whole thing about paying committers is two-fold:

1) the taxes... a substantial part of the money is going to be wasted anyway, so we might as well spend it something that doesn't require taxes... also, depending on local laws you might have a lot of paperwork to deal with if you make extra income outside of your regular job.
2) spreading it amongst the committers... number of commits or line count doesn't cut it because it doesn't take complexity into account and time spent figuring out how certain parts work.  For me personally, that's not an issue since a) i probably contributed less than anyone else here and b) i really don't want anything for the little i did do in the first place.... but i definitely wouldn't be surprised if people (past, current and future contributors) started catching feelings if they thought they weren't given enough according to what _they_ think their contributions were worth compared to what others received.  Worst case scenario, some people will feel slighted and stop contributing altogether.   It's a people thing... throw money into the mix and it all turns to shit.

[Fabio Maulo]

and sine when to donate time is different than donate money ?

Wasn't Steve's time paid ?

Sergej was hired (probably as Steve is a iMeta's employee), sure, and that is a little bit different than donate and receive an invoice.

Suppositions:

Tomorrow the XYZ company is available to pay 3 months of Richard's time to work in NH.
After tomorrow the ZYX company is available to pay 3 weeks of Tuna's time to work in NH.

ranlix company is available to spent 3 days of Davy's time to fix something or develop a new feature.

My point is that, so far, NH have received donations directly paid to a person with a clear agreement .

Everything can continue working in the same way... to manage any kind of amount, for 1U$D up, is not so easy without a real Organization behind the funds. 

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

--
Fabio Maulo

[Davy Brion]

+10

[Steve Strong]

Whatever we choose to do with the cash, we are going to need some non-profit entity to receive it.� If it's received by an individual, then I suspect that they will be an immediate tax liability, since that individual is going to be deemed to have received income by the local tax authorities (I'm no tax expert, but it's like this in most countries where I do have experience).

I suspect the first thing we need to do is find out which country has the easiest rules around non-profit entities, both for setting one up and managing it long term.� We clearly don't want to spend much time or money on running this side of things.

By the way, although I probably sound a little negative, I do think it's a good idea - I'm quite sure there are a whole bunch of useful things that we can spend cash on which will help NH and the community move forward.� We just need to do it right, otherwise it's going to bite us on the arse.

On 03/02/2010 22:00, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Taxes are relevant no matter what income source you have.

I am saying that we need to split it up into several issues:

* Infrastructure costs - As far as I can see, my company can cover things like servers and such.

* Paying committers - seems to be more complex than I initially thought

* Paying other people for tasks for us - tech writers, for example.�

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com> wrote:

actually, tax is a very important issue here...

we all take licenses pretty seriously when it comes to software (i'd hope), and getting money for writing open source software should be held to the same standard.� that means that anyone who gets money for contributing to open source should declare that money on their taxes... in the end, depending on the countries of the contributors, about 20 to 40% of the donated money is just going to be wasted on taxes.

if we spend it on infrastructure, we probably wouldn't have to waste anything on taxes... but maybe some kind of non-profit organization would have to be founded first, i'm not sure on that...

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

Personally, I'd be inclined to agree.� As soon as we try to split the cash, it's going to get ever so complex which was kind of the point of my previous email - if we do want to "pay ourselves" then we're going to have to deal with all of that and more (don't mention tax, anyone).� If we think there's gonna be enough cash to clear our mortgages then perhaps it's worth it, but since I suspect it's more likely to be the occasional beer & pizza I'd rather avoid the overhead.

Having the cash to fund other things (such as technical writers, software licences etc.) would be easier to manage and, providing we spend it wisely, do no end of good to both NH and the community.

I've dealt with various clubs and organizations before where money was involved, so understand the complexity that it can lead to.� Having said that, I've never done it on an OSS project, so I'm happy to be convinced in either direction :)

On 03/02/2010 21:22, Davy Brion wrote:

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that...�

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.� Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.� I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.� I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?� Any committer? Only "active" committers?� What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?� Is it split by number of commits?� Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?� Who has visibility of it?� Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?� Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?� Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.� Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.� Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.� I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.� If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.� We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don�t feel I should benefit from the donations.

[Fabio Maulo]

btw my friends... before create too much noise we should have a look to the past experience...

For JBoss NH was not a business.

My personal experience with iMeta-NH-Professional support is 0 (zero).

Perhaps we are talking about how distribute 0U$D... so... YAGNI can be applied even here, No ?

--
Fabio Maulo

[Steve Strong]

I think the difference is that getting a company to donate time is a relatively big thing.� What I think Ayende is aiming to tap into is individuals who might have the odd $ or two to donate - they don't have the time or expertise themselves, not the influence within their company to get any time committed.

I guess the key question is how much do we realistically think we'd get?� If it's only a few hundred, then it simply won't be worth the effort of getting started...�

On 03/02/2010 22:15, Davy Brion wrote:

+10

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:13 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

and sine when to donate time is different than donate money ?

Wasn't Steve's time paid ?

Sergej was hired (probably as Steve is a iMeta's�employee), sure, and that is a little bit different than donate and�receive�an invoice.

Suppositions:

Tomorrow the XYZ company is available to pay 3 months of Richard's time to work in NH.
After tomorrow the ZYX company is available to pay 3 weeks of Tuna's time to work in NH.

ranlix company is available to spent 3 days of Davy's time to fix something or develop a new feature.

My point is that, so far, NH have�received donations directly paid to a person with a clear agreement .

Everything can continue working in the same way... to manage any kind of�amount, for 1U$D up, is not so easy without a real Organization behind the funds.�

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Fabio,

IIRC, Sergej was hired by JBoss, then shortly after put to work on other things.�

iMeta's donation was of time, not money. That makes it easier to manage.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:46 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

What was around one year of Sergej full time development ?

What was 3 man-moths (or even more) full time development donated by iMeta ?

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Were there any donations

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can we take the recent past and no so recent past, of NHibernate "donations", as example of a possible funds management ?

2010/2/3 Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com>

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that...�

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.� Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.� I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.� I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?� Any committer? Only "active" committers?� What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?� Is it split by number of commits?� Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?� Who has visibility of it?� Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?� Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?� Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.� Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.� Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.� I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.� If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.� We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don�t feel I should benefit from the donations.

Donation Matching

Moreover, my company, Hibernating Rhinos, is going to match any donation to this campaign (to a total limit of 5,000$), as a way to give back to the NHibernate project for the excellent software it produced.

Why should you donate?

If you are a user of NHibernate, you gained a lot from build on such a solid foundation. We ask to you to donate so that we can make the project even better. If your company uses NHibernate, ask it to donate to this campaign.

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

[Steve Strong]

Completely agree.� What we need is some form of organisation that's already setup to receive & distribute funds of this nature...�

On 03/02/2010 22:20, Fabio Maulo wrote:

btw my friends... before create too much�noise�we should have a look to the past experience...

For JBoss NH was not a business.

My personal experience with iMeta-NH-Professional support is 0 (zero).

Perhaps we are talking about how distribute 0U$D... so... YAGNI can be applied even here, No ?

2010/2/3 Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com>

+10

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:13 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

and sine when to donate time is different than donate money ?

Wasn't Steve's time paid ?

Sergej was hired (probably as Steve is a iMeta's�employee), sure, and that is a little bit different than donate and�receive�an invoice.

Suppositions:

Tomorrow the XYZ company is available to pay 3 months of Richard's time to work in NH.
After tomorrow the ZYX company is available to pay 3 weeks of Tuna's time to work in NH.

ranlix company is available to spent 3 days of Davy's time to fix something or develop a new feature.

My point is that, so far, NH have�received donations directly paid to a person with a clear agreement .

Everything can continue working in the same way... to manage any kind of�amount, for 1U$D up, is not so easy without a real Organization behind the funds.�

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Fabio,

IIRC, Sergej was hired by JBoss, then shortly after put to work on other things.�

iMeta's donation was of time, not money. That makes it easier to manage.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:46 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

What was around one year of Sergej full time development ?

What was 3 man-moths (or even more) full time development donated by iMeta ?

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Were there any donations

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can we take the recent past and no so recent past, of NHibernate "donations", as example of a possible funds management ?

2010/2/3 Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com>

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that...�

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.� Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.� I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.� I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?� Any committer? Only "active" committers?� What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?� Is it split by number of commits?� Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?� Who has visibility of it?� Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?� Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?� Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.� Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.� Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.� I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.� If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.� We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don�t feel I should benefit from the donations.

Donation Matching

Moreover, my company, Hibernating Rhinos, is going to match any donation to this campaign (to a total limit of 5,000$), as a way to give back to the NHibernate project for the excellent software it produced.

Why should you donate?

If you are a user of NHibernate, you gained a lot from build on such a solid foundation. We ask to you to donate so that we can make the project even better. If your company uses NHibernate, ask it to donate to this campaign.

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

[Steve Strong]

As an aside, surely this type of conversation is what Google Wave was aimed at - whatever happened to that? :)

On 03/02/2010 22:20, Fabio Maulo wrote:

btw my friends... before create too much�noise�we should have a look to the past experience...

For JBoss NH was not a business.

My personal experience with iMeta-NH-Professional support is 0 (zero).

Perhaps we are talking about how distribute 0U$D... so... YAGNI can be applied even here, No ?

2010/2/3 Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com>

+10

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:13 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

and sine when to donate time is different than donate money ?

Wasn't Steve's time paid ?

Sergej was hired (probably as Steve is a iMeta's�employee), sure, and that is a little bit different than donate and�receive�an invoice.

Suppositions:

Tomorrow the XYZ company is available to pay 3 months of Richard's time to work in NH.
After tomorrow the ZYX company is available to pay 3 weeks of Tuna's time to work in NH.

ranlix company is available to spent 3 days of Davy's time to fix something or develop a new feature.

My point is that, so far, NH have�received donations directly paid to a person with a clear agreement .

Everything can continue working in the same way... to manage any kind of�amount, for 1U$D up, is not so easy without a real Organization behind the funds.�

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Fabio,

IIRC, Sergej was hired by JBoss, then shortly after put to work on other things.�

iMeta's donation was of time, not money. That makes it easier to manage.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:46 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

What was around one year of Sergej full time development ?

What was 3 man-moths (or even more) full time development donated by iMeta ?

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Were there any donations

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can we take the recent past and no so recent past, of NHibernate "donations", as example of a possible funds management ?

2010/2/3 Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com>

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that...�

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.� Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.� I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.� I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?� Any committer? Only "active" committers?� What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?� Is it split by number of commits?� Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?� Who has visibility of it?� Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?� Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?� Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.� Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.� Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.� I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.� If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.� We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don�t feel I should benefit from the donations.

Donation Matching

Moreover, my company, Hibernating Rhinos, is going to match any donation to this campaign (to a total limit of 5,000$), as a way to give back to the NHibernate project for the excellent software it produced.

Why should you donate?

If you are a user of NHibernate, you gained a lot from build on such a solid foundation. We ask to you to donate so that we can make the project even better. If your company uses NHibernate, ask it to donate to this campaign.

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

[Ayende Rahien]

I doesn't work very well when you have async conversations.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 11:26 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

As an aside, surely this type of conversation is what Google Wave was aimed at - whatever happened to that? :)

On 03/02/2010 22:20, Fabio Maulo wrote:

btw my friends... before create too much noise we should have a look to the past experience...

For JBoss NH was not a business.

My personal experience with iMeta-NH-Professional support is 0 (zero).

Perhaps we are talking about how distribute 0U$D... so... YAGNI can be applied even here, No ?

2010/2/3 Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com>

+10

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:13 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

and sine when to donate time is different than donate money ?

Wasn't Steve's time paid ?

Sergej was hired (probably as Steve is a iMeta's employee), sure, and that is a little bit different than donate and receive an invoice.

Suppositions:

Tomorrow the XYZ company is available to pay 3 months of Richard's time to work in NH.
After tomorrow the ZYX company is available to pay 3 weeks of Tuna's time to work in NH.

ranlix company is available to spent 3 days of Davy's time to fix something or develop a new feature.

My point is that, so far, NH have received donations directly paid to a person with a clear agreement .

Everything can continue working in the same way... to manage any kind of amount, for 1U$D up, is not so easy without a real Organization behind the funds. 

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Fabio,

IIRC, Sergej was hired by JBoss, then shortly after put to work on other things. 

iMeta's donation was of time, not money. That makes it easier to manage.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:46 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

What was around one year of Sergej full time development ?

What was 3 man-moths (or even more) full time development donated by iMeta ?

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Were there any donations

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can we take the recent past and no so recent past, of NHibernate "donations", as example of a possible funds management ?

2010/2/3 Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com>

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that... 

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.  Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.  I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.  I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?  Any committer? Only "active" committers?  What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?  Is it split by number of commits?  Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?  Who has visibility of it?  Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?  Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?  Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.  Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.  Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.  I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.  If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.  We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don’t feel I should benefit from the donations.

Donation Matching

Moreover, my company, Hibernating Rhinos, is going to match any donation to this campaign (to a total limit of 5,000$), as a way to give back to the NHibernate project for the excellent software it produced.

Why should you donate?

If you are a user of NHibernate, you gained a lot from build on such a solid foundation. We ask to you to donate so that we can make the project even better. If your company uses NHibernate, ask it to donate to this campaign.

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

[Ayende Rahien]

Fabio,

I am not trying to say that donating time isn't valuable.

Indeed, I think that this is more valuable than simply donating money.

However, managing time contributions seems to be much easier than managing monetary contributions.

[Ayende Rahien]

Regarding taxes, I wouldn't worry about it.

We can channel things through my company, and the way taxes work around here, if I get 100$ and pay 100$, I pay 0$ taxes.

That means that as the middleman, we don't have taxes to pay / worry about.

When it comes to the individual getting the money, however, they DO need to worry about taxation.

In Israel, as an employee, I would have rather NOT get any money (I would have to pay an accountant to get it sorted out, which most employees in Israel don't need to do) unless it was high enough amount. I am assuming that some people may have similar restrictions.

My original thinking was that several committers are already consultants/contrators, who are already setup to do this sort of thing.

To be perfectly frank, I don't really care if only a small percentage of the committers get the money, if that means that we can get people working full time on the project.

Stated otherwise, my goal is not to compensate committers, my goal is to improve the project. I think that enabling full time working is the best way to do so.

[Ayende Rahien]

Exactly.

My minimum estimate is several thousands. That is not a lot, but it is a respectable enough sum.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 11:21 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the difference is that getting a company to donate time is a relatively big thing.  What I think Ayende is aiming to tap into is individuals who might have the odd $ or two to donate - they don't have the time or expertise themselves, not the influence within their company to get any time committed.

I guess the key question is how much do we realistically think we'd get?  If it's only a few hundred, then it simply won't be worth the effort of getting started... 

On 03/02/2010 22:15, Davy Brion wrote:

+10

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:13 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

and sine when to donate time is different than donate money ?

Wasn't Steve's time paid ?

Sergej was hired (probably as Steve is a iMeta's employee), sure, and that is a little bit different than donate and receive an invoice.

Suppositions:

Tomorrow the XYZ company is available to pay 3 months of Richard's time to work in NH.
After tomorrow the ZYX company is available to pay 3 weeks of Tuna's time to work in NH.

ranlix company is available to spent 3 days of Davy's time to fix something or develop a new feature.

My point is that, so far, NH have received donations directly paid to a person with a clear agreement .

Everything can continue working in the same way... to manage any kind of amount, for 1U$D up, is not so easy without a real Organization behind the funds. 

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Fabio,

IIRC, Sergej was hired by JBoss, then shortly after put to work on other things. 

iMeta's donation was of time, not money. That makes it easier to manage.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:46 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

What was around one year of Sergej full time development ?

What was 3 man-moths (or even more) full time development donated by iMeta ?

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Were there any donations

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can we take the recent past and no so recent past, of NHibernate "donations", as example of a possible funds management ?

2010/2/3 Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com>

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that... 

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.  Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.  I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.  I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?  Any committer? Only "active" committers?  What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?  Is it split by number of commits?  Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?  Who has visibility of it?  Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?  Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?  Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.  Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.  Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.  I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.  If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.  We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don’t feel I should benefit from the donations.

Donation Matching

Moreover, my company, Hibernating Rhinos, is going to match any donation to this campaign (to a total limit of 5,000$), as a way to give back to the NHibernate project for the excellent software it produced.

Why should you donate?

If you are a user of NHibernate, you gained a lot from build on such a solid foundation. We ask to you to donate so that we can make the project even better. If your company uses NHibernate, ask it to donate to this campaign.

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

[Steve Strong]

About the only thing I can see with that is that we would probably *have* to distribute / spend all funds that we receive relatively quickly - if any was held within your company accounts over a year-end, then it would presumably be treated as a profit and taxed accordingly - however Israel is one country where I have zero tax knowledge, so I could be wrong here :)

On 03/02/2010 22:40, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Regarding taxes, I wouldn't worry about it.

We can channel things through my company, and the way taxes work around here, if I get 100$ and pay 100$, I pay 0$ taxes.

That means that as the middleman, we don't have taxes to pay / worry about.

When it comes to the individual getting the money, however, they DO need to worry about taxation.

In Israel, as an employee, I would have rather NOT get any money (I would have to pay an accountant to get it sorted out, which most employees in Israel don't need to do) unless it was high enough amount.�I am assuming that some people may have similar restrictions.

My original thinking was that several committers are already consultants/contrators, who are already setup to do this sort of thing.

To be perfectly frank, I don't really care if only a small percentage of the committers get the money, if that means that we can get people working full time on the project.

Stated otherwise, my goal is not�to compensate committers, my goal is to improve the project. I think that enabling full time working is the best way to do so.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 11:09 PM, Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com> wrote:

my problem with the whole thing about paying committers is two-fold:

1) the taxes... a substantial part of the money is going to be wasted anyway, so we might as well spend it something that doesn't require taxes... also, depending on local laws you might have a lot of paperwork to deal with if you make extra income outside of your regular job.

2) spreading it amongst the committers... number of commits or line count doesn't cut it because it doesn't take complexity into account and time spent figuring out how certain parts work.� For me personally, that's not an issue since a) i probably contributed less than anyone else here and b) i really don't want anything for the little i did do in the first place.... but i definitely wouldn't be surprised if people (past, current and future contributors) started catching feelings if they thought they weren't given enough according to what _they_ think their contributions were worth compared to what others received.� Worst case scenario, some people will feel slighted and stop contributing altogether.�� It's a people thing... throw money into the mix and it all turns to shit.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com> wrote:

Taxes are relevant no matter what income source you have.

I am saying that we need to split it up into several issues:

* Infrastructure costs - As far as I can see, my company can cover things like servers and such.

* Paying committers - seems to be more complex than I initially thought

* Paying other people for tasks for us - tech writers, for example.�

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com> wrote:

actually, tax is a very important issue here...

we all take licenses pretty seriously when it comes to software (i'd hope), and getting money for writing open source software should be held to the same standard.� that means that anyone who gets money for contributing to open source should declare that money on their taxes... in the end, depending on the countries of the contributors, about 20 to 40% of the donated money is just going to be wasted on taxes.

if we spend it on infrastructure, we probably wouldn't have to waste anything on taxes... but maybe some kind of non-profit organization would have to be founded first, i'm not sure on that...

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

Personally, I'd be inclined to agree.� As soon as we try to split the cash, it's going to get ever so complex which was kind of the point of my previous email - if we do want to "pay ourselves" then we're going to have to deal with all of that and more (don't mention tax, anyone).� If we think there's gonna be enough cash to clear our mortgages then perhaps it's worth it, but since I suspect it's more likely to be the occasional beer & pizza I'd rather avoid the overhead.

Having the cash to fund other things (such as technical writers, software licences etc.) would be easier to manage and, providing we spend it wisely, do no end of good to both NH and the community.

I've dealt with various clubs and organizations before where money was involved, so understand the complexity that it can lead to.� Having said that, I've never done it on an OSS project, so I'm happy to be convinced in either direction :)

On 03/02/2010 21:22, Davy Brion wrote:

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that...�

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.� Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.� I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.� I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?� Any committer? Only "active" committers?� What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?� Is it split by number of commits?� Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?� Who has visibility of it?� Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?� Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?� Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.� Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.� Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.� I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.� If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.� We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don�t feel I should benefit from the donations.

[Evan Hoff]

You actually have the same problem on the non-monetary front as well.  For example, things like copyright and IP also pose an ownership gray area for open-source projects (although this is YAGNI for 99% of them).  

What, for example, would happen if someone took the source and then decided to violate the license commercially?  Would it take an individual committer's lawsuit to enforce the license agreement and IP of NHibernate?

I'm not saying NHibernate definitely needs a non-profit, but I just wanted to point out the other side of the coin.

I can, however, recommend this book (which I'm in the middle of reading):

http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Protecting/dp/0596517963

In addition to the IP argument, there is probably also a liability argument (around who gets the lawsuit from a sue-happy ignoramus).  And yes, I know the license covers this, but that doesn't stop a stupid company from attempting a lawsuit anyway.

Just a few thoughts..

Evan

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

Completely agree.  What we need is some form of organisation that's already setup to receive & distribute funds of this nature... 

On 03/02/2010 22:20, Fabio Maulo wrote:

btw my friends... before create too much noise we should have a look to the past experience...

For JBoss NH was not a business.

My personal experience with iMeta-NH-Professional support is 0 (zero).

Perhaps we are talking about how distribute 0U$D... so... YAGNI can be applied even here, No ?

2010/2/3 Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com>

+10

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:13 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

and sine when to donate time is different than donate money ?

Wasn't Steve's time paid ?

Sergej was hired (probably as Steve is a iMeta's employee), sure, and that is a little bit different than donate and receive an invoice.

Suppositions:

Tomorrow the XYZ company is available to pay 3 months of Richard's time to work in NH.
After tomorrow the ZYX company is available to pay 3 weeks of Tuna's time to work in NH.

ranlix company is available to spent 3 days of Davy's time to fix something or develop a new feature.

My point is that, so far, NH have received donations directly paid to a person with a clear agreement .

Everything can continue working in the same way... to manage any kind of amount, for 1U$D up, is not so easy without a real Organization behind the funds. 

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Fabio,

IIRC, Sergej was hired by JBoss, then shortly after put to work on other things. 

iMeta's donation was of time, not money. That makes it easier to manage.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:46 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

What was around one year of Sergej full time development ?

What was 3 man-moths (or even more) full time development donated by iMeta ?

2010/2/3 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

Were there any donations

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Fabio Maulo <fabio...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can we take the recent past and no so recent past, of NHibernate "donations", as example of a possible funds management ?

2010/2/3 Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com>

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that... 

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.  Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.  I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.  I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?  Any committer? Only "active" committers?  What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?  Is it split by number of commits?  Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?  Who has visibility of it?  Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?  Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?  Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.  Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.  Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.  I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.  If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.  We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don’t feel I should benefit from the donations.

Donation Matching

Moreover, my company, Hibernating Rhinos, is going to match any donation to this campaign (to a total limit of 5,000$), as a way to give back to the NHibernate project for the excellent software it produced.

Why should you donate?

If you are a user of NHibernate, you gained a lot from build on such a solid foundation. We ask to you to donate so that we can make the project even better. If your company uses NHibernate, ask it to donate to this campaign.

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Fabio Maulo

--
Evan Hoff
ev...@evanhoff.com
cell: 615.870.4302

[Ayende Rahien]

If we need to hold money for over a year, I would say that we are doing well enough to decide to do something else.

It all balances out in the end, so I am not worried about it over much.

Call it YAGNI.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 11:46 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

About the only thing I can see with that is that we would probably *have* to distribute / spend all funds that we receive relatively quickly - if any was held within your company accounts over a year-end, then it would presumably be treated as a profit and taxed accordingly - however Israel is one country where I have zero tax knowledge, so I could be wrong here :)

On 03/02/2010 22:40, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Regarding taxes, I wouldn't worry about it.

We can channel things through my company, and the way taxes work around here, if I get 100$ and pay 100$, I pay 0$ taxes.

That means that as the middleman, we don't have taxes to pay / worry about.

When it comes to the individual getting the money, however, they DO need to worry about taxation.

In Israel, as an employee, I would have rather NOT get any money (I would have to pay an accountant to get it sorted out, which most employees in Israel don't need to do) unless it was high enough amount. I am assuming that some people may have similar restrictions.

My original thinking was that several committers are already consultants/contrators, who are already setup to do this sort of thing.

To be perfectly frank, I don't really care if only a small percentage of the committers get the money, if that means that we can get people working full time on the project.

Stated otherwise, my goal is not to compensate committers, my goal is to improve the project. I think that enabling full time working is the best way to do so.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 11:09 PM, Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com> wrote:

my problem with the whole thing about paying committers is two-fold:

1) the taxes... a substantial part of the money is going to be wasted anyway, so we might as well spend it something that doesn't require taxes... also, depending on local laws you might have a lot of paperwork to deal with if you make extra income outside of your regular job.

2) spreading it amongst the committers... number of commits or line count doesn't cut it because it doesn't take complexity into account and time spent figuring out how certain parts work.  For me personally, that's not an issue since a) i probably contributed less than anyone else here and b) i really don't want anything for the little i did do in the first place.... but i definitely wouldn't be surprised if people (past, current and future contributors) started catching feelings if they thought they weren't given enough according to what _they_ think their contributions were worth compared to what others received.  Worst case scenario, some people will feel slighted and stop contributing altogether.   It's a people thing... throw money into the mix and it all turns to shit.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com> wrote:

Taxes are relevant no matter what income source you have.

I am saying that we need to split it up into several issues:

* Infrastructure costs - As far as I can see, my company can cover things like servers and such.

* Paying committers - seems to be more complex than I initially thought

* Paying other people for tasks for us - tech writers, for example. 

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com> wrote:

actually, tax is a very important issue here...

we all take licenses pretty seriously when it comes to software (i'd hope), and getting money for writing open source software should be held to the same standard.  that means that anyone who gets money for contributing to open source should declare that money on their taxes... in the end, depending on the countries of the contributors, about 20 to 40% of the donated money is just going to be wasted on taxes.

if we spend it on infrastructure, we probably wouldn't have to waste anything on taxes... but maybe some kind of non-profit organization would have to be founded first, i'm not sure on that...

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

Personally, I'd be inclined to agree.  As soon as we try to split the cash, it's going to get ever so complex which was kind of the point of my previous email - if we do want to "pay ourselves" then we're going to have to deal with all of that and more (don't mention tax, anyone).  If we think there's gonna be enough cash to clear our mortgages then perhaps it's worth it, but since I suspect it's more likely to be the occasional beer & pizza I'd rather avoid the overhead.

Having the cash to fund other things (such as technical writers, software licences etc.) would be easier to manage and, providing we spend it wisely, do no end of good to both NH and the community.

I've dealt with various clubs and organizations before where money was involved, so understand the complexity that it can lead to.  Having said that, I've never done it on an OSS project, so I'm happy to be convinced in either direction :)

On 03/02/2010 21:22, Davy Brion wrote:

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that... 

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.  Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.  I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.  I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?  Any committer? Only "active" committers?  What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?  Is it split by number of commits?  Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?  Who has visibility of it?  Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?  Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?  Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.  Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.  Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.  I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.  If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.  We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don’t feel I should benefit from the donations.

[Steve Strong]

Yup, I'd say that yagni works well for the scenario

On 03/02/2010 22:55, Ayende Rahien wrote:

If we need to hold money for over a year, I would say that we are doing well enough to decide to do something else.

It all balances out in the end, so I am not worried about it over much.

Call it YAGNI.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 11:46 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

About the only thing I can see with that is that we would probably *have* to distribute / spend all funds that we receive relatively quickly - if any was held within your company accounts over a year-end, then it would presumably be treated as a profit and taxed accordingly - however Israel is one country where I have zero tax knowledge, so I could be wrong here :)

On 03/02/2010 22:40, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Regarding taxes, I wouldn't worry about it.

We can channel things through my company, and the way taxes work around here, if I get 100$ and pay 100$, I pay 0$ taxes.

That means that as the middleman, we don't have taxes to pay / worry about.

When it comes to the individual getting the money, however, they DO need to worry about taxation.

In Israel, as an employee, I would have rather NOT get any money (I would have to pay an accountant to get it sorted out, which most employees in Israel don't need to do) unless it was high enough amount.�I am assuming that some people may have similar restrictions.

My original thinking was that several committers are already consultants/contrators, who are already setup to do this sort of thing.

To be perfectly frank, I don't really care if only a small percentage of the committers get the money, if that means that we can get people working full time on the project.

Stated otherwise, my goal is not�to compensate committers, my goal is to improve the project. I think that enabling full time working is the best way to do so.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 11:09 PM, Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com> wrote:

my problem with the whole thing about paying committers is two-fold:

1) the taxes... a substantial part of the money is going to be wasted anyway, so we might as well spend it something that doesn't require taxes... also, depending on local laws you might have a lot of paperwork to deal with if you make extra income outside of your regular job.

2) spreading it amongst the committers... number of commits or line count doesn't cut it because it doesn't take complexity into account and time spent figuring out how certain parts work.� For me personally, that's not an issue since a) i probably contributed less than anyone else here and b) i really don't want anything for the little i did do in the first place.... but i definitely wouldn't be surprised if people (past, current and future contributors) started catching feelings if they thought they weren't given enough according to what _they_ think their contributions were worth compared to what others received.� Worst case scenario, some people will feel slighted and stop contributing altogether.�� It's a people thing... throw money into the mix and it all turns to shit.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com> wrote:

Taxes are relevant no matter what income source you have.

I am saying that we need to split it up into several issues:

* Infrastructure costs - As far as I can see, my company can cover things like servers and such.

* Paying committers - seems to be more complex than I initially thought

* Paying other people for tasks for us - tech writers, for example.�

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Davy Brion <ral...@davybrion.com> wrote:

actually, tax is a very important issue here...

we all take licenses pretty seriously when it comes to software (i'd hope), and getting money for writing open source software should be held to the same standard.� that means that anyone who gets money for contributing to open source should declare that money on their taxes... in the end, depending on the countries of the contributors, about 20 to 40% of the donated money is just going to be wasted on taxes.

if we spend it on infrastructure, we probably wouldn't have to waste anything on taxes... but maybe some kind of non-profit organization would have to be founded first, i'm not sure on that...

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

Personally, I'd be inclined to agree.� As soon as we try to split the cash, it's going to get ever so complex which was kind of the point of my previous email - if we do want to "pay ourselves" then we're going to have to deal with all of that and more (don't mention tax, anyone).� If we think there's gonna be enough cash to clear our mortgages then perhaps it's worth it, but since I suspect it's more likely to be the occasional beer & pizza I'd rather avoid the overhead.

Having the cash to fund other things (such as technical writers, software licences etc.) would be easier to manage and, providing we spend it wisely, do no end of good to both NH and the community.

I've dealt with various clubs and organizations before where money was involved, so understand the complexity that it can lead to.� Having said that, I've never done it on an OSS project, so I'm happy to be convinced in either direction :)

On 03/02/2010 21:22, Davy Brion wrote:

personally, i don't think the money should go to the committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might someday pay some bills

i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that...�

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong <srst...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes.� Given that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules for how this works prior to taking donations - that way, everyone (us and those donating) understand where the money is going and we don't end up in pointless arguments.� I suspect the levels of money won't be all that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is to be distributed is important.� I think we need to answer questions like:

• Who is eligible for the money?� Any committer? Only "active" committers?� What defines "active"?
• How is the money split? Do all committers (however that's defined) get the same amount?� Is it split by number of commits?� Number of lines of code changed?

• Who owns the bank account?� Who has visibility of it?� Is it available for public viewing?
• Do we have any other needs for money other than just distributing it amongst individuals?� Should we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?� Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
  

Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the project, and I see NHProf as something different.� Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it, there was nothing about being a committer that made it possible.� Anyone else *could* have written NHProf without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own money and has its own associated costs.� I don't really see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and your altruistic activity with NH) are related.� If they are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc. would also have to come under the same rules.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Steve

On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:

Guys,

I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for the project.

Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to post. I would like to get your comments and any suggestions on how to make this better.

NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open Source project, all the work done on it is done for free.� We would like to be able to dedicate more time to NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of time that we can spend on a free project is limited.

In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation campaign that will allow you to donate money to the project.

What is this money going to be used for?

This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.

As one caveat of that, none of that money is going to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I have my own commercial interest in NHibernate (NHibernate Profiler), so I don�t feel I should benefit from the donations.

[Ayende Rahien]

inline

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 11:49 PM, Evan Hoff <ev...@evanhoff.com> wrote:

You actually have the same problem on the non-monetary front as well.  For example, things like copyright and IP also pose an ownership gray area for open-source projects (although this is YAGNI for 99% of them).  

What, for example, would happen if someone took the source and then decided to violate the license commercially?  Would it take an individual committer's lawsuit to enforce the license agreement and IP of NHibernate?

We go to the EFF, and let them sort it out.

BTW, you CAN sell NH commercially, you just have to comply with the license.

In general, I believe that the community response would be an effective deterrent against this, and if you are at court, you've already lost, so I don't worry about this.

 

I'm not saying NHibernate definitely needs a non-profit, but I just wanted to point out the other side of the coin.

I can, however, recommend this book (which I'm in the middle of reading):

http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Protecting/dp/0596517963

In addition to the IP argument, there is probably also a liability argument (around who gets the lawsuit from a sue-happy ignoramus).  And yes, I know the license covers this, but that doesn't stop a stupid company from attempting a lawsuit anyway.

Read the license :-)

THE LIBRARY "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY

KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE

IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR

PURPOSE.

Now, they could try to sue, but not having anyone to sue is actually a good thing here.

[Richard Brown (gmail)]

 

I agree that the logistics of how to distribute money to committers would be hard to tie down ... to pay me to fix a bug might take 4 days, but the same bug could be fixed by Fabio/Ayende/etc in 2 hours.  (Not to mention I keep my daily rates suitably high ... so perhaps NH couldn't afford me?  )  I do this for personal achievement, and I am happy to contribute time whenever I practically can.

 

 

In addition, I would feel genuinely guilty accepting money after coming to the project so late in the day, and contributing a comparatively small amount, especially considering the time and effort from the many committers before me.  Another thing to consider is that NHibernate is more than just the committers ... the community who spend time answering questions in the users group contribute just as much as committers.  Wouldn't they deserve to be paid too?

 

 

I like the idea of having a fund for things the project might need.  If not for servers, then for anything else we might need (a web designer to make the NhForge look as nice as the jQuery site http://forum.jquery.com/#chome?  We really should steal/borrow those nice icons at the top of the page) ... or I liked the idea of mugs n t-shirts. 

 

 

Oh ... and ... as a contractor in the UK ... don't even get me started on TAX!!

[Henry Conceição]

Instead pay in cash, the fund can be used to buy some goodies. They can be bought on a local e-shop, by Ayende's company (as he said he don't have to pay taxes if he spends all the money). 

If the ideia is not compensate commiters and have full time developers, I think you should consider the amount of donations needed. Let's be optimistic and says that this campaign raises U$ 10k. At a $ 25 hourly rate and on pace of 40 hours per week the project will have 10 weeks of paid/sponsored dev, which is good number imho. But assuming that most of the NHibernate committers are from Europe/North America and have nice jobs, that will be very tuff and bravous decision to abandon a well established and wealth job to take a ten weeks gig. 

Cheers,
Henry Conceição

[Fabio Maulo]

+1 for re-do CSM at www.nhforge.org but only if it is really needed...

2010/2/3 Richard Brown (gmail) <fluk...@googlemail.com>

--
Fabio Maulo

[Peter Smulovics]

And what about the wise old guys, who does not currently work on the
project (we are drinking cocktails with small umbrellas in it ;)? Like
mthird, Mike or myself?

>> *From:* Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>
>> *Sent:* Wednesday, February 03, 2010 10:00 PM
>> *To:* nhibernate-...@googlegroups.com
>> *Subject:* Re: [nhibernate-development] NHibernate donation campaign

[Ayende Rahien]

Peter,

See my comments regarding my motivations for doing this.

[Fabio Maulo]

La frittata é fatta!

http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8615

2010/2/4 Ayende Rahien <aye...@ayende.com>

--
Fabio Maulo