Thank you

[Michael Snoyman]

Hi all,

I wanted to publicly thank Jean-Christopher Mincke, who has generously
given a donation to the Yesod project.

This actually brought up two difficult questions for me: how should
Yesod collect donations, and what should we do with the money? For
now, I asked Jean-Christopher to send the donation to my personal
Paypal account, though long term I'm sure there are better options. Is
anyone familiar with how other open source projects deal with this?

The other question is: how should we use this money? The only expense
the project really has is a pittance to EC2 for hosting each month. A
few months ago, I would have said we could hire a professional
designer to clean up my horrible site design, but Luite already
addressed that.

So, any thoughts?

Michael

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 9:17 PM, Michael Snoyman <mic...@snoyman.com> wrote:
> This actually brought up two difficult questions for me: how should
> Yesod collect donations, and what should we do with the money? For
> now, I asked Jean-Christopher to send the donation to my personal
> Paypal account, though long term I'm sure there are better options. Is
> anyone familiar with how other open source projects deal with this?

There are (1) vendor-controlled projects, (2) projects that set up
their own organizational entity, (3) projects that join an entity set
up to be a legal and financial home for open source projects, and (4)
projects that don't bother as they don't take donations at all, or
where it is appropriate for donations to go to single developers.

I'd guess (3) is appropriate. Haskell.org recently did this, joining
Software in the Public Interest --
http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/haskell/ -- given that maybe (3') is
seeing if the http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell.org_committee
which I know nothing about would want to take on "determining how
haskell.org funds are spent" for funds donated to Haskell projects.

Besides SPI, the obvious entities to look at are Software Freedom
Conservancy and Apache. SFC provides a few more services than SPI, see
http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/services/ and
http://sfconservancy.org/members/services/ while Apache of course
provides a lot and requires buying into various Apache processes. I'm
on the committee for SFC that evaluates project applications so
obviously I endorse that route, but SPI may be better if the only real
need is someplace to handle money.

> The other question is: how should we use this money? The only expense
> the project really has is a pittance to EC2 for hosting each month. A
> few months ago, I would have said we could hire a professional
> designer to clean up my horrible site design, but Luite already
> addressed that.

I think some common uses in addition to paying for hosting are
sponsoring developer travel to conferences, community event expenses,
paying developers to fix specific bugs or complete specific features,
and with lots more money, paying some of the core team to work full
time on the project.

Mike

[Simon Michael]

For a slick donation and management experience, wepay is rather nice, at the cost of a 3.5% cut. You can do target-based
or open ended campaigns.

[Rodrigo Gadea]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 12:20 PM, Simon Michael <si...@joyful.com> wrote:

For a slick donation and management experience, wepay is rather nice, at the cost of a 3.5% cut. You can do target-based or open ended campaigns.

I think money comes with troubles, so being careful is necessary.

I don't know how much the donation was - I think it's not up to Micheal to do it public - but having an infrastructure to admin money seems a bit high for the moment.

Sometimes it is necessary - indispensable - for keeping really big projects going (as the previously named, there are even more FSF-related) as LLVM, which lives because of Apple's ""generosity"" paying their engineers to code (as Red Hat pays for theirs to contribute on GCC, and Microsoft has paid many of the core Haskell people).

Sometimes it is called "sponsorship to the coders", other "sponsorship to developers", other "work for me and I set the agenda of the contributed patches", or "charity" (or support of a good work).

If a mean Haskeller wins - on average -- according to indeed -- about 110k/year, if you look at the concrete job offers, you will find that there are a lot about 200k for just knowing any functional languages on hype (even clojure or scala).

I don't know how much Micheal earns, but for having just one month coding 8 hours / 5 days a week as he does at his job and paying him 110k/year, we would have to raise about 160 USD 60 donations each month. This is not a really big sum, but this is no iTunes, and Micheal ain't Steel Robs.

As he has a family (look at his picture), it would be not wise to quit his job for a 3-month-funding trip (which would be 330k), nor traveling every month to a conference and stay away from his family one or two weeks per month (his kid may start calling "daddy" to a neighbor in the long term) during some years.

Also, Micheal is not the only who has contributed to Yesod - yes, he created him and he is our Jesus (or Moises ((or Ala (((or Budha))) - but there are others (i.e. Greg) who also contributed. But I think everyone would agree that the first question is to Micheal.

So, unless someone (some fancy corporation) "puts the pigs over the table" (it's how we say here - a "Show Me The Money" localization), I would say that Micheal keeps just in case, you never know, have a beer. It seems that it is worldwide the habit of saying "yes... yes... seems good... I'll answer you the next week" but never showing up when you have to "break the piggy-bank".

I think the better for now is not having an infrastructure (which is complicated), and don't loose the sight on the deer. Maybe a company wants to sponsor only Micheal for Yesod, and it "hires" him, maybe not. If that is the case, I think he deserves it. Micheal won't be able to do eventually all, despite working 8 hours, 10, 12 or more hours / day. When that moment arrives, well, he may start choosing his bitches (and I already have a red lipstick on me).

Just have a beer!

Cheers,
Rodrigo

[Rodrigo Gadea]

(Happy Weekend)

[Rodrigo Gadea]

(Today is easier to get money from good-looking powerpoints to friends than for building something, if not, see http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/31/3054444/diffbot-raises-2-million-apps-open-web )