On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 09:29:54AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > On 14/03/15 at 23:25 +0100, Mehdi Dogguy wrote: > > - Financial status not clear: We have money but we don't spend it. > > I'm not pointing specifically to you here (Neil has a similar statement > in his platform), but I think that we need to be a bit careful here. "We > don't spend it" is not a fair characterization of Debian's handling > of money.
Strong ACK, thanks for spelling this out. I'm not sure where/when it started, but this meme --- which periodically reappears at each DPL campaign, it seems --- that Debian does not "spend enough" money, that we collect donation to just let money "sit in the bank", or stuff like that is not grounded in reality. Not to mention the often overlooked fact that how much money we keep as reserve, is not an independent variable. Such a figure should be looked into perspective with respect to the annual budget which, as you've observed, tends to be totally dominated by DebConf. So it'd take just one DebConf going really bad to deplete completely (with some margin of error) Debian reserves and undermine day-by-day operations. I encourage DPL candidates to look at Debian reserves under the angle of "how many DebConf with close-to-nothing sponsorship would our current reserves allow us to do?". That, I believe, would set the discussion in a much reasonable mindset than "OMG, we've *a lot* of money which we're not using". (All quoted strings above are not actual quotes by present or past DPL candidates; just my vivid characterization of the atmosphere that I usually perceive in this kind of threads.) Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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