On Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at 08:14:29PM +0100, Hector Oron wrote: > Hello all, > > Congratulations for all the nominations and thanks for stepping up for this > challenging role. > > I follow up with a couple questions for you: > > 1. Do you know how were Debian funds spent last year(s)? Do you know how > much yearly income Debian has?
Now of course, the current DPL has an advantage in answering this, but I did read at least some of the SPI treasury reports and so have some reasonable insight I believe. I believe the majority of expenses are for conferences and travel; followed by hardware and IT cost. I used to read the SPI treasury reports in greater detail than today, and that's only an incomplete picture, but that's roughly what that shows and the yearly income probably probably should be in the range of about ~100k USD? I think on the SPI side it's always around $60k/year, and we keep a healthy buffer there of about $500k, although IIRC it used to be significantly higher a decade or so ago. > > 2. If elected DPL, how do you plan to use Debian funds? Which areas > (social, events, hardware,ยด etc) would you prioritise spending? ## social, events and travel I think travel will continue to play an important role; I'd like to emphasise especially smaller regional events like MiniDebConfs, such that people can get together without needing to fly around the world. A large part of that should be ensuring diversity of attendants, such as DebConf's diversity bursary. ## hardware On the hardware front, I think we see two different kind of things, but not sure; think compute hardware and so on vs stuff like cameras for events. I think for compute hardware, think new architectures, or new architecture levels, the best way would be to get hardware donated, rather than buying hardware, to establish a relationship with the companies making the hardware; bringing Debian to new hardware benefits the hardware maker as much as the community; the one that stands out to me here is Lenovo which has engaged on their own a lot over the past years, and I believe also IBM is very much actively keeping an eye on the health of s390x and ppc64el in Debian. Sometimes this can be tricky though. Distributing hardware around the world is pretty hard, and if it's data center hardware that you'd want some warranty for, even more so. ### cloud And on the flip side, getting random hardware contributions rather than being able to make informed decisions can lead to wide spread in different hardware and "clouds" that are hard to manage. Because it would be nice to have a uniform Debian cloud or two to host services and also builders on. I'd love for a DD to be able to just spin up a VM in a Debian cloud with full root access for an architecture they don't have access to, rather than have the limited porterbox experience we currently have. Or builders and testers that you can autoscale; where we actually control the infrastructure. But frankly this might be a challenge to actually have people to operate such a cloud, especially a cloud diverse in architectures. ## professionalising organisational aspects / legal aspects We also just had this discussion about our bookkeeping, which is quite arduous, and it would be really lovely to pay someone professional to do it. There are probably a whole lot more to this, and maybe it makes sense (and apologies for opening that can of worms again) to think about a future where we actually have a Debian Foundation that perhaps actually employs the DPL, given how low the interest in running for DPL *in addition to* a day job is. Areas where we don't have enough volunteers to do the job, or where it's critical for the job to be done right because there's legal consequences otherwise, that's important. Also for areas that are run by volunteers, I think it's valid for Debian to go assist these volunteers with legal support if they run into legal trouble for mistakes they made while volunteering. > Do you have ideas for improve fundraising (if you think this > is needed at all)? It seems to me donations are flowing in steadily over the years, so I'm not sure how much work is needed. One of the things when it comes to fundraising that may be some concern is dependence on big donors, rather than grassroots donations, especially in the volatile political and economical situation we've been thrown into in the last couple of weeks. If we look at the landing page https://www.debian.org/ there is no obvious way for someone to donate money, that surely could be improved - it's hidden under a "more" thing, not even a mention of it under contributing, despite donations also being a contribution of sorts. Currently we are in a sort of sense somewhat limited by our trusted organisations as well. Both in the sense that people could accidentally contribute to SPI in general rather than Debian specifically; and also in geographical terms; for example, maybe we should have a trusted organisation in India, it is one of the fastest growing markets and there may be many companies there that would like to help, but currently don't, whether it's the hassle of international donations, or a lack of tax deductibility (which let's face it, helps convincing people). It may perhaps all be easier to start setting up a Debian Foundation and regional outlets of it; not that I particularly have a strong knowledge in the complexity of international tax law involved. -- debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev ubuntu core developer i speak de, en
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
