Hello Philip and Josh,

Sorry, for the delay in my response, and thank you for inquiring how we are 
spending our money. I need to keep this reply short, as I’m on my way to the 
airport to attend SCALE to promote FreeBSD and recruit more users and 
contributors to the Project. I will write up a more formal statement after I 
arrive in California.  This week has been tough, with two major conferences 
happening this week.

To answer Julien’s original question, no, the Foundation did not pay for the 
CoC. However,, as we’ve been publicizing in our monthly newsletters in 2016 and 
the FreeBSD quarterly status reports, we did support the new Code of Conduct 
efforts by paying for a few hours of time for an outside consultant to provide 
guidance and advice to the  CoC review committee made up of volunteers from 
within and outside the FreeBSD community. The funding comes out of our general 
funds, like other support we provide to the Project. The consultant did not 
write the CoC, only provided advice.

 

To address Philip’s concern, we have always been public with our spending. 
Please check out our financial reports here:

 <https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/financials/> 
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/financials/

When you look at our P&L, you can see that we do not break out every expense. 
For example, you won’t see how much we spent on individual events, like the Bay 
Area Vendor Summit, or how much we paid to sponsor AsiaBSDCon or BSDCon. Most 
of that is lumped into Project Spending expense accounts. Paying for a 
consultant to provide guidance into making sure the FreeBSD Project is 
inclusive, welcoming, and safe, is part of our charter of supporting the 
FreeBSD Project and community. I’ll also include here, that it was important to 
have that expertise on putting together the reporting process. I understand 
that there are people on this mailing list that are concerned about how we are 
spending their donations, and I believe there is a misunderstanding of how much 
we actually spent on this. To be clear, it was less than .1% of our budget. 
Over 60% off our budget goes directly to software development, with most of the 
rest going to release engineering and security team support, FreeBSD 
infrastructure, and FreeBSD advocacy and education. In fact, here is a list of 
the areas we supported in 2017, copied from my December blog post:

In 2017, your support helped us advance the Project through: 

*       Increasing the software development projects we are managing and 
funding, by internal and external software developers, including the OpenZFS 
RAID-Z Expansion project, Broadcom Wi-Fi infrastructural improvements (bhnd(4) 
driver), increasing Intel server support, and extensive progress towards a 
fully copyfree toolchain.
*       Growing the number of FreeBSD contributors and users from our global 
FreeBSD outreach and advocacy efforts, including expanding into new regions 
like China, India, Africa, and Singapore.
*       Keeping FreeBSD secure and reliable by having staff members fill 
leadership roles on the Security and Release Engineering teams.
*       Starting up nascent internship/stipend programs by participating in the 
University of Waterloo Co-op program, where we are hiring interns for 
four-month periods to work directly on FreeBSD, and the University Politehnica 
Bucharest, where we are providing stipends to students doing research projects 
with FreeBSD.
*       Providing face-to-face opportunities such as developer and vendor 
summits and company visits to help facilitate collaboration between commercial 
users and FreeBSD developers,as well as helping to get changes pushed into the 
FreeBSD source tree, and creating a bigger and healthier ecosystem.
*       Utilizing a full-time staff member to ensure stability, reliability and 
high performance via ongoing maintenance and bug fixes.

 

Most of you probably noticed that there is no mention of supporting the FreeBSD 
CoC. That’s because this work was done in 2016. As I mentioned earlier, the 
bulk of our funding goes directly to supporting the Project, and that includes 
the salaries of our limited staff. We also spend funding on a Human Resources 
consultant periodicity, an accountant, an office, computers, and other 
administrative areas that support our efforts.

As someone who has traveled around the world, meeting FreeBSD contributors who 
are new to the Project, and also many who have been with it for a long time, 
I’m always impressed with the passion and love for FreeBSD. I’m here to support 
our constituents, and listen to what you want us to support. We are not a trade 
association like some of the other open source foundations out there. Our sole 
purpose is to support the FreeBSD Project and community. Though, we don’t have 
enough funding to do the work we are currently doing, we will step in the fill 
needs of the Project.

Along with my staff, we are committed to supporting this Project. I stand by 
the support we provided to the community to craft a better Project CoC.  As 
most people know, I will respond over email. If you have specific concerns 
about the CoC, I’m open to listening. But, please be specific on what concerns 
you. However, since I was not part of the CoC effort, it would be best to send 
your concerns directly to the core team, who is working on a process for 
committers to provide their feedback on the current CoC.

 

Sincerely,

 

Deb Goodkin

Executive Director

The FreeBSD Foundation

 

 

From: Philip M. Gollucci <pgollu...@p6m7g8.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, March 7, 2018 07:39
To: Josh Goldstein <josh.goldst...@protonmail.com>
Cc: d...@freebsdfoundation.org; freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: FreeBSD Foundation CoC involvement

 

I'm perplexed, speaking as a previous officer of the ASF -  Nearly everything 
we spent money on was public.  I know the staff and infra budgets are.  I wrote 
them for two years.

 

At the moment I have no opinion on if this was good or bad to spend on; however 
as a 501c(3) vs 501c(6) you have limits on what can be asked for untargeted 
donations.

 

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 9:09 AM, Josh Goldstein via freebsd-advocacy 
<freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org <mailto:freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org> > wrote:

Deb,

Several people have now asked and you have yet to respond, so I will
raise the question again in a new thread in case you're ignoring the
politics thread:

Did The FreeBSD Foundation pay for works related to the Code of Conduct,
and if so how much did it pay, and to whom for what services?

I don't think this is an unreasonable question; several of us have
donated money to the Foundation and would like to know how it is being
spent. Personally I assumed development but that appears to not be the
case and I need to reassess my commitment.

Regards,

Josh

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