Trisquel funds
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I am a member!
Is there any yearly (not monthly, not necessary) report page of how many money has been raised?
Not that I know of. However, this page lists the so-called associate members (users donating money every month). There currently are 52 members while 100 would allow quidam to make a correct living:
$ wget -qO - https://trisquel.info/about https://trisquel.info/en/about?page=1 | sed -n '/Associate Members/,/Registered Users/p' | fgrep -c 'tr class'
52
That's a lot of typing just to get back the number 52.
It takes far more time to count by hand, especially if you want to monitor the progress (add a >> member_count.log at the end and put the command in a crontab)! :-) It is more reliable too (although it needs to be modified whenever the list of members does not fit in two pages).
... but it may just be that I am currently teaching those commands and every non-artificial exercise is good to take. ;-)
True. However lets say we had 1000+ associate members and you had to figure out how many we had. Would you rather spend your time counting or just use a single command to return the result?
I am a member!
Willing to donate BUT click on the paypal link and the UK 'aint on the drop down list !!!
I am a member!
Does anyone knows how often the Associate member list is updated?
I am a member!
In that case the number is 54 because I joint on 9/16 :) even though my
name is not get publish for some reason.
I am pretty sure the list is manually updated by ruben. He indicated to me a few days ago, when replying about something else on the dev list, that he was [http://listas.trisquel.info/pipermail/trisquel-devel/2012-September/000694.html "completely swamped"]. Probably because he is working on [http://devel.trisquel.info/trisquel/toutatis/dists/toutatis/Release Trisquel 6.0] and his job at activity central.
I would maybe give it a week or so if you could. If you still don't see anything maybe contact him on IRC.
There is no official report. You can estimate though. The total list of donations is here.
Also for monthly income you can do some rough guesses. As Magic Banana indicated that there are 52 associate members. The minimum contribution is 5 euros, recommended is 10, and if you can afford it 20 is generous. I personally give 20.
So:
- 5 euro x 52 = 260 euros per month (minimum)
- 10 euro x 52 = 520 euros per month (recommended)
- 20 euro x 52 = 1040 euros per month (generous)
According to google minimum wage is 748.3 euros per month in Spain (where the lead dev lives). So only if every single member is donating over 10 euros a month (unlikely) would he even be making minimum wage. That is why quidam had to take a job at activity central.
That is also why we push the membership program so much. If we want a sustainable free distro in the future financial sustainability is a big part of it.
While I am at it, here are the total amounts of donations:
$ wget https://trisquel.info/en/donate -qO - | tr '<' '\n' | awk '/td>donated/ { donations[$2] += $3 } END { for (currency in donations) print currency, donations[currency] }'
PLN 70
BRL 25
£ 95
CAD 135
SEK 190
MXN 1120
AUD 60
€ 1304
$ 4223.42
I would say not bad, not bad at all. I think Trisquel users are very generous.
True. However, it is not that much if we want quidam to work full-time on Trisquel. These donations being spread along two years, that makes something like 200€/month (and, no, I did not write a script to make an exact computation!). Adding that to money raised through the membership program (say, 10€/member/month), the Spanish minimal wage is not even reached.
Also consider the difference between net and gross. For example lets say I get paid by my job $800 a month (after taxes). For me that is net. However, lets say Ruben makes $800 a month from donations/membership I would say that is gross. That is because money has to be taken out of that 800 to pay for Trisquel related things like hosting, servers, computers, internet, ect. So in reality for Ruben to make minimum wage he would have to take in actually more then then minimum wage to account for expenses from Trisquel.
I am a member!
There really should be more of an effort to keep conversation of money in the forums. The more we talk about it the more people will realize the need to donate and become a member.
It's not unreasonable to ask a few hundred USD / EUROS / AUD / CAN from each user every couple of years. Comparatively speaking this is what goes to Microsoft, Apple, and other companies for much much less.
I'd guesstimate that we donate about $100 USD for each computer sold. That is pretty darn good. However that's not that significant a dent when most users purchase systems elsewhere and load Trisquel without making any financial contribution. This is about 25% of the profits. There is a HUGE range in terms of the profits from each sale. It is significantly less for a system sold with zero upgrades or other accessories. It also doesn't take into account the real world costs of running the business.
One more thought. The project is still bringing in LESS from these donations than what we are paying for near minimum wage help (labor) here in the United States or abroad in South Africa or the United Kingdom. I'm sure Rubén is not making minimum wage at activity central. We should be shooting for 30,000 Euros / yr ($40,000 USD / AUD / CAN) if we want Rubén to go to work on Trisquel full time. This is based on a software developers pay in Spain. Personally I think this is still undervaluing his labor. It should be closer to 40,000 - 50,000 Euros.
Right now if we had 60 members it would cost 40 Euros per member a month to sustain this project with one full time developer.
Maybe we should be encouraging people to increase there monthly contributions by a factor of 4x. I suspect that the majority of the members are financially able to make larger contributions. For instance I believe I'm contributing the recommended amount. This is significantly less than what I could easily afford. At this point ThinkPenguin is bringing in more money than what I could ever hope to make as a software developer. Please be aware I'm not living a lap of luxury. The money is going back into the business. Few here would be jealous if you could see my accommodations. It reminds me very much of Richard Stallmans frequent accommodations. For those who aren't aware he travels a good portion of the year. His accommodations are frequently a couch in somebodies home. hmm then again maybe some would be jealous of that. It's a neat way to live. Free as a bird.
I think you should try to develop the membership program by giving additional value for members. Some suggestions:
1. Cloud disk space like Ubuntu one have. Maybe code a simple native to Trisquel interface for it.
2. Consider as a community to give support to mainly members only. That is, you can give support to non-members and it would be good to do, but pay special attention to supporting members. Optimally no problem a member have should be left unsolved.
3. Think Penguin should give a one year Trisquel membership for those buying a Trisquel machine.
Something even more radical could be to give compiled new versions of Trisquel to members first and later to non-members. This could though backfire. If done however, then a member should get a new version of Trisquel at latest one month after Ubuntu it is based on is released.
> 1. Cloud disk space like Ubuntu one have. Maybe code a simple native
> to Trisquel interface for it.
It would use resources that are needed to support the developers and
probably wouldn't be useful for users who want to control their
computing and use their own services for this.
> 2. Consider as a community to give support to mainly members
> only. That is, you can give support to non-members and it would be
> good to do, but pay special attention to supporting members. Optimally
> no problem a member have should be left unsolved.
We have a list of crowdfunded tasks, I don't know how well it works. I
think we shouldn't emphasize support for members, we want to help new
users and people contributing in different ways (or just boycotting
Paypal or considering it too difficult to use).
Maybe there are other ways than making the system difficult to use for
non-members that could help?
I am a member!
The problem with funding it seems to me comes down to two things :-
1) the human element
2)the forum
Let's have a look at the human element.
According to the forum there are over 3800 registered users, now it is a sad fact of life that 20% or less will post regularly.
Even less (for whatever reason) will donate.
If 20% donated 5 euro's the income would be 43200 /yr.
Now in My opinion it is the forum (NOT the people) that is part of the problem.
a more proactive forum would bring in more members and more donators, by that I mean the a more usual layout.
Now such is My belief in that statement and such is My belief in Trisquel
That I'm prepared to fund and set up an alternative forum but of course it would need the developer's consent as the forum link would need to point to the new forum.
Any thoughts on this?
Do you have concrete ideas on how to change the forum? The one we have
has some advantages like the mailing list integration and lack of
useless things making other forums harder to read. (It's not the only
distro known to me where it's common to offer making new forums.)
I am a member!
Yes I do have some ideas , I will set up a 'dummy' forum and post a link.
I am a member!
Setting up a few different forums and particularly those that integrate well with Drupal would be a worthwhile effort. Even if they aren't used and never see the light of day. Looking into the available free options is a good idea. We should take more initiative. While it may take Rubén to move forward with anything it doesn't take him to look into it.
Beyond the desirable I think the forums probably need to have:
1. Multi-ligual support
2. Drupal integration
3. Forum monitors
4. Under a free software compatible license (the forums Canonical uses are not free software and we can't use them even if we paid for it)
I think it's a good approach to calculate how much the software we're using would cost us were we forced to buy it off the shelves and donate accordingly. Also accounting for upgrades, possibly even forced hardware upgrades.
On the other hand as a student I realize many simply don't have any money to donate. Or at least not too much.
And then there's paypal with which I will never do business.
And the distribution question, how much should go to Trisquel and how much upstream.
All in all we've been given wonderful gifts and paying back to the developers and the community is very reasonable.
Is there a good way to get timely feedback and support in the trisquel EDU space? I joined and made a donation last March. I also sent an email stating that I wanted to get in contact with the Trisquel EDU community. I never received a reply.
That convinced me that however much I like the goals of the Trisquel effort, it is not viable to use in deployments for which I am responsible.
I am a member!
What email did you send it to? It's probably not a wise move to send things to the lead developer. You wouldn't do that if running non-free software. There are two possible answers to support:
1. Commercial support (libre.thinkpenguin.com)
2. Forums
Rubén does respond although like other lead developers he is extremely busy. If your project has money to contribute or pay for support its probably not an issue. The infrastructure for Trisquel is very good. It's setup such that it can be supported. Unlike GNewSense and some of the other free software distributions there are tools within to utilize it effectively. This is because of its Ubuntu roots and regularly released consistent (even if not always speedy as some would like) updates.
Rubén mainly fixes non-free software issues and adds support for free software. If there is an issue it is very likely Trisquel is not the right place to report the issue. What needs to happen is the equivalent Ubuntu release needs to be tested and then reported upstream. Except where it's something that is packaged by the Trisquel project. An example of this is the web browser and kernel.
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