Re: raising funds and or donations for the project? sponsors?
+++ Peter Naulls [04-06-10 23:12 +0100]:
> In message <[🔎] 20040610183023.GC8157@debina.ctnet.pl>
> Henrion Benjamin <bh@udev.org> wrote:
>
> > I think emdebian should raise funds and ask for donations, even calling
> > for sponsors,
>
> Not really - who will get this money, and who will decide,
This is the main reason I haven't followed up on the offers and semi-offers
I've had so far (and I have been making 'enquiries' shall we say). It's easy
for me to take people's money myself (through Aleph One or directly) and
spend time working on Emdebian (indeed I'd enjoy doing so - volunteers
please step forward :-), but as soon as money is donated to 'The Embedded
Debian Project' then things get much more complicated. Where does the money
sit, how do we share it out? What do we give 'official sponsors' in return
(apart from the project of course) - a logo on the web pages?
And I want to have a clear separation between any money Aleph One gets for
working on Emdebian and any money donated to the project as there is clearly
potential for me to abuse my position within emdebian to get consulting work
- theing need to be seen to be done properly.
There _is_ room for corporate sponsorship. I can spend more time working on
emdebian if someone is paying for it than if not (assuming I have spare
cycles), and that is probably true for others too, and there may well be
companies that find it easier to donate money than expertise/time/hardware.
That's fine. This is how free software is supposed to work. I do spend some
time buttering up corporate people who ought to know about us (e.g. I spent
an evening with Tim bird, Ex Lineo CTO, now a Sony bigwig at CELF (consumer
electronics linux forum), last week, so now he knows what we are about,
which is a good thing. ARM put me in touch, and these sorts of contacts are
currently their contribution to the process.
I have turned on the donations for the sourceforge project so if any money
turns up that way then we'll have to decide how to spend it at some point.
> No, EmDebian needs to be sold on its on merits to companies, either
> directly interested in what it can do for them, or developed as a
> consequence of solutions companies are after which EmDebian happens to
> be appropriate for. Indeed, there is already one project with a large
> company in which this is the case, and is likely to have some benefits
> for EmDebian.
I think this is the right way to progress, at least for the time being. As
someone pointed out, our only real current need is bandwidth/hosting costs.
I have had one fairly serious offer of 'a few hundred quid' as sponsorship,
so it probably makes sense to use that get Philippe's machine
hosted/connected. But there is no rush for this. One server will
do for now and I think Phillipe can more valuably spend his time getting the
build environment more mature than admining yet another box :-)
The easiest way to deal with any money we do get is probably to use SPI to
deal with it. I know they are a bit hopless, but they do have exactly the
right infrastructure - we might as well make use of it. Any violent objection?
Thanx for everyone's input on this.
Wookey
--
Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679
work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/
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