On 20/03/14 at 22:44 +0100, Neil McGovern wrote: > I don’t think there’s an “if” here. Ever since I was secretary of SPI, > I’ve been concerned about the amount of money that Debian has > earmarked. Again, I disagree with Lucas here - I don’t think that > saving donors money is a good plan, our donators expect their > donations to be spent to progress the project. > > At the moment, in just SPI, we have > 100k USD awaiting being spent. > As an indication, that’s enough for a DebConf without any sponsors! > Our donations should be spent. Be that better porter boxes, or a > better backup service, or simply making sure our core machines are > replaced regularly. I would put it differently: "in SPI, we have ~$100k. That's barely enough for a DebConf for which fundraising would mostly fail, or for which many unexpected expenses would need to be made!" (the amount of sponsorship raised for DC13 was ~ $160k; the deficit for DC10 was $50k despite $90k of fundraising) We need some amount of savings to care for all the unexpected problems that could happen, and at the same time, we need to spend money where needed to support Debian's goals. The really hard problem is to find a good balance between saving money for the unexpected, and spending more money. We need to be careful with that, and build a good understanding of Debian's historical needs so that we can spend more money if needed without jeopardizing the future. So, yeah, it seems that Neil and I disagree on that, because I don't think that it's as simple as 'our donations should be spent'. (On core machines being replaced regularly, this is already happening: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/03/msg00010.html) Lucas
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