Donations?

[Rich Brown]

Hi Jo,

From your note, I draw these conclusions:

- Currently, nothing in the LEDE Project "goes wanting" because of lack of money. The cost of the current three build servers is being handled personally by members of the core team. These servers total ~150 Eur per month, plus a small annual domain registration fee.

- Digital Ocean has graciously contributed the remaining infrastructure (Wiki, Forum, etc) as part of their open source support program.

- In the future (how soon - 2 months? six months?), we will likely need another two servers (additional ~100 Eur/month) to handle the full release. There may be team members who could step up to cover those new servers.

- If the current team is willing to continue to handle the existing expense, there is no immediate need to seek outside funding for the ~250 Eur/mo (3,000 Eur/year; $3,300/year) expense.

- On the other hand, donations of $20 from each of 200 community members would be enough to compensate those team members for an entire year's operating expense, so it might be worth setting up the tracking/transparency mechanism to take outsider's money, either through direct contributions or some crowdfunding site. 

- I looked into one such site - gofundme.com. They take 5.3 % of the amount. I think (in the US) we might avoid a separate legal structure, since gofundme.com also says that most donations would be treated as personal gifts, and thus not taxable. I will ask my accountant, and report back. 

- Finally, I would like to put an excerpt of your note on the site. I think it's just as important for people to get credit for their financial contributions as their technical contributions. I won't mention names in the first draft, but I think it's important for the community to know about all the contributions that .

Thanks again.

Rich



> On Oct 28, 2016, at 11:15 AM, Jo-Philipp Wich <jo at mein.io> wrote:
> 
> Hi Rich,
> 
> I am not sure what kinds of implications there are when handling
> monetary donations, therefore we avoided that topic so far.
> 
> I think at the very least there needs to be someone dedicated to
> handling incoming money and maintaining a proper balance sheet so that
> people see what money is spent where. Insights or suggestions are quite
> welcome here :)
> 
> It probably boils down to the need to be a legal entity or to use escrow
> services of an existing entity like Linux foundation.
> 
> 
> That said, the current running costs are:
> 
> - 3x 49,00 Eur / month for three Hetzner EX40 servers [1] serving as
>  download master and build server
> 
> - 1x 13 Eur / year for the domain
> 
> John pays two of the three Hetzner servers while Felix pays the third
> one and  I am handling the remaining domain fees atm.
> 
> The rest of the services runs on donated resources with the Digital
> Ocean open source support program providing the backbone of our
> remaining infrastructure (forum, wiki, ...).
> 
> 
> Immediate needs in the near future are:
> 
> - One or two more (Hetzner) servers to provide build services for the
>  upcoming release since we're at 1.4T of 1.8T disk utilization on the
>  existing machines now
> 
> 
> Right now the easiest would be if someone simply rents those servers and
> hands out access to them until the project eventually gains the ability
> to properly handle financial donations.
> 
> If there are other opinions then please share them :)
> 
> 
> HTH,
> Jo
> 
> 
> 1: https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40
> 
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