[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] financial sustainability Plan A (SPI)

[Thilo Borgmann]

Hi,

Am 28.10.23 um 16:20 schrieb Ronald S. Bultje:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 11:45 AM Michael Niedermayer <michael at niedermayer.cc>
> wrote:
> 
>> This is financial sustainability Plan A (SPI)
>> ATM SPI has like 150k $, we do not activly seek donations, we do not
>> currently
>> use SPI money to fund any development. SPI money is ultimately controlled
>> by
>> the FFmpeg community and everything is transparent and public.
>>
>> 1. We should fund some FFmpeg development with SPI-FFmpeg money
>> 2. We should activly seek more donations for SPI-FFmpeg
>>
>> To help 2. we should favor flashy, cool development that can bring in more
>> donations
>>
> 
> Hm... There's a lot going in the above. I'd like to dissect. With 2, are
> you looking for end user donations, or corporate contributions? Without
> trying to be too picky, I believe they are different. Users like flashy new
> features. My impression from discussions is that corporations are asking
> for a lot of things, but flashy new features aren't the ones I've heard
> them ask for.
> 
> With his Demuxed lightning talk, Kieran was aiming for corporate
> contributions, not end user donations. I'd like to play advocate for the
> devil for a second. Why would they do that? What might their desired
> outcomes be?
> - a more stable, polite, professional community (community sustainability)
> - continued codebase maintenance, support, bugfixing (codebase
> sustainability)
> - so that devs who write features important to them might stay around and
> maintain said features and possibly even become friendly mentors /
> reviewers for future contributors - maybe even develop more features
> (developer sustainability)
> 
> I also think they'd like safeguards in place. If they are willing to set
> aside non-trivial amounts of *their* (not ours) money that can pay for the
> annual lifelihood of a fulltime developer ("salary"), then this can no
> longer be carried with community votes of an often hostile community. I
> agree with Michael's point earlier that 501c3 donations are tax-deductible
> for US-based corporations, which might be helpful. Maybe that can be done
> with EU-based non-profits also (not an expert there). More importantly,
> though, is that I doubt they would just "give" the money and sit on the
> sidelines. They'd ask for a seat at the table in return - it is *their*
> money, after all. In US non-profits, this is called an advisory board.
> Also, these non-profits are usually run by an executive director which has
> the support of that board & community. This guarantees some professional
> accountability, e.g. to ensure the donations are used for useful purposes
> in a somewhat-professional/accountable fashion (not just parties).
> 
> Some of this probably sounds scary to some of you. But the idea that they'd
> just throw us some money and see what happens is equally scary to them. Our
> community's track record (professionalism, politeness, self-sustainability)
> is not good enough for that.

I don't mind where the SPI money comes from. If it does not come from scared 
companies, that's fine. If they require more paperwork and won't do it via SPI, 
that's fine as well. We can give them some alternatives, like Kieran did, that 
fit into their world.

Right now, as we have no way accepted to spent SPI money except for travel & hw, 
it is also not very appealing to donate at all - because nothing happens with 
the money, either for the donors direct interests nor general interests in the 
project.

What this is about, is to set up a way to properly spend the SPI money aside 
from travel & hw. Why we should not do it because some companies beurocracy, I 
cannot see. If we would have a proper way to spend the money, donating could 
become more appealing. If we set this up and we know it could be brought to good 
use, instead of sitting in the account, it could make donating more appealing 
and advertising for that way easier. And if it does not, we lost exactly nothing.

-Thilo