Hello all,

Congratulations for all the nominations and thanks for stepping up for this challenging role.

I follow up with a couple questions for you:

1. Do you know how were Debian funds spent last year(s)? Do you know how
much yearly income Debian has?

2. If elected DPL, how do you plan to use Debian funds? Which areas
(social, events, hardware, etc) would you prioritise spending? Do you have ideas for improve fundraising (if you think this is needed at all)?

Thanks again for your support to the project.

Regards

<div dir="auto">Hello all,<div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Congratulations for all the nominations and thanks for stepping up for this challenging role.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I follow up with a couple questions for you:</

<div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">1. Do you know how were Debian funds spent last year(s)? Do you know how much yearly income Debian has?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">2. If elected DPL, how do you plan to use Debian funds?

Which areas (social, events, hardware, etc) would you prioritise spending? Do you have ideas for improve fundraising (if you think this is needed at all)?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Thanks again for your support to the project.</div><
div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Regards </div></div>

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Hello,

Just a couple remarks


El dom, 16 mar 2025, 21:51, Julian Andres Klode <[email protected]> escribió:

we keep a healthy

buffer there of about $500k

This is even lower ~$300k

There are probably a whole lot more to this, and maybe it makes

sense (and apologies for opening that can of worms again) to
think about a future where we actually have a Debian
Foundation [...]

Project should be in the order of managing $1M/year for the idea of a foundation to make sense, which also needs people on staff, therefore it
needs sustained (big) donations to keep up capital expenditure.

Thanks for your explanation.

Regards

<div dir="auto"><div>Hello,<div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Just a couple remarks </div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">El dom, 16 mar 2025, 21:51, Julian Andres Klode &lt;<a href="mailto:
[email protected]">[email protected]</a>&gt; escribió:<br></div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">we keep a healthy<br>
buffer there of about $500k<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">This is even lower ~$300k</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">There are probably a whole lot more to this, and maybe it makes<br>
sense (and apologies for opening that can of worms again) to<br>
think about a future where we actually have a Debian<br>
Foundation [...]</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Project should be in the order of managing $1M/year for the idea of a foundation to make sense, which also needs people on staff, therefore it needs sustained (big)
donations to keep up capital expenditure.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Thanks for your explanation.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Regards</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"></div></


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On Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at 08:14:29PM +0100, Hector Oron wrote:

Hello all,

Congratulations for all the nominations and thanks for stepping up for this challenging role.

I follow up with a couple questions for you:

1. Do you know how were Debian funds spent last year(s)? Do you know how
much yearly income Debian has?

Now of course, the current DPL has an advantage in answering this,
but I did read at least some of the SPI treasury reports and so
have some reasonable insight I believe.

I believe the majority of expenses are for conferences and travel;
followed by hardware and IT cost. I used to read the SPI treasury
reports in greater detail than today, and that's only an incomplete
picture, but that's roughly what that shows and the yearly income
probably probably should be in the range of about ~100k USD? I think
on the SPI side it's always around $60k/year, and we keep a healthy
buffer there of about $500k, although IIRC it used to be significantly
higher a decade or so ago.

2. If elected DPL, how do you plan to use Debian funds? Which areas
(social, events, hardware,� etc) would you prioritise spending?

## social, events and travel

I think travel will continue to play an important role;
I'd like to emphasise especially smaller regional events
like MiniDebConfs, such that people can get together without
needing to fly around the world.

A large part of that should be ensuring diversity of attendants,
such as DebConf's diversity bursary.

## hardware
On the hardware front, I think we see two different kind of things,
but not sure; think compute hardware and so on vs stuff like cameras
for events.

I think for compute hardware, think new architectures, or new
architecture levels, the best way would be to get hardware donated,
rather than buying hardware, to establish a relationship with
the companies making the hardware; bringing Debian to new hardware
benefits the hardware maker as much as the community; the one that
stands out to me here is Lenovo which has engaged on their own a
lot over the past years, and I believe also IBM is very much
actively keeping an eye on the health of s390x and ppc64el in
Debian.

Sometimes this can be tricky though. Distributing hardware around
the world is pretty hard, and if it's data center hardware that
you'd want some warranty for, even more so.

### cloud
And on the flip side, getting random hardware contributions rather
than being able to make informed decisions can lead to wide spread
in different hardware and "clouds" that are hard to manage.

Because it would be nice to have a uniform Debian cloud or two to
host services and also builders on. I'd love for a DD to be able
to just spin up a VM in a Debian cloud with full root access for
an architecture they don't have access to, rather than have the
limited porterbox experience we currently have.

Or builders and testers that you can autoscale; where we actually
control the infrastructure.

But frankly this might be a challenge to actually have people to
operate such a cloud, especially a cloud diverse in
architectures.

## professionalising organisational aspects / legal aspects

We also just had this discussion about our bookkeeping, which
is quite arduous, and it would be really lovely to pay someone
professional to do it.

There are probably a whole lot more to this, and maybe it makes
sense (and apologies for opening that can of worms again) to
think about a future where we actually have a Debian
Foundation that perhaps actually employs the DPL, given how
low the interest in running for DPL *in addition to* a day
job is.

Areas where we don't have enough volunteers to do the job,
or where it's critical for the job to be done right because
there's legal consequences otherwise, that's important.

Also for areas that are run by volunteers, I think it's valid
for Debian to go assist these volunteers with legal support
if they run into legal trouble for mistakes they made while
volunteering.

Do you have ideas for improve fundraising (if you think this
is needed at all)?

It seems to me donations are flowing in steadily over the
years, so I'm not sure how much work is needed.

One of the things when it comes to fundraising that may be
some concern is dependence on big donors, rather than grassroots
donations, especially in the volatile political and economical
situation we've been thrown into in the last couple of weeks.

If we look at the landing page https://www.debian.org/ there
is no obvious way for someone to donate money, that surely
could be improved - it's hidden under a "more" thing, not even
a mention of it under contributing, despite donations also being
a contribution of sorts.

Currently we are in a sort of sense somewhat limited by our
trusted organisations as well. Both in the sense that people
could accidentally contribute to SPI in general rather than
Debian specifically; and also in geographical terms; for example,
maybe we should have a trusted organisation in India, it is
one of the fastest growing markets and there may be many
companies there that would like to help, but currently
don't, whether it's the hassle of international donations,
or a lack of tax deductibility (which let's face it, helps
convincing people).

It may perhaps all be easier to start setting up a Debian
Foundation and regional outlets of it; not that I particularly
have a strong knowledge in the complexity of international
tax law involved.
--
debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev
ubuntu core developer i speak de, en

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Hi Hector,

First of all, thank you to you and the other treasurers for carrying out
such high-responsibility work that our common project depends on. Your
efforts are highly appreciated, and I'm grateful that others take on
this role, as I personally would not volunteer for it.

Am Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at 08:14:29PM +0100 schrieb Hector Oron:

Hello all,

Congratulations for all the nominations and thanks for stepping up for this challenging role.

I follow up with a couple questions for you:

1. Do you know how were Debian funds spent last year(s)? Do you know how
much yearly income Debian has?

As Julian mentioned, I do have some advantage in answering this
question. However, rather than focusing on what I personally know, I
think it is more useful to consider how everyone could more easily
access and understand this information.

What I can say is that there are monthly reports from SPI, though they
are admittedly difficult to interpret. Thanks to the work of Hector and
the other treasurers, I have access to graphs illustrating the
development of our funds, though I believe these are not publicly
available.

So instead of simply answering whether I know Debian's yearly income,
I'd rather focus on whether we should improve the transparency and
readability of financial information-at least for Debian members, if not
for the general public. Ideally, the information should be presented in
a way that enables anyone interested to answer these questions without
needing special access or prior financial expertise.

Understanding Debian's financial situation is essential for the DPL, as
one of the DPL's responsibilities is making decisions on funding
requests. However, it is important to emphasize that the actual
financial management-including tracking income, expenses, and
reporting-is handled by the treasurers. Their work ensures that Debian's finances are well managed and accounted for, and the DPL relies on their expertise to make informed decisions.

For a long time, financial decision-making was relatively
straightforward. In his Bits from the DPL talk, Neil once mentioned at DebConf15 that he approved every single funding request he received, and Debian's financial reserves still grew during his term. Unfortunately,
these simpler times seem to be over, and the need for careful financial planning has increased. I'd love to be in Neil's shoes, and I hope that
future DPLs will see those times return.

2. If elected DPL, how do you plan to use Debian funds? Which areas
(social, events,

I'm not sure how meaningful it is to separate "social" and "events"
since any gathering of more than two people inherently has a social
component. While technical needs often drive in-person interactions, all
our meetings-whether among Debian contributors at (Mini)DebConfs, team
sprints, bug squashing events, or release parties-also have an important
social aspect.

Likewise, representing Debian at broader events such as FOSDEM and
FOSSASIA (as international examples) or local ones like Chemnitzer
LinuxTage (just to name a few current examples) is, in my view, highly valuable. I would support all these activities as best as our funds
permit.

hardware, etc)

When it comes to servers maintained by DSA, it seems obvious to me that
we should follow the recommended hardware refresh cycle to keep our infrastructure at a modern and reliable level-ensuring that Debian
remains what it is. Fortunately, much of our hardware, as well as rack
space, is donated or made available at a reduced price. I sincerely hope
that our financial situation will always allow us to maintain this
without having to make cuts.

Sometimes we also support DDs in buying in some way "interesting"
hardware, be it open hardware like MNT Reform[1] or to some extend
consumer ready RISC-V hardware like Frame.work with RISC-V board.
For me it makes perfectly sense to make sure Debian runs on alternative hardware which to some extend matches our values and I would support
if Debian developers will make sure that we can support our users
who are interested in it.

would you prioritise spending?

I do not think it makes sense to imagine hypothetical conflicts between different spending categories like "social" and "hardware." Decisions on spending should be made on a case-by-case basis. What I can say is that
I will continue to apply Debian's high standards when making these
decisions.

Moreover, I can confirm that whenever I have faced important decisions,
I have always sought advice from Debian developers who I consider
knowledgeable in the relevant area. Looking back, this has always been a
good approach, and I intend to stick to this habit.

In short: For complex financial decisions, I will consult the treasurers
first and also speak with those directly affected by the decision.

Do you have
ideas for improve fundraising (if you think this is needed at all)?

I do not think improving fundraising is merely an option-it is a
necessity if we want to continue running the project as we have in the
past.

I am just back from FOSSASIA (hence my late response-your question came
in as I started my travels, and I am now slightly jet-lagged with
real-life work piling up). My motivation for attending was to see how
others are working and to find new supporters, whether for development
or financial backing of Debian.

Beyond this kind of outreach, I believe there are areas where we could
improve by involving professionals. Many tasks in Debian are handled by
people with a brilliant IT background, but who take on responsibilities
outside their core expertise. While many of our volunteers have
developed at least semi-professional skills in areas like conference organization, press work, or financial management, it could be
beneficial to involve contributors with formal training in these fields.

At the same time, I know that some Debian users who are less technically involved might wonder how they can help the project, assuming that their
lack of deep technical knowledge is a barrier. However, Debian has many important non-technical tasks that need to be picked up-ranging from
event organization to outreach, documentation, fundraising, and more.
These are valuable ways to give back to Debian, and I would strongly
welcome contributors who want to support Debian in these areas.

We already do this in some areas-for example, in our publicity team,
where we have non-uploading DDs. I believe Debian would benefit from strengthening our efforts in these non-technical fields. If we could
attract contributors who have expertise in fundraising and are eager to
support Debian in ways beyond technical work, I would strongly welcome
their involvement.

Thanks again for your support to the project.

My thanks goes also to you as I said in the beginning
Andreas.


[1] https://mntre.com/
[2] https://frame.work/de/de/blog/risc-v-mainboard-for-framework-laptop-13-is-now-available

--
https://fam-tille.de

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