[Mageia-discuss] keep on donate or AUFML full transparency

[Michael Scherer]

Le jeudi 30 septembre 2010 à 09:20 +0200, Morgan Leijström a écrit :
> Den 2010-09-30 00:24:59 skrev Michael Scherer:
> > Le mercredi 29 septembre 2010 à 20:41 +0000, André Machado a écrit :
> > > How much Mageia Foundation needs to start its operations?
> >
> > This is not a Foundation, this is a association, which is a little bit
> > different from a legal point of view.
> >
> > And well, I think we need to pay for the domain name
> > ( 12 e/y ), for the trademark ( 400e ), for the disks ( no estimate yet,
> > depend on the size and the price ), for some part of the hosting ( can
> > be quite cheap or not, a small server for dns/smtp/etc, cost around 20
> > to 30 euros per months ). You can also add some administrative fees
> > ( bank account, sending letter to association members, etc ).
> >
> > So the bare minimum is quite low. But with it, you do not do much.
> >
> > With more money, well, better and more servers can be bought ( faster
> > build, more services, spare hardware in case of problem ), developers
> > travel and so on. For example, Opensuse have invited us to come at their
> > conference in Nuremberg, but that's a little bit too far and expensive
> > for me, so I guess I will have to decline.
> >
> > You can also see how Mozilla foundation, or Wikimedia does and spend
> > their money, but their need are far greater than ours.
> >
> > Usually, this is the available funds that decide what can be done, and
> > not the reverse.
> 
> Well written, Michael!
> 
> Such explanation makes it easier to open the purse.
> Could some text like this be linked from the donation page?
> 
> Linked, so it need not be translated every time it is updated;
> 
> It would be nice if it would be updated with what the money is planned to be 
> used for, and have been used for so far, in the future.

That's the plan , explain each month what were spent. I hope not a full
blown report, because this would put too much work on the poor soul in
charge of this. But I guess a blog post for this would be ok .

So far, no money of donation have been spent at all, everything was paid
out of our pocket ( in fact, I fear mainly out of Romain pocket ).
Romain used his gandi account for the DNS, so I assume he paid it too,
and IIRC, he did the various papers for protecting the trademark ( not
so expensive in the long run, but you pay one time for 10 years afaik ).
I think that some very basic tshirts have been made too for Open World
Forum today, I guess this would be for one time 50 euros spending.

If I take a look at the spending of AUFML or other associations, you
would also count "printing papers" and "printing posters", even if
papers are usually printed at work by members. And for a linux
distribution, money could be spent on cd and sending them ( personally,
I do not like this from a ecological point of view, but well ).

Right now, Anne, Romain, Damien and others are at the open world forum
in Paris, so if you are in Paris, you can ask them, and if you have the
chance of living elsewhere, you will have to wait if you have more
questions.
 
-- 
Michael Scherer