Re: Git / Software Freedom Conservancy status report (2025)

From: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 1, 2025, 15:32 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP8UFD1jCRyhN3XH_-WxtCz7sixt+Js_XDFZxkxH9zX2-vZVNw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <aNblfuTDdtxLdImC@nand.local>

On Fri, Sep 26, 2025 at 9:12 PM Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> wrote:

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> ## Expenses
>
> More interesting is where we spent money. Like last year, the biggest
> chunk of our expenses went towards conference travel. We spent more in
> that category than last year (where we spent only $675.96).

I think the $1,846.90 we spent towards conference travel was likely compensated by Google giving to the project for mentors travelling to the GSoC mentor Summit. It looks like what Google gives likely goes into the "Donations" account, so it's not easy to match to the corresponding expenses.

Outside of the GSoC Mentor Summit, I must say that we have tried to sponsor people to come to the Git Merge 2025, but the effort we have made, and we made significantly more effort than previous years on this, have all failed due to visa issues.

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> ## Future expenses?
>
> The project continues to take in a modest but quite healthy amount of
> money, and has very few expenses.
>
> I continue to wonder if there are other ways that we should be spending
> our money. If others have thoughts about what the project should do with
> its money, please feel free to share them.

It has been suggested several times (including last year and this year during the Contributor's Summit) that we give a good chunk of what we have (for example 50%) on our bank account to Outreachy's general fund. This will soon fund contributions to other open source projects (and perhaps one day to Git if the companies that are currently donating for the Outreachy interns working on Git stop donating).

In https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAP8UFD2OcOaSsumKGZ-oVVWzttc48CvmQZD8tQaWTGQR7wR1EA@mail.gmail.com/ I have mentioned that Outreachy is navigating significant financial challenges these days. Here are related links (again):

https://www.outreachy.org/blog/2025-08-14/december-2025-call-for-mentoring-organizations/ https://www.outreachy.org/blog/2024-08-14/outreachy-needs-your-help/

Outreachy is part of the Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/) like Git, so I think we should help them as we have no need in the foreseeable future for the $100k USD we have on our account.

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> ### Outreachy
>
> The Git project participates in Outreachy, which is a program that
> provides internships in open-source to anyone from any background who
> faces under-representation, systemic bias, or discrimination in the
> technical industry where they are living.
>
> Outreachy suggests that companies to donate $10k USD per internship they
> want to sponsor (previously this was $8k USD).

On https://www.outreachy.org/docs/community/#funding-requirements they say it's between $8k and $10k USD per internship:

- $7,000 USD donation towards the Outreachy internship stipend
- $1,000 to $3,000 USD donation towards the Outreachy program activities fund

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> The Git project has
> historically benefited from GitHub and/or GitLab covering these costs
> for us. We may want to consider budgeting for this in the future
> ourselves, in case we want to take on more interns than those companies
> are willing to sponsor.

Let's try again to ask GitLab and GitHub. It has always worked in the past, so it makes sense to try again. But yeah, if it doesn't work, the Git project can then donate for the internships. And if we have donated to the general fund, then we can always ask to benefit from it instead of donating again.

Note that this year we are likely to have only at most one intern, as it looks like few people are willing to mentor. This means the average number of interns we mentor per year is likely to stay close to 1. So the risk of Git running out of money in the long run due to Outreachy interns is very low.

Thanks for your hard work on this report!