git gsoc money

As a result of our participation in the Summer of Code project last summer and this summer, Google gave the git community some money. Most of that money went to defraying travel costs to the SoC mentor summit and the GitTogether, both last year and this year.

However, we still have about $500 USD remaining. Because of the way Google hands out the money (they want to deal with one entity per project, and git has no legal entity), all of the remaining money is being held personally by me.

For accounting and tax reasons, I don't want to hold it later than Dec 31st. So I am soliciting suggestions from the community on what to do with the money.

Some possibilities are:

  1. Become an affiliated project of an organization like The Software
     Freedom Conservancy or Software in the Public Interest. These are
     non-profit groups to whom we (or anyone else who wants to, for that
     matter) can donate money earmarked for a particular project. They
     handle the accounting and hold the money, and then we get it out
     when we need it for something.

     Of course, then we still have the question of what that "something"
     is. So far, all money has been used for travel aid. Suggestions
     welcome.

     The upsides of this path are that it would handle the issue for
     future years, and it would make it easy for people to donate money
     to git if they wanted to. The downside is that the process may take
     a while, so it may not actually happen in the next month.

     Some relevant links for further reading:

       http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/overview/
       http://www.spi-inc.org/treasurer/associated-project-howto.html

  2. Donate the money to some non-profit (by the way, all discussion of
     taxes and non-profit here is with respect to the United States, as
     the money is being held in the US). Possible recipients include a
     software freedom organization like those listed above, or something
     not software-specific like the EFF. It might be nice to contribute
     to projects that help us build git, like curl, libxdiff, or
     asciidoc, but AFAIK we can't do so in a tax-exempt way. gcc/mingw
     is another candidate; we can probably donate to the Free Software
     Foundation for that.

Basically I don't want to hold on to this money, I want it to go somewhere useful, and I don't want to make a unilateral decision. Please let me know what people think would be useful.

-Peff

I'm a newcomer here so don't pay too much attention to me.

I would suggest that becoming associated with an existing non-profit group who do similar kinds of project and financial management for other similar projects would be the ideal option. There could be many benefits further down the road other than just having them act as a bank.

I've heard something good of spi-inc.org before, but softwarefreedom.org's web site looks a lot better in "links". :-)

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Try to join the Software Freedom Conservancy and retain the funds for Git's use? Maybe you can slide in before the Dec 31st deadline.

I know a few users of Git have said they can't contribute code, but they would like to throw $25-50 towards a developer to say thank you. This would give them an easier vehicle to do that.

I'm not saying we should actively seek donations, we have virtually no expenses and don't need them.

But we do sometimes have these GitTogether things, or one of us is going to a Linux Plumbers conference or something to give a talk promoting Git. Having $500 from a handful of donations available to defray Git related travel costs for some of our more active developers is more useful than having a user send something from an Amazon wish list [1][2].

At worst, if we collect a bunch of money and realize "Oh, wait, we have like $8000 USD and we haven't spent any of it in the past 5 years!" we can have the SFC do a big donation to FSF or something and say "thanks for GCC!".

If joining the SFC proves too difficult, just donate the $500 to the FSF. That's what we did the first year we were in GSoC.

[1] At least, to me.  My apartment isn't big enough for the crap
    I already own, I don't need more crap shipped to it.

[2] This remark is due to a user on #git the other week wondering
    why I don't have an Amazon wish list, as he wanted to send me
    something to thank me for some feature I wrote eons ago.

On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 07:39:35AM -0800, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Everybody who responded seems to think that is a good idea, so I've contacted the SFC about joining. I'll keep the list up to date as things develop there.

I expect they'll need a liaison from the project. I can do that, but if somebody else is interested, let me know.

-Peff

Jeff King wrote:

Now that I've read the links that you mentioned, I too think this is a good idea. I haven't been involved in SoC (though I benefited and much appreciated having my travel expenses reimbursed), so my opinion should be weighted accordingly.

If there's anything I can do to help, Jeff, please let me know.

-brandon

On jeudi 03 décembre 2009, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Yeah, that would be a great. Thanks for doing that!

I benefited from the GSoC fund last year and much appreciated having my travel expenses to go to the GitTogether reimbursed.

But I think it is ok too for developers to have an amazon wish list, so donors can choose. And by the way Junio has one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/1513KNZE30W63

so everyone is welcome to buy him something!

Another way we could perhaps use the funds (especially if we have to do that before the end of the year) could be to defray membership costs if some developers want to join (or are already member of) some related organisation like the Linux Foundation:

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/join/individual/

or the FSF:

http://www.fsf.org/associate/

Best regards, Christian.

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

I have never been actively involved in SoC mentoring so my suggestion shouldn't count too much, but the SFC route sounds like a very reasonable option to me. Travel fund helped me a lot to attend last year's GitTogether, and it would be very handy to have such a community fund to cover part of costs when git people need to appear in events and conferences for the benefit of git community as a whole.