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On 7/9/2015 8:24 AM, Mihovil Stanic wrote:<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:559E9240.9020304@miho.im" type="cite">
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LibreOffice has paid staff, but I don't think any of those are
paid.<br>
Paid staff is 1 for infrastructure, 1 "director", 1 community
coordinator and 1 recently contracted marketing lead, which lead
marketing effort for free uptil now.<br>
<br>
Most of developers are volunteers (some probably hoping they can
earn something from it since they get certified in the end and can
be hired by companies to fix bugs, introduce new feautures for
them etc.) and rest are paid developers by Red Hat, Canonical,
Collabora (most active in contribution, but they earn directly
from that) and rest of companies.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Actually quoting from their 2014 Annual Report, they say: "Florian
Effenberger has been promoted to Executive Director, with the
responsibility of helping the Board of Directors to coordinate and
control the foundation activities. Staff members are: Sophie Gautier
(administration, QA, localization and certification), Christian
Lohmaier(release engineering and infrastructure), Alexander Werner
(infrastructure), Robinson Tryon (QA and release engineering) and
Italo Vignoli (certification). Note also that their code development
team is mostly provided by third-party organizations that benefit
from LibreOffice. Not sure how we can do the same thing. This is not
an organization that primarily relies on volunteers.<br>
<br>
Overall, this is an excellent annual report that is quite
representative of where Thunderbird needs to be.<br>
<br>
Note the staff are focused on release engineering, infrastructure,
and QA. Those are the critical needs of a mature project, and
Thunderbird is going to have the same issues. We have to be careful
about over-promising features as the reason for needing funding.
Even with current levels of Mozilla infrastructure support (which I
don't believe will be sustained indefinitely), recently I have
focused most of my time on release issues. Most of my development
efforts in the last year have been following up regressions that
were caused by volunteer contributors. Not saying those
contributions were bad or unwelcome, just saying that a professional
piece of software needs people whose primary mission is to get a
quality release in the hands of users. These are not roles that we
usually think about with IndieGoGo-style campaigns.<br>
<br>
Reading the financials (though I wish they had GAAP-style
statements), I see no taxes listed. The US IRS is making it
difficult to register open-source projects as non-profit entities
with respect to US income tax. Were LibreOffice a US C Corporation,
they had $600,000 of income, $200,000 in expenses, which is a
"profit" of $400,000. US corporate income tax on that would be
$134,000. Taxation of excess donations is the big issue in wanting
non-profit status, and may drive us to Europe for registration.<br>
<br>
Their $600,000 in donations with 80,000,000 users, scaling to
Thunderbird's 20,000,000 users, gives us an expectation of $150,000
per year in donations. I've been saying lately that Thunderbird
could reasonably expect $100,000 to $500,000 per year in donations,
so this is in line with those numbers. Yet I think it would be
difficult to accomplish all that we would like with $150,000 per
year, which is why I keep dreaming of funding models that can
improve on those numbers.<br>
<br>
:rkent<br>
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