Re: Git / Software Freedom Conservancy status report (2024)

Re: Git / Software Freedom Conservancy status report (2024)

[Christian Couder]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 2:54 PM Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> wrote:

> Last year we spent money ($675.96 USD) sponsoring Christian Couder to
> attend the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 Mentor Summit. According to
> my mails, Karthik Nayak also attended, but I haven't seen their expenses
> reflected in Conservancy's bookkeeping, so they may have not yet
> submitted their expenses for reimbursement.

Karthik didn't attend the GSoC Mentor Summit last year, but will
attend this year (October 4 to 6). Hariom Verma wanted to attend last
year but unfortunately he couldn't get a visa.

Also please note that the money spent to attend it is more than
covered by Google, as Google gives $500 for each mentored contributor
and also gives a generous amount for the mentors to travel to the
Mentor Summit ($1200 for me last year). It looks like those amounts
are not in the same accounting bucket though.

Anyway thanks for your great work on this report!

Git / Software Freedom Conservancy status report (2024)

[Taylor Blau]

I wrote up a small update on the Git project's activities at Software
Freedom Conservancy over the past year, but vger keeps marking it as
spam-y.

Instead of spending more time trying to figure that out, here's a link
to a copy of that report as a public Gist :-).

    https://gist.github.com/ttaylorr/cc41512caafefab110ad7a0b8a088750

Feel free to respond here with any questions or comments.

Thanks,
Taylor

Re: Git / Software Freedom Conservancy status report (2024)

[Taylor Blau]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 03:07:54PM +0200, Christian Couder wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 2:54 PM Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> wrote:
>
> > Last year we spent money ($675.96 USD) sponsoring Christian Couder to
> > attend the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 Mentor Summit. According to
> > my mails, Karthik Nayak also attended, but I haven't seen their expenses
> > reflected in Conservancy's bookkeeping, so they may have not yet
> > submitted their expenses for reimbursement.
>
> Karthik didn't attend the GSoC Mentor Summit last year, but will
> attend this year (October 4 to 6). Hariom Verma wanted to attend last
> year but unfortunately he couldn't get a visa.

Got it!

> Also please note that the money spent to attend it is more than
> covered by Google, as Google gives $500 for each mentored contributor
> and also gives a generous amount for the mentors to travel to the
> Mentor Summit ($1200 for me last year). It looks like those amounts
> are not in the same accounting bucket though.

I imagine that they have either not sent that money to us yet or
Conservnacy hasn't recorded it quite yet.

> Anyway thanks for your great work on this report!

Apologies for this one not making it to the list, but I was able to send
a copy via a link to a Gist containing the contents of the report here:

    https://lore.kernel.org/git/ZurR5HGfhktqZPa+@nand.local/T/#u

Thanks,
Taylor

Re: Git / Software Freedom Conservancy status report (2024)

[Christian Couder]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 3:16 PM Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 03:07:54PM +0200, Christian Couder wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 2:54 PM Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Last year we spent money ($675.96 USD) sponsoring Christian Couder to
> > > attend the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 Mentor Summit. According to
> > > my mails, Karthik Nayak also attended, but I haven't seen their expenses
> > > reflected in Conservancy's bookkeeping, so they may have not yet
> > > submitted their expenses for reimbursement.
> >
> > Karthik didn't attend the GSoC Mentor Summit last year, but will
> > attend this year (October 4 to 6). Hariom Verma wanted to attend last
> > year but unfortunately he couldn't get a visa.
>
> Got it!
>
> > Also please note that the money spent to attend it is more than
> > covered by Google, as Google gives $500 for each mentored contributor
> > and also gives a generous amount for the mentors to travel to the
> > Mentor Summit ($1200 for me last year). It looks like those amounts
> > are not in the same accounting bucket though.
>
> I imagine that they have either not sent that money to us yet or
> Conservnacy hasn't recorded it quite yet.

You mean that it hasn't been recorded for this year or last year or both?

On Nov 18 last year, the Conservancy told us the following:

"Note that at present we have received a lump-sum ACH from Google for
all our GSoC projects, and are still awaiting a per-project breakdown
of the funds from them. Assuming all is in order, the travel funds
from Google should be $1200 per traveler."

So I don't know when or if Google eventually sent them a per-project
breakdown of the funds. Maybe we could ask the Conservancy if they
eventually did send it?

Re: Git / Software Freedom Conservancy status report (2024)

[Taylor Blau]

Hi again,

On Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 09:13:08AM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
> I wrote up a small update on the Git project's activities at Software
> Freedom Conservancy over the past year, but vger keeps marking it as
> spam-y.
>
> Instead of spending more time trying to figure that out, here's a link
> to a copy of that report as a public Gist :-).
>
>     https://gist.github.com/ttaylorr/cc41512caafefab110ad7a0b8a088750
>
> Feel free to respond here with any questions or comments.

Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote to me off-list that part of the reason my
message was dropped was due to my mail triggering the SPF_NONE rule, so
I have added an SPF record to hopefully allow this mail to go through.

If you're reading this, then that worked. Thanks, Konstantin! OK... here
goes:

--- 8< ---

It's that time of year again where Git Merge is upon us, so as usual
it's time to update our "Git at SFC" status report. This report is a
brief overview of our project financials, our activities at SFC, and
similar.

This email will serve as a report on the project's activities at
Conservancy for the year 2024, with new data displayed relative to the
previous report.

The previous report (from last year, whose format I've been trying to
stick to over the years) can be found at:

  https://lore.kernel.org/git/ZRHTWaPthX%2FTETJz@nand.local/

# Background

Git is a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The Git
project joined Conservancy in 2010 so Conservancy could help us manage
our money and other assets, and provide legal representation for
trademark matters. Conservancy doesn't hold any copyright on any of the
project's code. Similarly, being a member project at Conservancy does
not grant Conservancy any influence in the project's development. The
technical direction that Git takes is up to us.

Interested readers can take a look at a more full picture of what
Conservancy does for the Git project at:

  https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services/

A "Project Leadership Committee" (PLC) represents the Git project at
Conservancy. The PLC currently consists of Junio C Hamano, Christian
Couder, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, and myself.

# Financials

The most recent data I have this year is from 2024-09-18, so these
numbers should be more or less current (modulo outstanding
incoming/outgoing transactions).

We have ~$93k USD in our account, up ~$4k USD from where we were in
September, 2023. This was a modest year for the project's financials,
since the last report reported that we were up ~$19k year-over-year.
Average year-over-year growth we have seen over the past is closer to
~$10k USD/yr.

Here are some top-level ledger numbers gathered since the end of January
01, 2024. Note that this is all double-entry, so negative numbers are
good.

           $-21,554.09 Income:Git
           $-21,162.47   Donations
              $-391.62   Royalties
             $2,981.08 Expenses:Git
               $196.34   Banking Fees
               $675.96   Conferences:Travel
                 $0.00   Filing Fees
             $1,940.99   Hosting
               $167.21   Tax:Sales
                 $0.58   General
                 $6.80 Assets:Receivable:Accounts
               $325.00 Liabilities:Payable:Accounts
  --------------------
           $-18,573.02

Like last time, most of our money comes from donations. This year, ~1.8%
of it comes from royalties, which is in line with the proportion for
last year (which was closer to 2%). All of the royalties come from
Amazon affiliate links. 10% of all incoming money goes to Conservancy's
general fund (the above numbers are after that 10% has been deducted).

Last year we spent money ($675.96 USD) sponsoring Christian Couder to
attend the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 Mentor Summit. According to
my mails, Karthik Nayak also attended, but I haven't seen their expenses
reflected in Conservancy's bookkeeping, so they may have not yet
submitted their expenses for reimbursement.

We are still paying around ~$65 USD/mo to host git-scm.com on Heroku.
This cost is discounted from Heroku because of our status as an
open-source project. Our un-discounted bill would be something more like
~$100 USD/mo, and we receive $40 USD/mo as a discount. That covers most
of most but not all of the main Dyno cost. The remaining cost of our
bill is for the Postgres addon. I'm personally looking forward to
finishing the migration of git-scm.com to a static site hosted on GitHub
Pages so that we can eliminate this cost entirely.

# Trademark

We hold a trademark on the term "Git" and its logo in the space of
software and version control. The report from 2017 has a good overview
of the details there:

  https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202024501.57hrw4657tsqerqq@sigill.intra.peff.net/

There have been a few requests around our trademark policy, none of
which are all that interesting to share here, though I am happy to list
some of the details if folks are interested.

Two years ago Christian brought a discussion to the list about
rethinking the way we treat our trademark in the future, particularly
with respect to enforcement.

  https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAP8UFD3WQ64FuXarugF+CJ_-5sFNBCnqPE0AEBK-Ka78ituKTg@mail.gmail.com/

We haven't talked much more about this with Conservancy in the last
year, mostly due to a lack of engagement with the aforementioned mail on
the list. I imagine that would change if the discussion were
resurrected.

# Travel Budget Allocation

Nothing new here.

# Spending money

As you can see, we take in a modest but quite healthy amount of money
for an open-source project which has very few expenses. It seems that if
we did nothing, our account would grow somewhere between $10k to 20k
USD/yr.

I wonder if we should do something with that money. I could imagine that
it would be very cool to sponsor individual developers who want to work
on Git on a contractual basis, but can't due to financial barriers. (In
this imagination, I figure that whatever we do here would be
supplemental to programs like GSoC and Outreachy, which are focused more
on student projects.)

I would be curious if others have thought the same, or have their own
ideas on what the Git project could spend some of it's money on.

# Conclusion

That's all for this year. I'm happy to answer any questions on the list,
and I'll propose a session on it at the Contributor's Summit in a couple
of days, in case folks want to discuss this further in person.

I'm looking forward to seeing folks throughout the rest of the week who
are able to attend this year's Git Merge here in Berlin. See you then!

Thanks,
Taylor