Sponsoring by my Company

Fri Oct 14 16:38:19 CEST 2016

Hello everybody,

> Maybe not just Germany, but I'm not aware of any other active convention
user
> group.

Waving from Vienna, Austria, and making Simon wave too.

> first of all, as Silvio pointed out, what we are doing helps the users
> of Xfce. It's quite common that users come to the booth and bring their
> problems and/or questions with hoping to get some support.
> These are sometimes also people who don't know communication channels
> like IRC or mailing lists exist or even doesn't speak English well
> enough to ask there (or they think they don't).
> So, there is no direct benefit here but it helps the users which I would
> consider part of the community.
>
> A direct benefit is people sometimes create bug reports after we
> debugged some problem or we create the bug reports for them in case they
> don't want or can't do it on their own.

It might come as a surprise, but I think Xfce does not need more channels
for
bug reporting. The reality is that we have tens of thousands of open bugs.
What
we need is time spent coding. Sadly, many core devs, or experienced devs,
don't
have this time.

> Even better would be to have the foundation running so we could also
> accept donations and use that money for such things.
> Does anyone know how is the status of the foundation?

Last I heard, it's kaput.

There is the BountySource money available, to some extent as some of it is
tied
to bugs being fixed or features implemented. I personally had in mind to
propose
the group to hire me as a part-time / full-time dev, since I can't get
around to
contributing after doing full shifts on my current job. If others think this
idea is useful / would like to come forward to do paid dev work / would
like to
ask their company to sponsor developers, I feel this would be the most
beneficial
thing for Xfce as a whole right now.

Cheers,

On 13 October 2016 at 22:10, Simon Steinbeiss <simon at xfce.org> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> sorry for joining this discussion a little late, but I was on a conference
> and travelling.
>
> The foundation was never founded and the "founding documents" so to speak
> have expired, plus the people originally wanting to form the foundation are
> gone.
>
> In its place we have bountysource.com, through which we can either
> receive donations as a team - this is money that we can spend on whatever
> we want - or people can post bounties on bugs specifically.
>
> Currently our balance is around 3k€. My plan - I have discussed this with
> some members of the development community over time, but there's no final
> proposal/decision - was to organise a Hackfest somewhere in Europe (where
> most of us are based atm).
> However we can also withdraw some money for community initiatives like
> booths at conferences.
>
> And finally - this is just my personal opinion - we don't have a tradition
> of putting anyone's logo on our website. We didn't even do that for
> bountysource, despite the fact that they donated some money towards us as a
> team. So I'd be cautious about that, unless we decide this is how we wanna
> raise money for Xfce (presuming we need it for something).
>
> Either way, I think it's great if people go to conferences and represent
> Xfce, it's not like we're super visible compared to other DEs (despite the
> fact that we have a lot of users, I saw many of them on Linux Embedded
> these last days). Maybe it'll help to lure in contributors, maybe it'll
> just be a nice sign of life.
>
> Cheers
> Simon
>
>
>
>
> Enrico Tröger <enrico at xfce.org> schrieb am Di., 11. Okt. 2016, 21:00:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> > Well, sponsoring of a free software project is a sensible matter IMHO,
>> > so I am a bit wary.
>> >
>> > To me, sponsoring xfce would be getting paid to work on xfce core or
>> > contributing financially either for the infrastructure or live events
>> > of xfce developers (like a hackfest).
>> >
>> > I am not sure I am willing to accept a company logo on the website for
>> > limited events that doesn't really benefit the project itself, unless
>> > I am missing something.
>>
>> It has benefits for the project itself:
>> first of all, as Silvio pointed out, what we are doing helps the users
>> of Xfce. It's quite common that users come to the booth and bring their
>> problems and/or questions with hoping to get some support.
>> These are sometimes also people who don't know communication channels
>> like IRC or mailing lists exist or even doesn't speak English well
>> enough to ask there (or they think they don't).
>> So, there is no direct benefit here but it helps the users which I would
>> consider part of the community.
>>
>> A direct benefit is people sometimes create bug reports after we
>> debugged some problem or we create the bug reports for them in case they
>> don't want or can't do it on their own.
>>
>>
>> You asked for some report of the last event (I'm writing this mail in
>> the train on the way back from Prague), some time ago I wrote some kind
>> of report for our work in Germany. IIRC we are running booths for Xfce
>> since 2010 on all of the bigger FOSS events in Germany and since three
>> or four years also in Prague.
>> https://www.pending.io/presenting-xfce-and-geany-on-conferences/
>>
>> Until now, almost all of the material we use as well as travelling
>> expenses we paid on our own. This is OK but if we had the chance to get
>> something back, it's at least worth a discussion.
>>
>> I'm also not completely sure yet whether this is a good idea but it
>> could help a lot.
>> Even better would be to have the foundation running so we could also
>> accept donations and use that money for such things.
>> Does anyone know how is the status of the foundation?
>>
>> Regards,
>> Enrico
>>
>> --
>> Get my GPG key from http://www.uvena.de/pub.asc
>>
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>
>
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-- 
Steve Dodier-Lazaro
PhD Student
University College London
Free Software Developer
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