LWN: Comments on "Free-software foundations face fundraising problems"

Excessive Salary

pizza — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 10:39:49 +0000

> $50K/year if full time.

Whoops, apparently I need new glasses. That should be $30K/year... to flip burgers.

FWIW, I also know someone who was offered well north of $100K/year as fresh-out-of-college starting pay at Microsoft.

Point being, $150K/year for someone with the skills and experience to serve as the GNOME foundation director is downright *cheap*.

Excessive Salary

pizza — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 10:29:37 +0000

> Well, if we compare budgets.... 150k for google is drop in the ocean. 150k for non-commercial is 1/5 of their budget.

By your logic, a director of a $1M/yr nonprofit should be willing to work for well below minimum wage [1]

One can make a reasonable argument about the proportionality of executive compensation, but that isn't it.

[1] I see local fast food restaurants advertising *starting* pay of $15/hr, which works out to about $50K/year if full time.

Excessive Salary

amarao — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 03:32:40 +0000

Well, if we compare budgets.... 150k for google is drop in the ocean. 150k for non-commercial is 1/5 of their budget.

If we apply the same number to Google, CEO would get a meager €5B a year. It does not. Because google counts money better.

Excessive Salary

malmedal — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 22:01:27 +0000

Seems like an entry-level software developer salary in FAANG.

You can check levels.fyi to see what typical salaries are at.

Excessive Salary

amarao — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 18:30:30 +0000

Can they hire someone with a bit more enthusiasm toward open source and less of enterprise CEO greed?

Excessive Salary

jzb — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 13:15:25 +0000

The archived job description gives some clues. They are expected to lead fundraising, serve as "primary advocate and evangelist" for GNOME, oversee day-to-day operations, ensure legal compliance, and have 5+ years of nonprofit or organizational management.

Excessive Salary

domdfcoding — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:01:07 +0000

What does GNOME's executive director do to justify a $100k salary? Seems a tad excessive, especially if you're struggling to balance the books and letting staff go.

Consider crypto donations in the past

pgarciaq — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 22:42:50 +0000

I'm not sure the Gnome Foundation, KDE eV, etc are having trouble raising the "usual" funds. What I do notice is the large donations (hundreds of thousands, even 1 million USD) coming from crypto firms are no longer coming. For years the KDE eV and others spent more than they raised just for the sake of spending those crypto funds.

Strangely high salary considering total budget

LtWorf — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 09:00:36 +0000

I certainly don't make anywhere near that.

Donations

gnu — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 07:54:41 +0000

I just renewed my associate membership to the FSF (I live in a third world country and owe my life and livelihood to free software and availability of source and to the kind souls who poured their life into creating software that I depend on daily). Wish bigtech (and other small/mid/big companies) that depend on Free Software contribute money. I wish I could contribute to more projects like GNOME, but there is only so much I can keep aside for donations.

I have asked for my subscription to be cancelled immediately

marcinjend — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 02:51:10 +0000

Please do so immediately LWN as you are a pack of [offensive insult]
[edited, perhaps obviously -- the subscription has been canceled and refunded -- sheesh]

The corruption angle

notriddle — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 19:23:13 +0000

The idea that "it's okay as long as they fundraise more than they earn" has already been discussed, but there's one other major argument in favor of spending a lot on anyone in a major position of power.

The cost-benefit of taking bribes should never be worth it, including "no-strings attached" favors that create a sense of obligation without formal dealings at the time. You also don't want the head of the GNOME Foundation to plan for a job at IBM once they leave ("revolving-door politics") and you don't want them distracted by a second job.

If you live in a low-corruption country, paying your public servants well is probably a major reason why. In my uninformed opinion, of course.

Not Even Scraps

jzb — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:47:38 +0000

This has the potential to go sideways, so it'd be best to stop here. Let's keep the focus on issues and not start attacking people's character. Thanks.

Not Even Scraps

Ranguvar — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:38:25 +0000

Any independent journalist can be smeared as a "professional grifter" for not sharing your personal worldview.

Issues of governance and allocation of funds are too important to be distracted by petty politics and the picking of sides, which far too often serves to hand-wave such criticism.

Not Even Scraps

jubal — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 11:40:17 +0000

if only lunduke wasn't a professional right-wing grifter trying to make money from him inserting into whatever “culture war” issue he thinks he's seeing himself

Strangely high salary considering total budget

milesrout — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 08:55:42 +0000

>As long as they bring in more money than their salary, it's an overall net gain.

I don't agree with this at all. Fundraising isn't automatically a good thing if most of it gets spent on more fundraising. You would be better off leaving that money where it was before. It isn't better that money is spent on the salary of an executive director of a foundation than, say, on beer.

It might be an overall net gain *for the organisation* but that's irrelevant: the entire point of these organisations is that they shouldn't be operating as if their incentive is just to maximise their net gain i.e. their profit. They're meant to take a more holistic approach. Remember, the fundraising activity itself is, economically, pure loss: it has really no material benefit at all.

It's like fixing a window. It isn't good economically for you to break a window, even though you could analyse it naively and think: if I smash windows, I create jobs for glassmakers, glaziers, broom manufacturers, cleaners, bin men, rubbish truck drivers, tip operators, etc. All the economic activity that goes into cleaning up the mess and creating and installing a new window is *loss* to society. It is effort that could go into something else.

The same is true of fundraising. It isn't a good thing for society if an organisation spends $9m/yr to generate $1m/yr to go into open source software. You'd have to assume that $1m/yr channelled towards open source software is worth more than $10m/yr left in the pockets of the people being parted with their money. I seriously doubt that's the case. How many people would contribute if they knew how little of their money actually went to the objects of the charities they support? I think the increasing knowledge of the gap there is a big reason why many people have stopped giving to charity. They're very inefficient.

Not Even Scraps

milesrout — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 08:48:07 +0000

The criticism of Holly Million was not about what she does "in her spare time". For a start, she was hired by the GNOME foundation in a press release filled with corporate word salad:

>We are thrilled to announce a significant milestone for the GNOME Foundation as we welcome Holly Million to our team as the new Executive Director. Holly is a multi-talented individual with a diverse background in nonprofit leadership, filmmaking, teaching, public speaking, and writing. Her commitment to empowering individuals to make a positive impact aligns perfectly with the values and goals of the GNOME Foundation.

The problem is the takeover of free software organisations that were created as organisations for hackers to coordinate and share resources by professional "nonprofit leader" grifters that are responsible for so much that is wrong with charities and other non-profit organisations today. There's a reason that nobody really contributes to charities anymore: bring up charities in conversation and if you have anything like my experience, most people will say something along the lines of "I don't give money to charity because most of it never gets to the people it is meant to go to, it gets tied up in bureaucracy and corruption".

The best example of a free software organisation that has been taken over by grifters is the Mozilla Foundation, which has gone from being about software development to being about "outreach" towards "marginalised communities" and "uplifting" people or whatever.

The fact that a professional nonprofit grifter was hired by the GNOME foundation is bad enough. But as Lunduke observed in his piece:

>She also appears to sell "Spiritual Herbs" and offers virtual shaman services which people can purchase via Venmo. Which, interestingly, is a sentence that makes my left eye twitch.

Not, in fact, just something she does "in her spare time". This isn't a matter of someone being picked on for having weird views or beliefs. Nobody would care if this woman just had kooky views. She's a symptom of everything wrong with free software organisations today: they've been taken over by people that are as different to hackers as it is possible to be. Hackers traditionally have valued things like *intelligence* and *rational thinking*. If you posted something about "shamanic energy healing" and "spiritual herbs" then it wouldn't even occur to most hackers that could be serious: you'd either be a parody of some kind, or far more likely a spam bot trying to sell herbal supplements.

Not Even Scraps

daenzer — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 08:07:33 +0000

> KDE survives on less than one fully-loaded senior FTE? Impressive, since on average they add a lot more to the world.

The KDE & GNOME foundation funding doesn't directly cover development work, a lot of that is covered by companies employing individual developers.

Strangely high salary considering total budget

unBrice — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 17:46:38 +0000

> The primary responsibility of an Executive
> Director of a charity is to fundraise. As long
> as they bring in more money than their
> salary, it's an overall net gain.

A net gain for the organization but not necessarily for the cause.

Consider: I create an organization whose budget is 20% my salary. The rest is donated to other non profits. All I do is marketing: I reach out to the sponsors mentioned in the article and argue they should donate to me instead from their limited budgets. My salary is justified from the perspective of the organization I created. Yet the net result of my action is that less money is spent on Free software and it would be legitimate to question my role.

As anecdata: I volunteer for a local food bank. It is smaller but apparently not by an order of magnitude (about 170kUSD income in 2023 plus the food that people donate). Only the cleaner gets paid (she comes a few hours each week). I wouldn't feel comfortable collecting donations if a significant portion of the budget went to a single admin.

So close...

daroc — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 12:51:27 +0000

Oh! That's good; we were all wracking our brains trying to come up with something like that.

Strangely high salary considering total budget

pizza — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 11:46:54 +0000

> Is that just me or does paying an executive director a significant percentage of your total budget seem a bit strange?

The primary responsibility of an Executive Director of a charity is to fundraise. As long as they bring in more money than their salary, it's an overall net gain.

(BTW, many of the regulars here make more money than that as "just" developers, with far fewer responsibilities)

Strangely high salary considering total budget

taladar — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 07:44:43 +0000

> The foundation is currently searching for a new executive director, with a base salary between $120,000 and $150,000

> The foundation is projecting expenses of about $550,000 and income of about $586,000

Is that just me or does paying an executive director a significant percentage of your total budget seem a bit strange?

So close...

jezuch — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 06:19:46 +0000

"Free-software foundations face foul fundraising feasibility"

There ya go!

(Sorry for not having anything meaningful to say about the topic)

KDE e.V.'s income split

jzb — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 02:22:07 +0000

Thanks for the correction, I've updated the text and linked to your comment here for reference. Much appreciated!

FSF going remote work

atai — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 21:48:52 +0000

Article did not mention the FSF, but the FSF going remote work may be related.

KDE e.V.'s income split

Sho — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 20:44:24 +0000

Just to clarify, individual supporters make up more than a quarter of our income - more than half.

We distiguish between individiual Supporting Members (a form of legal standing at the org tied to a recurring membership fee plan) and non-member recurring and one-time donations, which probably made our reporting hard to parse on this point.

If you have any other questions about our finances, I'll be more than happy to answer.

--Eike

Not Even Scraps

calvin — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 19:37:52 +0000

> Although, I wouldn't want to fund shamanistic practices with public funds, so some kind of vetting would be necessary.

I don’t see what people do in their spare time is relevant, beyond Lunduke (who made such a big deal out of it) trying to create some drama.

Not Even Scraps

hDF — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 15:54:25 +0000

Coming from big tech, the numbers involved seem minuscule. KDE survives on less than one fully-loaded senior FTE? Impressive, since on average they add a lot more to the world.

I think ideally we could fund at least some FOSS work through taxes, specifically taxes on big tech. Although, I wouldn't want to fund shamanistic practices with public funds, so some kind of vetting would be necessary.