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On 17/05/15 15:11, Paul Menzel wrote:
Dear coreboot folks,
Timothy, congratulations again on making a coreboot port for the
ASUS KGPE-D16 and therefore completing your third coreboot port!
That’s really amazing!
Am Mittwoch, den 29.04.2015, 22:46 +0100 schrieb The Gluglug:
You should crowd-fund the $35,000 figure, there
are lots of
people who will be interested in this. I personally will chip in,
and I'd ask others to as well.
I am thinking about organizing the crowdfunding campaign to raise
the money.
If somebody else wants to do it, please speak up!
As this is more or less a donation by the backers, the process
should be as open and transparent as possible. That’s why I am
sharing the following information publicly.
1. Giant Monkey Software Engineering [1], the German company I work
for, would be the organizing entity. As a company with five
employees and a GmbH it might have enough credibility so that
people would pledge/give their money to Giant Monkey compared to a
private person or company run by a single person. Giant Monkey also
has some PR/campaign knowledge, but most importantly knows a lot of
people in the marketing sector.
2. After receiving the money, Giant Monkey would contract Raptor
Engineering.
3. I’d like to have the domain
campaign.coreboot.org redirect to
the campaign page at the crowdfunding platform or set up a simple
Web site there.
4. git-annex’ second funding was done by itself with PayPal. That
saves the 4 % fee most other crowdfunding platforms charge.
Using a crowdfunding platform might be easier though, as they have
experience and also provide a big community of possible backers.
Currently I’m thinking about Indiegogo, which Jolla also used to
fund the Jolla Tablet. I heard, Kickstarter is also great with a
big network.
5. I plan to raise 100.000 € (around $110.000) to upstream, that
includes *paid review* and running the campaign, the whole port.
(I’ll continue to use Euros.) More money would be used for stretch
goals.
?) 4.000 € Indiegogo fees ?) 35.000 € for Raptor Engineering for
upstreaming for basic port ?) 15.000 € for Raptor Engineering for
implementing support for S2R (S3) ?) 10.000 € for code review
(inclusively hardware) (just an estimate) ?) 2.000 € for Gluglug
to release images (I have not talked to Francis yet.) ?) 10.000 €
campaign goodies (cf. 7.) ?) 4.000 € taxes (probably a lot more,
depends if given money counts as donation) ?) 20.000 € Giant Monkey
for running the campaign (Web site, press, marketing, videos, mile
stone tasks (see below), …)
(Stretch goal) ?) 15.000 € for Raptor Engineering for upstreaming
Family 15h support for the board
6. I’d start with a minimal Web site and campaign platform page and
see how big the momentum alone through the coreboot community is.
If we get 10.000 € in a week, I’d fully step in with a professional
campaign. Otherwise I’d stop the campaign.
7. As a thank you for backers, I think of a payload included in
the distributed coreboot based firmware image, reading a text file
from CBFS with the names of the backers and displaying it. (Or a
simple splash screen.) Of course just for those wanting it. Big
backers (25.000 €) get a board with one CPU and RAM and coreboot
preinstalled; medium backers (10.000 €) get some BLOB free laptop
for example (Rockchip Chromebook or some Lenovo board). flash ROM
chips are sent to backers donating 25 €.
8. Milestone tasks: At certain mile stones (probably each 10.000
€), I’d promise some more tasks to improve coreboot or the port
(see the 5.000 € steps in the top). Possible are also SSL
certificates for coreboot infrastructure, promising to run a 32-bit
userspace build host, redesigning the Web site, implementing CBMEM
time stamp support in SeaBIOS and GRUB, supporting Google’s
verified boot, ….
9. Reasons for contributing
?) server, cluster companies; administrators Do hosting/server
companies besides coreinfo [5] with AMD based offers exist? That
means, is there a chance of getting big contributions?
What about the Free Software Foundation (FSF), FSF Europe (FSFE),
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)? What about governments?
?) free software enthusiasts I hope with the FSF, FSFE and EFF some
big organizations will be able to motivate a lot of people to
donate. ?) private “normal” people This is my main problem.
Alexandru Gagniuc uses(?)/used(?) the board as a workstation, but
the normal user will never use that expensive server board at home.
Therefore they will never hold it in their hands. In the end the
given money is a donation. Therefore, we need good arguments that
Jane User will participate.
I have the bad feeling, that most of them won’t donate, as they do
not see the benefit as coreboot is hard to explain. This is the
biggest risk for the campaign. To get those a lot of money needs to
be invested in marketing and promotion. But will the additional
donations cover those costs and add to the original goal to support
upstreaming the board?
In the end, coreboot developers should get paid for their work.
The Varnish Cache developer has a good write-up about this issue
[7].
But software is written by people, real people
with kids, cars,
mortgages, leaky roofs, sick pets, infirm parents and all other
kinds of perfectly normal worries of an adult human being.
The best way to improve the quality of Free and Open Source
Software, is to make it possible for these people to spend time
on it.
They need time to review submissions carefully, time to write and
run test-cases, time to respond and fix to bug-reports, time to
code and most of all, time to think about the code.
But it would not even be close to morally defensible to ask
these people to forego time to play with their kids, so that they
instead develop and maintain the software that drives other
peoples companies.
The right way to go -- the moral way to go -- and by far the
most productive way to go, is to pay the developers so they can
make the software they love their living.
Questions ========= 1. Recently Roundcube, the most(?) popular
Webmail client, which is much more known than coreboot, started a
crowdfunding campaign for $80.000 [6]. In the last two weeks they
raised around $25.000. But experience shows that only in the
beginning and in the end of a campaign a lot of money is
collected.
So, what do you think? Is the coreboot crowdfunding campaign even
realistic?
2. What crowdfunding platform should be used? Does Indiegogo [3]
work for everyone? Are there platforms which will get boycotted by
free software enthusiasts?
Thank you for reading up to this point. I am looking forward to
your comments.
Thanks,
Paul
[1]
https://www.giantmonkey.de [2]
https://campaign.joeyh.name [3]
https://www.indiegogo.com [4]
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-first-crowdsourced-…
I think we should get the FSF to run a campaign for this. They can
keep the overheads low and keep the funding amount low. They are also
based in the same country as Raptor Engineering.
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