[coreboot] [RFC] Preparing a crowdfunding campaign for the ASUS KGPE-D16 (was: coreboot ported to the ASUS KGPE-D16)

[Paul Menzel]

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.

α)  4.000 € Indiegogo fees
β) 35.000 € for Raptor Engineering for upstreaming for basic port
γ) 15.000 € for Raptor Engineering for implementing support for S2R (S3)
δ) 10.000 € for code review (inclusively hardware) (just an estimate)
ε)  2.000 € for Gluglug to release images (I have not talked to Francis
yet.)
φ) 10.000 € campaign goodies (cf. 7.)
ι)  4.000 € taxes (probably a lot more, depends if given money counts as
donation)
μ) 20.000 € Giant Monkey for running the campaign (Web site, press,
marketing, videos, mile stone tasks (see below), …)

(Stretch goal)
ν) 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

α) 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?

β) 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.
γ) 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-tablet
[5] http://coreinfo.us
[6] https://roundcu.be/next
[7] https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/4.0/phk/dough.html
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