[coreboot] [RFC] Preparing a crowdfunding campaign for the ASUS KGPE-D16

[The Gluglug]

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


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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