On 07/05/2018 02:24 AM, Simon Lees wrote:
[snip]
> > Yes we have no intention of moving away from our great relationship with > SUSE, at the same time there have been financial restrictions / > limitations with our current arrangement that have made it impossible to > work with organizations outside of SUSE with our current setup (example > below), this and other less major issues have lead the board to believe > that we need an alternative solution at times when dealing with sponsors > outside of SUSE, If SUSE finds it beneficial to also use this > alternative solution at times then they are more then welcome too but we > are expecting that atleast most of the time they probably wont. > > As I mentioned in a previous email last year google offered to sponsor > openSUSE in order to to send some people involved in GSoC to an event, > at the time SUSE's budgets were frozen and they were unable to accept / > use this money on openSUSE's behalf and as a result people missed out on > traveling to an event that would have been fully paid for. The board is > very keen to ensure that such a situation does not happen again and that > we have an alternative way of accepting the sponsorship. Even if this > alternative way is only ever used sparingly in cases when SUSE can't > accept the money for whatever reason or in cases where I third party > doesn't want to donate via SUSE because they have no way of confirming > the money they donate will actually be spent on openSUSE.
As I was the Google Summer of Code admin the last three years, I want to give some more insights.

openSUSE participates since many years in GSoC. To reward the organizations, Google offers every year a donation. This donation is usually 1100 USD travel stipend for two mentors + 500 USD for every student we mentored (+ 500 additional travel stipend). For openSUSE it was usually around 5-6k USD. The mentor travel stipend is intended to send two mentors to the annual GSoC mentor summit at the Google campus in Sunnyvale.

As openSUSE has no bank account, the only way to accept money (in an official way) is to use a SUSE account. However, we needed to use a MicroFocus account in the end. Therefore every year I have several long conversations with people from MF accounting and legal if we're allowed (this is not a very common scenario for SUSE as we usually SELL something before we receive money) and how we can accept the money (every year it starts again because people left, process changed etc etc). After we finally get all the information and approval to send the money to a MF account, the money "vanishes" and I need to tell the openSUSE board to state this money in the next "budget planning" (not sure what happens exactly behind the scenes here). If this process would be feasible if I wouldn't be a SUSE employee, I don't know!

So the issue we had last year was that we received the travel stipend from Google but we were not allowed to spend it because of the frozen budget. This caused some frustration among our mentors.

If this is the only issue we have with receiving / spending money, than an openSUSE foundation might be overkill. If there are more issues like this...

Christian