On 5 July 2018 at 10:34, Christian Bruckmayer <cbruckmayer@suse.com> wrote:
On 07/05/2018 02:24 AM, Simon Lees wrote: [snip]
SUSE, at the same time there have been financial restrictions / >
Yes we have no intention of moving away from our great relationship with 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
While nothing Christian says above is untrue, it's worth pointing out that in almost every year we've been involved in GSoC, SUSE's has ensured openSUSE has been able to spend money supporting GSoC greater to or equal to the amount of money received from Google - (in the form of sponsoring travel of mentors to the mentorship summit and sponsoring via the TSP for GSoC students to visit oSC) Ever since SUSE started receiving money from Google for openSUSE's participation in GSoC, Ralf Flaxa (President of Engineering) has assured openSUSE would be able to count of reciprocal sponsorship from SUSE. This remains a principle without question. As far as I am aware, there has been one time when that principle was blocked by practical problems. Last year, where the timing of the GSoC mentorship summit co-coincided with a budget freeze within SUSE. This of course also impacted openSUSE's ability to sponsor anything, not just GSoC. For example all TSP requests had to be frozen at the same time, for the same reason, not just the GSoC mentorship sponsorship. This was a brief freeze while the details of MicroFocus's merger with HPE was sorted out, but due to the narrow timing available for the GSoC mentorship summit, some mentors were unable to secure funding to go. This was a very atypical situation. It's the only time I can think of where such an internal matter within SUSE impacted openSUSE in any meaningful way. Talking not only around GSoC but generally, it is common for almost every justified request for sponsorship from openSUSE to be approved by SUSE. "No, SUSE won't pay for that" is not a sentence I've had the displeasure of writing very often as Chairman. Still, it sucks when SUSE's situation gets in the way of what openSUSE wants to do. It happened once, it might happen again. It is good to discuss this issues, and it would be nice to have ways and means of avoiding/mitigating against such race occurrences. Having something like membership to SPI on the side of our relationship with SUSE might be a relatively low effort method of achieving that. But of course, that option too might be open to similar risks as our current arrangement with SUSE. Who is to say that as a collective organisation SPI or SFConservancy might not have periods of their own budget freezes that could similarly impact openSUSE? Any large organisation is going to have times where some of their services provided may or may not be as available as normal. That doesn't mean whole independence is the solution either - governance can be tricky, who'll controls such bank accounts? who will have access to it? will there always be access in time for situations like the narrow-window we often have for things like arranging GSoC mentorship summit? Even then, banks fail, currencies fluxuate, credit limits exist, currency transfers can be limited, taxes need to be paid... The way I see it, every option, from the status quo, to an umbrella, to full independence, doesn't guarantee openSUSE will never have a repeat of last years GSoC mentorship sponsorship problems. In short, shit happens. The question is, which shit are we as a community most happy to have? My vote at the moment would be the status quo, not only because it's the 'devil we know' - but it's the least work for openSUSE, and there is the cathartic benefit of being able to blame SUSE when SUSE make mistakes..and such hiccups have always led to SUSE making improvements for openSUSE long term. There's benefits to having a multi-billion dollar company so close and caring for a community. The amount of times SUSE dives in and goes above and beyond to shift money, staff, hardware, influence in other organisations/conferences, or other things to benefit openSUSE is far more than the one or two examples where SUSE's business/processes/etc gets in the projects way. The umbrealla/SPI option is not one I'm opposed to, but in many respects it brings many of the same risks, just under a different name. It might be worth while - diversifying and spreading the risk across two organisations might mean the openSUSE project always has a plan B. But I'm only most comfortable with the idea on the premise that we keep almost everything we have with SUSE right now the same; I think we should just be pursuing joining an umbrella like SPI -in-addition- to our current relationship with SUSE, not instead of. I'm least keen on the fully independent, all-on-our-own foundation model. It's the most work, with the most risk, and if/when anything gets screwed up it will be all our own fault, with the least options for rectifying it. SUSE won't be able to do as much as they can today to dive in and help when things go wrong, so we'll have less of a safety net. I don't see how any of the perceived or practical benefits of that model would justify taking that sort of risk with the Project. Regards, Richard Brown openSUSE Chairman -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org