Hi again, On Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 09:13:08AM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote: > I wrote up a small update on the Git project's activities at Software > Freedom Conservancy over the past year, but vger keeps marking it as > spam-y. > > Instead of spending more time trying to figure that out, here's a link > to a copy of that report as a public Gist :-). > > https://gist.github.com/ttaylorr/cc41512caafefab110ad7a0b8a088750 > > Feel free to respond here with any questions or comments. Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote to me off-list that part of the reason my message was dropped was due to my mail triggering the SPF_NONE rule, so I have added an SPF record to hopefully allow this mail to go through. If you're reading this, then that worked. Thanks, Konstantin! OK... here goes: --- 8< --- It's that time of year again where Git Merge is upon us, so as usual it's time to update our "Git at SFC" status report. This report is a brief overview of our project financials, our activities at SFC, and similar. This email will serve as a report on the project's activities at Conservancy for the year 2024, with new data displayed relative to the previous report. The previous report (from last year, whose format I've been trying to stick to over the years) can be found at: https://lore.kernel.org/git/ZRHTWaPthX%2FTETJz@nand.local/ # Background Git is a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The Git project joined Conservancy in 2010 so Conservancy could help us manage our money and other assets, and provide legal representation for trademark matters. Conservancy doesn't hold any copyright on any of the project's code. Similarly, being a member project at Conservancy does not grant Conservancy any influence in the project's development. The technical direction that Git takes is up to us. Interested readers can take a look at a more full picture of what Conservancy does for the Git project at: https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services/ A "Project Leadership Committee" (PLC) represents the Git project at Conservancy. The PLC currently consists of Junio C Hamano, Christian Couder, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, and myself. # Financials The most recent data I have this year is from 2024-09-18, so these numbers should be more or less current (modulo outstanding incoming/outgoing transactions). We have ~$93k USD in our account, up ~$4k USD from where we were in September, 2023. This was a modest year for the project's financials, since the last report reported that we were up ~$19k year-over-year. Average year-over-year growth we have seen over the past is closer to ~$10k USD/yr. Here are some top-level ledger numbers gathered since the end of January 01, 2024. Note that this is all double-entry, so negative numbers are good. $-21,554.09 Income:Git $-21,162.47 Donations $-391.62 Royalties $2,981.08 Expenses:Git $196.34 Banking Fees $675.96 Conferences:Travel $0.00 Filing Fees $1,940.99 Hosting $167.21 Tax:Sales $0.58 General $6.80 Assets:Receivable:Accounts $325.00 Liabilities:Payable:Accounts -------------------- $-18,573.02 Like last time, most of our money comes from donations. This year, ~1.8% of it comes from royalties, which is in line with the proportion for last year (which was closer to 2%). All of the royalties come from Amazon affiliate links. 10% of all incoming money goes to Conservancy's general fund (the above numbers are after that 10% has been deducted). Last year we spent money ($675.96 USD) sponsoring Christian Couder to attend the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 Mentor Summit. According to my mails, Karthik Nayak also attended, but I haven't seen their expenses reflected in Conservancy's bookkeeping, so they may have not yet submitted their expenses for reimbursement. We are still paying around ~$65 USD/mo to host git-scm.com on Heroku. This cost is discounted from Heroku because of our status as an open-source project. Our un-discounted bill would be something more like ~$100 USD/mo, and we receive $40 USD/mo as a discount. That covers most of most but not all of the main Dyno cost. The remaining cost of our bill is for the Postgres addon. I'm personally looking forward to finishing the migration of git-scm.com to a static site hosted on GitHub Pages so that we can eliminate this cost entirely. # Trademark We hold a trademark on the term "Git" and its logo in the space of software and version control. The report from 2017 has a good overview of the details there: https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202024501.57hrw4657tsqerqq@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ There have been a few requests around our trademark policy, none of which are all that interesting to share here, though I am happy to list some of the details if folks are interested. Two years ago Christian brought a discussion to the list about rethinking the way we treat our trademark in the future, particularly with respect to enforcement. https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAP8UFD3WQ64FuXarugF+CJ_-5sFNBCnqPE0AEBK-Ka78ituKTg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ We haven't talked much more about this with Conservancy in the last year, mostly due to a lack of engagement with the aforementioned mail on the list. I imagine that would change if the discussion were resurrected. # Travel Budget Allocation Nothing new here. # Spending money As you can see, we take in a modest but quite healthy amount of money for an open-source project which has very few expenses. It seems that if we did nothing, our account would grow somewhere between $10k to 20k USD/yr. I wonder if we should do something with that money. I could imagine that it would be very cool to sponsor individual developers who want to work on Git on a contractual basis, but can't due to financial barriers. (In this imagination, I figure that whatever we do here would be supplemental to programs like GSoC and Outreachy, which are focused more on student projects.) I would be curious if others have thought the same, or have their own ideas on what the Git project could spend some of it's money on. # Conclusion That's all for this year. I'm happy to answer any questions on the list, and I'll propose a session on it at the Contributor's Summit in a couple of days, in case folks want to discuss this further in person. I'm looking forward to seeing folks throughout the rest of the week who are able to attend this year's Git Merge here in Berlin. See you then! Thanks, Taylor
