FreeBSD Foundation CoC involvement

Wed Mar 7 16:11:37 UTC 2018

Hello Philip and Josh,

Sorry, for the delay in my response, and thank you for inquiring how we are spending our money. I need to keep this reply short, as I’m on my way to the airport to attend SCALE to promote FreeBSD and recruit more users and contributors to the Project. I will write up a more formal statement after I arrive in California.  This week has been tough, with two major conferences happening this week.

To answer Julien’s original question, no, the Foundation did not pay for the CoC. However,, as we’ve been publicizing in our monthly newsletters in 2016 and the FreeBSD quarterly status reports, we did support the new Code of Conduct efforts by paying for a few hours of time for an outside consultant to provide guidance and advice to the  CoC review committee made up of volunteers from within and outside the FreeBSD community. The funding comes out of our general funds, like other support we provide to the Project. The consultant did not write the CoC, only provided advice.

To address Philip’s concern, we have always been public with our spending. Please check out our financial reports here:

 <https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/financials/> https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/financials/

When you look at our P&L, you can see that we do not break out every expense. For example, you won’t see how much we spent on individual events, like the Bay Area Vendor Summit, or how much we paid to sponsor AsiaBSDCon or BSDCon. Most of that is lumped into Project Spending expense accounts. Paying for a consultant to provide guidance into making sure the FreeBSD Project is inclusive, welcoming, and safe, is part of our charter of supporting the FreeBSD Project and community. I’ll also include here, that it was important to have that expertise on putting together the reporting process. I understand that there are people on this mailing list that are concerned about how we are spending their donations, and I believe there is a misunderstanding of how much we actually spent on this. To be clear, it was less than .1% of our budget. Over 60% off our budget goes directly to software development, with most of the rest going to release engineering and security team support, FreeBSD infrastructure, and FreeBSD advocacy and education. In fact, here is a list of the areas we supported in 2017, copied from my December blog post:

In 2017, your support helped us advance the Project through: 

*	Increasing the software development projects we are managing and funding, by internal and external software developers, including the OpenZFS RAID-Z Expansion project, Broadcom Wi-Fi infrastructural improvements (bhnd(4) driver), increasing Intel server support, and extensive progress towards a fully copyfree toolchain.
*	Growing the number of FreeBSD contributors and users from our global FreeBSD outreach and advocacy efforts, including expanding into new regions like China, India, Africa, and Singapore.
*	Keeping FreeBSD secure and reliable by having staff members fill leadership roles on the Security and Release Engineering teams.
*	Starting up nascent internship/stipend programs by participating in the University of Waterloo Co-op program, where we are hiring interns for four-month periods to work directly on FreeBSD, and the University Politehnica Bucharest, where we are providing stipends to students doing research projects with FreeBSD.
*	Providing face-to-face opportunities such as developer and vendor summits and company visits to help facilitate collaboration between commercial users and FreeBSD developers,as well as helping to get changes pushed into the FreeBSD source tree, and creating a bigger and healthier ecosystem.
*	Utilizing a full-time staff member to ensure stability, reliability and high performance via ongoing maintenance and bug fixes.

Most of you probably noticed that there is no mention of supporting the FreeBSD CoC. That’s because this work was done in 2016. As I mentioned earlier, the bulk of our funding goes directly to supporting the Project, and that includes the salaries of our limited staff. We also spend funding on a Human Resources consultant periodicity, an accountant, an office, computers, and other administrative areas that support our efforts.

As someone who has traveled around the world, meeting FreeBSD contributors who are new to the Project, and also many who have been with it for a long time, I’m always impressed with the passion and love for FreeBSD. I’m here to support our constituents, and listen to what you want us to support. We are not a trade association like some of the other open source foundations out there. Our sole purpose is to support the FreeBSD Project and community. Though, we don’t have enough funding to do the work we are currently doing, we will step in the fill needs of the Project.

Along with my staff, we are committed to supporting this Project. I stand by the support we provided to the community to craft a better Project CoC.  As most people know, I will respond over email. If you have specific concerns about the CoC, I’m open to listening. But, please be specific on what concerns you. However, since I was not part of the CoC effort, it would be best to send your concerns directly to the core team, who is working on a process for committers to provide their feedback on the current CoC.

Sincerely,

Deb Goodkin

Executive Director

The FreeBSD Foundation

From: Philip M. Gollucci <pgollucci at p6m7g8.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, March 7, 2018 07:39
To: Josh Goldstein <josh.goldstein at protonmail.com>
Cc: deb at freebsdfoundation.org; freebsd-advocacy at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: FreeBSD Foundation CoC involvement

I'm perplexed, speaking as a previous officer of the ASF -  Nearly everything we spent money on was public.  I know the staff and infra budgets are.  I wrote them for two years.

At the moment I have no opinion on if this was good or bad to spend on; however as a 501c(3) vs 501c(6) you have limits on what can be asked for untargeted donations.

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 9:09 AM, Josh Goldstein via freebsd-advocacy <freebsd-advocacy at freebsd.org <mailto:freebsd-advocacy at freebsd.org> > wrote:

Deb,

Several people have now asked and you have yet to respond, so I will
raise the question again in a new thread in case you're ignoring the
politics thread:

Did The FreeBSD Foundation pay for works related to the Code of Conduct,
and if so how much did it pay, and to whom for what services?

I don't think this is an unreasonable question; several of us have
donated money to the Foundation and would like to know how it is being
spent. Personally I assumed development but that appears to not be the
case and I need to reassess my commitment.

Regards,

Josh

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