Fund rising, donations transparency and more about infrastructure

I would like to make a little donation to Haiku; it would not be the first time, as i did several in the past years. But I must admit that the donations section of the website doesn’t inspire trust.

To my eyes, it looks very outdated, it’s not nice to not have idea on where the funds actually lands in my opinion. It should be updated on yearly basis.

And it seems that almost all the funds are actually spent to power the infrastructure. A VERY powerful infrastructure mode of dedicated servers. I was wondering if a SaaS/PaaS solution was considered in the past, or it can be considered in the future to save precious resources. Just my two cents.

The “infrastructure” is just a single dedicated server. Ok, at the moment there are two of them, because we are migrating from an old one which was showing its limits, to a new one with more RAM (and also cleaning up the setup, making it a lot easier to redeploy the whole thing if needed). As a result the costs are temporarily increased.

According to the inc website, this is about $900 a year (I think this is for a single server?). We are past $5000 in donations this year, which means keeping the dedicated server online is not really a problem.

There has not been any financial reports for some time, but the largest expenses are actually paying developers who work full time on Haiku (no one currently), and funding coding sprints and other events (the biggest expense in 2017 with something close to $3000, IIRC, funding rooms and meals for 8 devs hacking on Haiku for a week in a distraction-free environment).

The server hosts:

  • Gerrit
  • Trac
  • Website, forums
  • Buildbot (master + some virtualized slaves - the remaining slaves are Mac Minis donated to Haiku by Mozilla and gracefully hosted by various project members)
  • Buildmaster for HaikuPorts packages
  • Storage space for nightlies and packages repositories (a lot of space, since we keep old versions to allow people to downgrade for testing)
  • Pootle, for translating Haiku to various languages, and another tool for translating the userguide,
  • irker, the bot providing commit notifications on IRC

Some tools in this set are not that usual or downright custom. So it is unlikely we can find someone hosting them as SaaS. We also had rather unpleasant experiences with outsourcing critical services (people who have been in the project long enough remember Berlios not allowing SVN commits because their disk was full, every other week end or so). It takes a lot of time to set up a proper workflow with the plumbing between all these tools, and it is quite annoying to do it on an SaaS infrastructure where we are at the mercy of an update (API deprecation, etc) - this is happening to Haikuports, where the hooks we use to trigger mailing list notifications from github commits will not be working anymore by the end of the year.

The needs are sufficiently complex that the dedicated server is worth it, and it is not even the place where most of our money is spent. I hope the inc can publish the financial reports so everyone can have a look and see this more clearly.

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tnx for the clarifications, it’s absolutely nice to know in details what’s going on. I’m sure it would benefit a lot in fund raising having this published in the relevant area of the inc website :slight_smile:

About four weeks ago Alex (one of Haiku Inc’s board members) wrote that he has finished the 2017 Financials but is waiting for them to be approved by the board. So perhaps the Haiku Inc. board can approve these in the next few weeks or months.

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I just pinged them again and reminded them it is almost the end of 2018 :slight_smile:

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I see. Presumably this was not effective. I suggest you simply instead present the analysis as “preliminary” noting that you were not able to obtain approval from the other 5 members after many weeks waiting. That way your effort wasn’t wasted. If the remaining board members wake from their slumber and approve it, there can be an “official” copy that’s identical.

Also perhaps Haiku should consider implementing something like wat Xorg has…they had similar issues with inactive board members in the past causing the management of the project to loose traction.

Not to oust members or anything but to mark them active / inactive for practical purposes.

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Do oust them, really. They do more harm than good.

I’m terribly worried about that…what’s going on there? Lack of interest? Too Busy? Different views?

I don’t want to be rude but…an inactive board is a very big issue if they are supposed to take some decisions (like this case). If some have no interest in the project anymore, shall these take the right decisions? Or shall they decide something at all?

Haiku had had a nice media coverage tnx to B1. Can you imagine the reputation loss if someone would point out that donations goes to a Inc. whose leading member did not even answer to an email?

Again, it’s not about ousting ppl, but to understand what’s goin on…

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Mostly too busy, and the problem is that this is an ongoing problem for years so the paperwork is in a pretty bad state. As a result they can’t really leave and let new people figure out the mess, that may be an even larger problem.

We should fix the inc status to allow people to leave the board and still do some of the paperwork but… doing so require agreement of board members :frowning:

I will probably join the inc at some point and try to help (as if I didn’t have already enough things to do) but I want to remove myself from another unrelated non-profit first. I’m transitionning this year there, so next september I should be good to go. We’ll see.

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sounds like a deadlock :thinking: maybe a business consultant could help cleaning out the mess? Quite annoying to drain funds for paperworks but…hell…someone has to do that sooner or later…

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Where is the INC. located?

If paper work and filings are not being handled the incorporation may be expired/invalid.

Check the inc site.

A heads up. I went ahead and uploaded my 2017 Financial report to our beta Haiku, Inc. site.
It’s a work in progress still to move everything over to Hugo.

http://haiku-inc.netlify.com

I’m hoping to finish this up this week. I’m doing my best to keep up with everything. (infrastructure, Inc, etc)

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tnx allot for your effort and transparency! And the new website is really cool :slight_smile:

the “Donations” entry gives a 404 yet

PS off-topic question. Why did u choose Hugo vs Jekyll? I adopted the latter, just curious about your motivations

Yeah, still working on copying all the text over and converting to markdown. (sure I could just import the HTML, but where is the fun in that?)

Mostly because haiku-os.org is using Hugo. @waddlesplash is originally to blame for going with Hugo there :slight_smile:

I know the feeling :rofl:

IIRC, Jekyll had terrible performance on large sites (i.e. site rebuilds with a few thousand pages would take minutes) vs. Hugo taking <15 seconds. Plus the templating syntax of Hugo is more powerful.

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Ironically, this was the same reason I opted for Jekyll, instead. Build times is no issue here, since our websites are typically very small, and I opted for a simpler templating template, although not so powerful, as I had to teach it to our front end designers, which were not so ‘in’ to coding :slight_smile:

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