[Qgis-psc] Financial warning

[Andreas Neumann]

Hi Paolo,

It is very hard to coordinate the exact amount of bug fixing, due to 
several reasons:

- devs can only roughly tell me how many days they are really available. 
So I don't know in advance, until I get the invoice.

- information comes in at totally different times. Some devs only tell 
me quite late that they are available while others already spent some 
days working on it

- what would be a fair amount how to distribute the money between 
devs/companies and who would decide?

In general I think we should be grateful that the core devs participate 
in the paid bug fixing campaign for the low rate of 100 € h for us - 
because if they would sell their services to clients at the same time, 
they would probably charge 150-180 € an hour and earn more and 
potentially have a more interesting task than fixing bugs in QGIS. 
However through their efforts, in return they get the benefit of a 
"better QGIS" where they could more easily sell their services around 
QGIS, if it more stable and of better quality. And lets not forget that 
we have also a lot of "unpaid" contributions towards QGIS.

Personally, I would like to keep the process of accepting all available 
bug fixing hours we get, but rather try to get more funds in.

Thanks,
Andreas

Am 02.03.19 um 12:27 schrieb Paolo Cavallini:
> Hi Andreas,
> thanks for this warning. What prevents us from sticking to the budget,
> and allocating to bugfixing only what is available?
> I think communicating our needs will help in this regard: I believe
> donors will be more motivated when they will know all the additional
> donations will go into bugfixing.
> All the best.
>
> On 02/03/19 12:17, Andreas Neumann wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> In that respect I hope that our change from sponsors  to sustaining
>> members (to be voted on during the upcoming AGM) will help to attract
>> more organizations to join as financial supporters. I am positive that
>> it will help, esp. for governmental organizations and universities.
>>
>> Andreas
>>
>>
>> Am 02.03.19 um 11:50 schrieb Andreas Neumann:
>>> Dear PSC,
>>>
>>> In the light of the current discussion around AGM and fast release
>>> pace, here is some additional information and concern I have as the
>>> financial manager of the project:
>>>
>>> Most of our financial resources go into bug fixing (> 50%) and I have
>>> the impression that this share is increasing every year. Currently I
>>> have to send out a warning that our financial resources are dwindling
>>> rapidly - our bank account is down below 30k €. For every release we
>>> spend about 10-20k more on bug fixing than allocated in the budget. As
>>> a consequence, we will have to either cancel the QGIS grants this year
>>> or skip bug fixing of release 3.8 or cut down drastically if we can't
>>> find additional financial supporters. I am very grateful that many
>>> core qgis devs can find the time to participate in the paid bug fixing
>>> (and they do a very good job!) - but unfortunately bugs are coming in
>>> quicker ...
>>>
>>> I don't want to sound overly pessimistic - but it is my duty to let
>>> you know about this development that we currently spend more than we
>>> get in. Something will have to change in this respect during the 3.8
>>> release or we'll have to skip the QGIS grants program this year.
>>>
>>> Andreas
>>>
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