[IAEP] Sugar Labs Budget.

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
> Am 06.04.2009 um 23:28 schrieb David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org>:
>> Last week, I set the rather abstract goal of raising $100,000US for
>> Sugar Labs.  $100,000 seems like a reasonable number for a project in
>> its second year.  Last year, Sugar Labs proved that it could get a
>> surprisingly large amount of development accomplished with very little
>> money.
>>
>> As for direct spending, I believe that Sugar Labs should focus it's
>> resources entirely on community and ecosystem development.
>
> Mmm, personally I'd say that at least a third of Sugar Labs' budget  
> should go towards actual development.
> 
> All of that traveling and outreach becomes somewhat of a moot point  
> when the actual platform we're building a community around and  
> marketing doesn't work as advertised/expected.

In my view, it's a question of amounts.  Some rough numbers from a US
perspective: paying a software developer a salary of $50,000 a year, much
lower than industry standard for the skill and experience we require,
typically costs the payer about $100,000 a year due to payroll taxes,
health insurance, and business paperwork expenses.  That's David's entire
imaginary budget.

Also, I think it's important to remember that Sugar Labs has never
received a development grant from any granting agency and Sugar has never
been associated with any profitable entity.  Walter has diligently applied
for many grants for educational software development but (as far as I am
aware) none have been accepted.  OLPC and Red Hat spent way more money on
Sugar development than they made back.  Sugar has not been a profitable
enterprise.

Currently we have no money, and no path by which we may particularly
expect to get money, so all talk of spending it is a bit premature.
Paying the core developers enough to work full time on Sugar would cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

The obvious question is: what can we buy for less?  I don't think we can
reasonably buy the time of people who already have full-time jobs.  That
leaves two types of people: contractors and interns.  Professional
software development contractors typically charge very high rates,
probably not affordable to us.  Student interns are cheap: perhaps $3000
for three months of work.  It seems reasonable to me that Sugar Labs could
offer summer internships, to go beyond the number of slots offered through
Google Summer of Code.  Such a program would serve to enhance "community
development" and potentially add some value to Sugar.  However, interns
are unlikely to have much luck making Sugar "work as advertised", because
core features and core debugging require familiarity with a large codebase
that is beyond most undergraduates.

My claim, then, is that Sugar is not sustainable on a professional basis
until there are organizations with revenues from Sugar totaling at least
~$500,000 a year.  After immediate business expenses, this might be enough
to hire one or two full-time developers.  So if you want to start paying
developers, I recommend that you also start working on schemes to acquire
Very Large Amounts of money.

- --Ben
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.10 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAknao7YACgkQUJT6e6HFtqQimACfeO3VlizL6kmlFUV2xQbYll3C
B7QAn2BDxisvnlaH66AjiQxDCmkukTBy
=5kss
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----