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kaspaar wrote (edited )

Follow up question about porting the X220: In case your time issue is related to money rather than a matter of priorities in life and you still enjoy the work on it, ever thought of making some kind of kickstarter?

Related to that, as someone whose abilities are clearly more analogue to put it very, very milldly, why is it that one can't donate to libreboot directly to give those without any technical talent whatsoever an easy way to give something back nonetheless? Bureaucratic hurdles? Philosophy? Organisational issues?

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libreleah OP wrote (edited )

Not money related. I don't need money to work on X220, just time.

If time were legal tender, I'd be running a budget deficit.

We currently cannot accept donations, for we do not have the legal infrastructure in place to do so. The other issue is that we need a neutral third party, one that will oversee our spending. That is either:

  • FSF handling donations to Libreboot (with GNU membership - they have not yet responded to our application to re-join). This would also mean operating under GNU auspices, answering to Richard Stallman.

  • SFC (software freedom conservancy) membership. This is a separate organization to the FSF, but with the same goals, and one of its founding members is Bradley Kuhn, former FSF leader. They provide financial support to projects, and they help with fundraising. They act as a neutral third party, handling funds for projects. They have several member projects. SFC membership is not just the same as GNU membership; projects get more autonomy, and it's generally a much looser affiliation

I have no problem with money in the project. I use some of the money from Minifree sales to help fund the project..

EDIT: To clarify: I'm uneasy about Libreboot itself, as an independent project, having infrastructure of its own for donations. The probability of corruption and misuse of funds increases, under such a scenario. Further, I believe it would take valuable energy out of the project, on the part of the developers. Organizations like FSF/SFC can handle it much more efficiently than we could.

This is not to say that we in the Libreboot project are "bad". Just human. SFC/FSF are operated by humans too, but they're less biased, and more likely to be impartial and do what's best for the project. If Libreboot itself set up its own independent infrastructure, then there is less of an obstacle to corruption.

I'm not arrogant enough to say that I'm perfect, or naive enough to say that anyone else is. All people on this planet are imperfect, and capable of corruption. Corruption/bias is a big problem when handling public donations. The concept of "oversight" was invented, to mitigate this, but that is also not perfect.

EDIT2: and we've discussed this extensively in #libreboot IRC before, amongst ourselves. The above insight is based on those discussions.

EDIT3: There are other organizations too, but FSF/SFC are the ones that I'd trust. I'm on good speaking terms with Bradley at SFC (or at least, we're both friendly to each other when we talk), and I'm currently on neutral terms with the FSF. Both organizations have libreboot's goals (100% free software) in mind, at heart and in principle and in practise.

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