| 7 Mar 2024 |
 edef | * idk. that's my piece i guess, i seem to survive, i'd like somebody to be working on a bunch of stuff, i also want to find a way to make my survival sustainable without quite so much brinkmanship. maybe those will overlap, maybe they won't, but so far i've not wanted to take very much time away from working because the more-fun moneymaking activities seem less essential to doing stuff that helps other people | 10:30:29 |
| edef | and like, there are probably other people kind of like this. if they have any sense, they will disappear in the long run. some of them are probably of value to retain and perhaps a net benefit even on a purely financial basis | 10:35:00 |
| edef | eg we probably could've burnt way less foundation money on the cache if we'd been more on the ball about it, and saved money on net even if we had to pay some folks to allow them to focus on it | 10:36:16 |
 Wanja Hentze | does the foundation sponsor individuals for e.g. project grants? | 10:36:53 |
| Wanja Hentze | rust foundation does this and imo it's been by far one of the best uses of their money | 10:37:04 |
| edef | the cache preservation project has €5k allocated to me, discussed previously | 10:37:43 |
| Wanja Hentze | I think it's capped at $1500/mo which is nothing compared to a real tech salary but also is a whole lot compared to $0 | 10:37:53 |
| edef | doesn't really move the needle that much given the time expenditure | 10:38:01 |
| edef | and yeah, $1500/mo doesn't pay for my living costs | 10:38:19 |
| edef | there's a long tail of stuff downstream of free rider effects and underfunding of a lot of infrastructural stuff at many levels, we're probably wasting a bunch of the volunteers' time on things that could be automated or made smoother by having dedicated people or guidance and leadership, etc | 10:40:09 |
| edef | like "hey can you answer this question about the cache / historical builds / etc" has been useful to people doing other work | 10:43:51 |
| edef | i know julian malka is working on some reproducibility stuff and i was able to pull him the cache metadata he needed (some work to do still, but priorities) | 10:44:49 |
 Jonas Chevalier | we're working on the fundraising on the foundation level, and I think that will give us much more room to do things like that. I'm also working on something on the private level to make edef sustainable, but I don't want to talk about it too much until it's done. | 10:45:07 |
| edef | like, i've run a startup before, having people who are paid to be on the team and being able to round up some folks and go "look, this is what needs to be done. take care of it" clears a lot of inefficiencies, but that isn't something we can necessarily ask of people right now | 10:47:08 |
| edef | ownership is kind of loose, we don't really have any kind of guarantees on people beyond "best effort, kinda" | 10:48:21 |
| edef | it's kind of hard to load-balance over people if we're already getting all we can from the folks we have and not really getting all we need | 10:49:43 |
| edef | and i think the compounding effects are huge at every level. and if we're doing a better job at building a powerful, reliable OS and packaging stack, and the infrastructure to support it, we probably have a better fundraising story too | 10:54:05 |
| edef | like, when i ran a startup, i built it on Nix because it was better, recruited flokli from the community, sponsored NixCon (and even ran … two? during COVID), etc in no small part because it was just a series of sensible business decisions | 10:57:07 |
| edef | there are hedge funds that use Nix for at least their developer infrastructure, and that's some of the purest productivity-increase-to-dollars-made places | 10:58:49 |
|  marijan joined the room. | 14:13:49 |
|  @joepie91:pixie.town joined the room. | 15:48:58 |
| 11 Mar 2024 |
|  Artturin joined the room. | 01:02:50 |
|  jakegrin joined the room. | 01:03:36 |
|  paultrial joined the room. | 04:35:26 |
|  Shalok Shalom joined the room. | 06:20:49 |
| Shalok Shalom | In reply to @whentze:matrix.org
I think it's capped at $1500/mo which is nothing compared to a real tech salary but also is a whole lot compared to $0 I guess that depends a lot on the area. I know that is kinda an ethical topic, Indian developers earn around 5k - in one year. | 06:45:26 |
| Shalok Shalom | In reply to @whentze:matrix.org
I think it's capped at $1500/mo which is nothing compared to a real tech salary but also is a whole lot compared to $0 * I guess that depends a lot on the area. Indian developers earn around 5k - in one year.
I know that raises ethical questions for some, and on the other hand, did we decide to take money from arms dealers.
And I can imagine worse than taking money from the arms industry and giving it to Indian developers.
Or Chinese, or Ukrainian, or else. 🙂
| 06:56:59 |
| Shalok Shalom | * I guess that depends a lot on the area. Indian developers earn around 5k - in one year.
I know that raises ethical questions for some, and on the other hand did we decide to take money from an arms dealer.
And I can imagine worse than taking money from the arms industry and giving it to Indian developers.
Or Chinese, or Ukrainian, or else. 🙂
| 06:57:32 |
|  @arianvp:matrix.org joined the room. | 06:58:14 |
| @arianvp:matrix.org | In reply to @edef1c:matrix.org
but broadly speaking i am not impressed with how much the (seemingly profitable) ecosystem has contributed towards the Foundation Can i ask why you didn't claim more than 5k? And I generally agree with this sentiment. I was hoping that me fighting for my company to donate 20k would cause more companies to do the same | 07:15:40 |
