[haiku] Re: Haiku Inc: Proposed Annual Budget
- From: "Jorge G. Mare" <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:20:03 -0800
Hallo,
Humdinger wrote:
I'm not sure it's a good idea to include such a speculative amount into
a budget that should be reliable. I take it, the sum of $5,500 is a
realistic one, considering past donations etc.
For the most part, budgets are (unavoidably) speculative to a certain
extent, as they frequently have to be based on projections and/or
educated guesses of what is expected to happen in the future (an inexact
science). I suppose what want to say that that $20/year is aggressive,
which I agree. But that's actually by design; let me try to explain.
How about this being the "safe" (whatever safe there is) minimal
budget.
Have an additional special dev-donation-drive budget á là HCD where
really well-defined projects are financed (additional Coding Sprints
can also fall under that category, if the participants a have clear
goal). All the overhead is already computed into the "regular" budget,
so one can say everything above this $5,500 goes 100% into development.
I also believe only HCD-like planned projects can attract that amount
of money.
When you look at the budget from the perspective of what can take the
project to the next level in terms of funding, having a *growth budget*
that provides tangible and compelling motivation to the existing support
base, growing that support base, and pushing the project into exploring
new sources of revenue is definitely more important than being safe.
The $20K figure does in fact come from past experiences and some
(educated) guesses of what can be expected to happen in the future. When
you look at 2008, between the 2-week HCD donation drive and GSoC alone,
Haiku raised more than $10K. If you add to that the money that was
donated on a regular basis, the sales from the Haiku store, and what was
donated to the Haikuware bounties (which was, after all, money put into
Haiku development), then you start to see how $20K/year is not crazy at all.
I also added community growth into the formula. Considering that alpha 1
has been downloaded at a rate of approximately 30K downloads/month --
and that's only to the extent that we know and without counting the
nightly builds -- it becomes pretty clear the target audience is growing
significantly, and can (only) be expected to grow more in the future.
This also needs to be taken into account when considering potential
sources of revenue, and preferably as food for thought for exploring new
revenue streams (Google searches perhaps?).
All of the above in consideration, I think it just boils down to whether
you think about your budget as a tool that can potentially bring growth
or not. HCD is a good example of an initiative where the project stepped
into unexplored territory with a relatively aggressive approach; there
were in fact some gloom and doom predictions, but in spite of that, it
did very well (an understatement).
There is much more to win from an aggressive budget, with no downsides
to it since, in the end, there is always the premise that Haiku will
never spend what it does not have, so no real harm can be done.
All FWIW and IMHO disclaimers apply. :)
Cheers,
Jorge/aka Koki
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