When you give money to Debian, where does it go?

Numerous emails and blogs have appeared recently about Debian financial decisions.

When people ask about giving money to support the development of the Debian GNU/Linux software, they are typically encouraged to place their donation in the account of one of the listed Debian Trusted Organizations.

According to the Debian Constitution, if you give money to one of the Debian Trusted Organizations, the Debian Project Leader will have absolute discretion over how the money is used.

Nonetheless, there are other ways that people support Debian financially and their money is not under the control of the Debian Project Leader. For example, if a company employs Debian Developers, the payment goes directly to the developers and the Debian Project Leader has no control over their duties.

In fact, anybody can make a personal donation or grant a freelance contract to any developer or group of developers at any time.

This blog post simply ignores those possibilities and looks at the case where you simply give the money to one of the Trusted Organizations (which Debianists refer to as TOs) and it falls under the control of the Debian Project Leader.

Not all of the money will be spent promptly. Sometimes it just sits in the bank account and gets eroded by inflation while the community has long email discussions about other topics.

I just want to highlight some of the examples of expenses that were funded and expenses that were denied over the years. This list might be updated from time to time.

Things that have been funded

• For DebConf19 in Brazil, we saw the budget had a line of $10,000 for diversity. A group of young women from Albania and Kosovo were given free flights and accommodation and many of them were sitting at the same table as the Debian Project Leader for the DebConf dinner.
• Outreachy internships: each year, Debian appears to be paying for approximately four internships, two in summer and two in winter. The internships are paid $7,000 each, regardless of the local salary where the intern resides. That is $28,000 per year plus travel grants.
• Legal expenses: the FSFE fellows elected a Debian Developer as their representative in 2017. Over $120,000 has been spent on legal bills trying to control what the volunteer says and to hurt his family.

Things that were not funded

• When Adrian von Bidder died in 2011, Andreas Tille objected to use of Debian funds to buy a wreath, despite the fact that von Bidder had a formal role as secretary of Debian.ch, the incorporated association in Switzerland.
• When a volunteer asked if his wife could eat the food at DebConf in South Africa, he received an angry rejection email from Margarita Manterola at Google.
• Volunteers from third world countries are told to pay their own visa fees and other incidental costs for attending DebConf, even though these expenses are disproportionate compared to their incomes.
• According to the response submitted in the latest WIPO UDRP dispute, volunteers were asked to pay a supplement for joining the kayak trip and this may have been the reason one local Indian developer was left behind to swim by himself. He drowned.

Before you give money to a Debian Trusted Organization

Please think about visiting the debian-project email list and asking how the decision making, budget processes and financial reporting can be improved to provide more transparency about the expenditure goals and better outcomes.

If you are not satisfied with the decision making processes and transparency, consider giving donations to local Debian Developers who are working on things that you are familiar with.