Today, I am thrilled to introduce a new fundraising initiative that has been in the works for some months now: the “Nixpkgs Contributors” Open Collective: Nixpkgs Contributors - Open Collective … The force behind this new and exciting initiative is none other than myself, @raitobezarius. After numerous discussions with various members of our vibrant community (some of whom may prefer to remain anonymous), I’ve taken it upon myself to spearhead this effort.
I am pleased to see this move to acknowledge areas where focused, financed development would benefit the Nix ecosystem. As always, where money is involved, there is a certain amount of complexity regarding taxes, reporting and standards compliance, hence I would like to ask the following questions:
Which legal entity will receive the donations made via OpenCollective (and by extension, where is this legal entity based and how is it incorporated)?
At what frequency will financial reports be made available to the general public, and how much detail will these cover?
Have bookkeeping services and legal counsel already been arranged, and will these be paid for out of the Nixpkgs Contributors Open Collective fund (and if not, by whom)?
As you can see, this is the Open Collective provided host which will receive the donations. There’s no legal entity as the Nixpkgs Contributors are a very non-formal group of folks and I am but one representative of such a group.
I will aim for yearly, I would be interested if we could have a third party (be it a nixpkgs contributor or not) as an accountant who can review our Open Collective. This is a possible role of this initiative.
All bookkeeping is already handled by OC as our host, we only need to generate expense and approve them, for the rest, this is the person being paid who should be responsible to manage their own income tax thingie, their legal structure, etc. We pay directly individuals (or their company).
As for legal counsel, I would be curious to what you have in mind, we should have very few needs for legal counsel, so my aim is to have people with experience scrutinize our operations and raise warnings if anything could be problematic. We will also let the OC fulfill their obligations towards their tax host, e.g. US.
Choosing to delegate all accounting and legal requirements to Open Collective is a prudent decision, and yearly reports would be perfect for the NixOS community to remain informed about the fund with. Thank you for your very swift and conclusive response!
What exact qualifications apply for being able to apply for funding? What does “funding” mean exactly? I like probably many others, wish we could have a job or career with Nix because of how much we enjoy it and love what it offers. Unfortunately, it seems there isn’t much of a market.
I think it would be good to see contracts between certain team members on various teams be contracted by the Nix Foundation for involvement with maintaining their respective modules and packages. There’s a lot of picky packages which require a lot of work to maintain or update so even if it isn’t a fixed pay but a contracted rate for the number of hours spent on maintenance, I think that would be beneficial. But then we come into the problem of 1) how much should people be paid that and 2) how much can the foundation provide.
I started using Nix a year ago coming from Void and Arch after a system crash caused me to loose a lot of data and NixOS was interesting enough that I picked it up. I learned how things worked and when I noticed Lens was out of date, I updated it and eventually started contributing. I’m not sure what everyone else’s story is but whatever their story is, I hope we can all continue to make NixOS and Nixpkgs a great piece of Linux technology.