 So, hello. Thank you for having me. So, I want to talk about fritzing. Who am I? I studied computer science and worked six years producing autonomous cars and robots and also another five years helping real cars to navigate. And, yeah, and now I am the maintainer of fritzing. So, let's make fritzing create again. So, I guess most of you already know the project. For those who don't, it's like a CD software for creating electronic boards. It's very simple. So, it can also be used by students like pupils like maybe 12, 16 year olds and also it's used a lot by people who are from foreign professions like biologists or doctors or whatever who are not knowledge, not electronic engineers but have some issue that can be solved with an electronic board or electronic circuit and just want to get it done. What's not possible with fritzing? Yeah, if you have a highly integrated circuit or if you want more than two layers, yeah, you just go for key cat and also if you want to simulate a circuit that's a frequently asked question we get. That's not possible with fritzing and designing your next iPhone I wouldn't recommend also. It's very basic software. So, how did I get to the project? Yeah, last year this was the state of the project. The last release was already three years ago. There's more than 1,100 issues. And that despite the project had been downloaded one million times last year and there's like 200,000, 250,000 users visiting the website each month. So, it's really alive but not on the development side. The maintainers had left so I wanted to join this. When looking at it there were more problems so I didn't compile anymore nobody had published a build for two years. The server is still on deviant 6. I don't know, maybe you know what that means if you have it online. There was a broken capture issue and nobody fixed it for like months, half a year and no users couldn't log into the website anymore because just the capture mechanism didn't work anymore. Forum signups, not possible. The email system had stopped working. Basically MailChimp had just changed the tariffs and although Fritzing UG was still paying for it, no email was delivered anymore. So, I stumbled on it while working on my own electronic project and stumbled on a bug in Fritzing, checked on GitHub. Maybe this bug is fixed in a master branch and it's just not yet released and then I saw the whole situation and also Eisler's talk at Fostem last year where they asked if someone wants to join this project and that's what I did. For restarting this project there was to first do an analysis so what had gone wrong, so why so many users and so many downloads but why is there no development anymore? So, yeah, looking at what was Fritzing bringing in the money. So it started in 2007 with a public research funding which gave in a lot of money but it was only limited for two years so after this money run out there was only the other parts left for just getting some income. PCB manufacturing, so at that time Fritzing had its own FabLab. That was a source of income. Parts development was a source of income but actually it's a bad idea to do that because if companies pay you to include their parts into your project then you have, first of all, for the users you want to have as much parts as possible. If you charge for that then you get less parts and on the other side, if you earn money by creating parts then you shoot yourself in food by creating a really nice parts editor. So the parts editor of Fritzing, it's really shitty who tried to use it knows that. So another source of income was Google Ads. It's not really that much. The CreatorKids, they were a really great source of income and also very popular but that just vanished when kids were produced in China and also Arduino started producing kids and yeah, so it was not that good anymore. And last but not least the Nations but also that was like below minimum wage for one developer was not sufficient. In 2019, the situation was inverse. So PCB manufacturing by Isla, that's the only plus and really nice and Google Ads was still there. That's it. So in the result, after the funding run out at some point every developer had left the project and had moved on so all the developers really a major part of the code in Fritzing was developed by paid developers. So it's a professional project and it's not easy to get into it. So what can we do about it? So first step of course, make it build again on all platforms. So that is the first very discouraging thing if you see this project cannot even be built. So why should I contribute code? At a continuous integration, so we can easily review pull requests. Also we can all the time verify that it still builds even if I'm not there. Yeah, we burned on 482 issues from those originally 1185 issues were opened during this year. But it's a good sign that the community is alive again. It's really nice. And the issues which are now opened, they are much more useful than like issue from 2014. It's not helpful or most of the time. Yeah, and we made a release 094. It's basically a maintenance release. Not really a lot of new features. Some like you can have now colored your wires by length, which might be nice, but there's no standard for color coding wires by length. But if you have such thing, if you're a manufacturer and you do this, or if you produce like sets like that, it was a feature request. Somebody made a pull request. Why not? The website took a lot of work. So some imagine repairs, emergency repairs, adding TLS finally. So otherwise it would already be banished from Google browsers and many more. Forum service already immigrated. So we now have software from 2020 for the forum. It's going to be stable even without maintenance for quite some time. But now it's also easy to maintain it just by updating it with one click. And one thing a lot discussed is we added payment so actually because of legal issues, we had to send back all the donations that had been made in the end of 2018 until the beginning of 2019. Or not we because I was not part of the project that back then. I tried DonaBox and other services, but the income from that still would not be sufficient to fund one developer like me. Or services, third party developers, yeah. Yeah, what I said. So now we have this eight euros per download for a GPL project, which is a lot discussed. But it's successful. So by pushing users to this kind of donation, which is text wise it's not a donation, but it's still not obligatory, although we really pushed users to that. It now pays for one developer, money for services, data protection officers, web servers, and even to hire freelancers. So future for fritzing is looking really good from that perspective. So we have a roadmap for 2010 and 20. We will try things like issue bounties. So maybe we can put some bounties from the money we gained during the downloads on GitHub issues and see if people like that and want for this offer help us burn down the still remaining 880 issues. So 482 issues done means we had last year 1.2 issues fixed per day. And I hope to increase this to two issues a day. So we will be able to fix all the major projects by the beginning of next year. Yeah, we hope to get a much better part experience in fritzing. I can't say too much about it because it's really work still. So you can see that part is end of life, stuff like that, when you start your project. That would be really cool. We are working on a new parts editor, obviously now. So that will hopefully be done this year also. And join in for STEM 2021. That's also already on the roadmap. And try to keep the GPL business model. So for now it's a problem for a school when they want to download fritzing and we say it's 8 Euros per download. It's not a good idea for a classroom. It just doesn't work. So of course when they write me an email then I just send them the link. And if you register, I think if you register on the website then this is a way to sneak around the 8 Euro payment. So for schools there is always this option. Yeah, it's like support campus and classroom downloads. So for a campus they also want network install for Windows and lots of stuff like that. That most open source developers, if you do this on your free time you don't care about does it install Windows network install. Maybe a university who needs this will develop it. It's possible still. But yeah, it's on our to-do list also to enable. Yeah, I rushed through. We can start questioning. Yeah, I started with Open Collective, but Open Collective US and then discovered that there's quite some paperwork to be done and they also take quite a huge margin at that time. It was like 20%. And yeah, I thought, well, paperwork 20%. I didn't like that much. I tried to look into more other solutions. So currently we have the donor box for donations. And it's working also like you can look in donor box. We got about 7,000 to 8,000 euros to it, about a major part from one PCB manufacturer and a few from the community. It's really great to have this, but it's not 7,000 euros for one year of development. It doesn't work that way. I thought about trying to push this more, like trying to get publicity for the donation page. But in the end, I'm doing software development. There's one thing about fritzing that the whole community is students or beginners who are less likely to submit pull requests to add code. They just get started with electronics and they are, yeah, it's a beginner's audience. So they won't contribute. That's also, it showed like when there was no, nothing going on despite it's a GPL project and despite it's being used that much. But many people there are asking, how can we contribute? If I get access to the original repo and everything. Yes, I got access to the domain, to the web server, to the original repo, to everything, actually. Yeah, well I didn't get access to the books, so I don't know where the money went before I started. Yes, of course, if I get negative feedback about the 8 euros per download by the users. So yes, of course. Some people they really don't like it. But there's more people who actually favor it. So it's equals out. So that the people who are enthusiastic about fritzing and also other developers, usually they are fine with it. They say, yeah, okay, cool. If this is the way to make the project going on again, then it's fine. And then of course, yeah, sometimes you get a run from someone. The software, it has lots of bugs. Don't make me pay for it. I just want to try it. Well, yeah, that's it. That's life. Yeah, so we're, sorry. 8 euros per download is a bit weird. So how does it work for distributions? Ubuntu or the like? Yeah, we still have the Linux and the Mac version currently on GitHub releases. And of course it's GPL. So Ubuntu, they can just take the source code, compile and put it in Ubuntu. Or Arc Linux or Fedora or whatever. And on the other side per download is also stupid if you have multiple computers. And then, yeah, it's a weird business model. Yeah, the workshop, the website still mentions workshops. Does it still exist? No, most of the website is really outdated. But there are people interested in workshops. For example, I met with a guy who puts the Apple One PC on a breadboard. So actually on multiple breadboards. And he's also planning to do this in workshops. Like you have those breadboards. Yeah, it makes total sense. It's like, so you would love to make a contribution, a monthly donation. If others then can profit from it or don't need to pay. Yeah, that's a good idea. So if we reach a certain goal, if we would then say like, okay, this monthly goal is reached. And then from now on we can just offer it for free. Yes, of course. I didn't think about this yet. So that would be a good idea. You got your question back? Yeah, I remember. About governance. I am. So if I left the project, how do we prevent that the project is dying again? So the best mechanism that is currently really fixed in place, I think is the CI mechanism. So a new person who wanted to pick it up, there's already some technical depth done. So it's easier to start with the project now. And also, yeah, there's actually not a good protection against it now. So I am currently not thinking about leaving the project. It's working great. But also there's some legal stuff that needs to be done. For example, we are not GDPR compliant at all. Stuff like that. And all those legal risks, they need to be settled also with fritzing UG. And I'm currently not yet associated with them. So that's a risk to the project. Thank you.