 I didn't do anything special about it, but there was something that焦b ash of the last month or so. It's that we buy money all over the world. It is starting to try to give a little bit of pressure on how much money we have, and that we don't have enough at all. We buy money with SPI and the time we have in Germany, Mae'n cyngorol yn ddweud yn y ffwrdd debyn ddebyn o'r ffordd i'r hyn syddol sy'n ddweud o'r ffordd i'r llwyll iaith yr Unig, Ysgrifennas, Ysgrifennas, Braesol, Ogyntinia, nid yw'r ffordd i'n ddweud yw'r holl yn gwneud yn ymdill oherwydd mae'n gwneud o'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd ...that we should really be doing something with. This is going to be a quick talk from me... ...because I want lots of ideas from you lot. So, how much money have we got? A lot. I'm not going to try and do the Dr Evil thing... ...and say $100,000 but we've got a lot of money. So, what do we do with it? I reckon Luke and I should get a really nice holiday out of it. We can do other things. Hardware. We do have some ideas from the DSA team that they want bits and pieces of kit scattered around. The big thing with hardware is the vast majority of what we need, we get donated already. If we go out and start buying large lumps of hardware, the chances are that will just annoy the people who are happily giving it to us already. It's often better for those companies to give us equipment rather than money. It works out easier for them for tax and all that kind of stuff. Related to that, we've also had suggestions of, well, we could start paying for hosting. I already shouted at the person who suggested that because that would be a really bad plan, I think. In the $100,000 for the amount of data we shift would be gone overnight. Once people get the idea that we might be able to consider paying for the hosting we've got, why would they give it to us? Feel free to argue if you think I'm wrong on any of these. I've had suggestions of marketing. There's a suggestion that we should possibly pay for a full-page ad in one of the national papers in the US or the UK or Germany or somewhere. I don't know how much that costs. Anybody have any ideas? Sorry? Yeah, probably. Well, Mike? Marketing in countries... Hello? No, Mike. Try again. I was thinking about more targeting the marketing to less developed areas where God forbid, windows isn't so much of a stranglehold on the marketplace. Let's face it, anybody who already knows what Linux is will go and download it and has a choice. Let's look at places where the choice is a bit more limited. OK, that's an idea. I've even had it suggested that, I know this has come up in the past, that we should even maybe hire somebody part-time to do the marketing bits that frankly most of our engineers, most of our developers are not going to do. I don't know if people have thoughts on that. I will say at least while I'm DPL, we're not going to do another dunk tank. You can quote me on that if you want. The amount of bad feeling that caused means... Please tell me I don't look that stupid that I think that will be a good idea. I've also heard a couple of suggestions that frankly if we can't find something to do with the money we should give it away to other organisations who might use it. That bothers me as well. I mean there's been a suggestion that we should give it to maybe there's a group in the UK who do evaluations of operating systems, computer kit and whatever and we could basically pay them to test and evaluate Debian so it meets their needs and then more of the non-profit groups might start using us. I'm not convinced, Zach. I don't know the aggregate data for this Debconf but various individual people with whom I've spoken during this Debconf have received half of what they asked to be sponsored to come here. Given that we have that much money, given that in the past we already used money to sponsor people, I wonder why we don't sponsor the entire request. Maybe putting a boundary on the maximum according to a count or whatever. OK. Bridal? I was going to say that while I would not be very enthusiastic about giving the money to other organisations to do work that's not already sort of well aligned with Debian, there are some interesting projects out there that other worthy sort of non-profit organisations in and around the free software world are pursuing that it might, where Debian is already a component of the solution they're working on, where I think it could potentially make sense for us to decide that that's something we'd like to be a more active partner or participant in where the action could be that we agree to put some money on the table. But to me though, while some of those are actually fairly attractive things for us to consider, they are substantially less attractive to me than finding things that would very directly impact the project. Absolutely. That's my own thoughts as well. I know Peta suggested the people working on some free flash implementation. Is it the Gnash? Is it Peta here? Yeah. Is it Gnash? I can't remember. Yeah. I'm suggesting we may possibly want to help sponsor those guys. So at the danger of potential conflict of interest because I'm a member of the board of directors, the Open Media Now Foundation is pursuing efforts to build open implementations of media codecs. That's something that is sort of another big frontier for people trying to build client things. I'm aware of the new Project Kawa stuff that Mad Dog and Linux International are engaged in in Brazil. We've been following the saga of the open moco stuff as it transitions to a more community-oriented process. And again, John's been helping to try and find some manufacturing assistance for that in Brazil and things like this. There are a whole bunch of interesting opportunities out there if we really get stuck. But to me that's sort of a second tier of thing we ought to talk about if we give up. My own feeling is on this. This isn't going to come down to necessarily my decision. If we do have really good ideas along that front and we can't come up with anything else, I'm not going to say no. I can be talked into anything here probably. But I'm very much reticent to the idea that the money that's been donated directly to Debian, we should then pass on somewhere else. If the donors wanted to give it, wanted those people to have the money in the first place, they could have done it directly. Exactly, yeah. Steve. So I wanted to echo Zach's comment about DevConf sponsorship because it does seem like sponsorship for this conference is a constant struggle every year. There's always so much uncertainty about whether we're going to be able to sponsor people. It becomes more expensive to sponsor each individual the longer it drags on the uncertainty and not being able to commit to give the actual attendees a solid yes. Plain ticket fairers go up and everything else. I really wonder why we aren't already doing that, first of all. That's a very good question. The answer is that it was a little bit too late for us to make much of an impact this year. I did authorise that Debian would throw $20,000 into DevConf funds to make sure that we didn't have any panics about paying bills and things. And to make sure that we got at least the first lump of the travel sponsorship covered for quite a long while. I mean, I'm the sponsorship team leader as well for DevConf. For quite a long while it looked like we were not going to have enough money for any travel sponsorship. Thankfully, in the last couple of months, we've had a lot more sponsors come through and that money, if anything, is looking surplus. We've managed a bit to cover, frankly, anyone who asked for sponsorship and had the patience to wait long enough unless we thought that they were asking for sponsorship and they just didn't deserve it. We gave everybody sponsorship. There might be some people around who disagree with how we did things. For exactly that reason, I want to make sure that some of the surplus that we have from this year will be available right from the beginning of planning for DevConf next year so we don't have to do the same thing again. Sorry, was there a second part to what you're going to say, Steve? Just that, obviously, when we start talking about trying to get 300 developers to a conference, $100,000 is not all that much when you get right down to it and we can burn through that rather fast, so it's not like it's going to be a sustainable, ongoing thing, but if we're saying we've got too much money in the bank, well, this is a way to burn through it that's not going to screw us over in terms of offending bandwidth or other sponsors as well. Exactly, and in terms of ongoing commitments, we can afford to do it for a few years without having to panic. Oh, absolutely. I mean, given a lot more money, then I would say we will be able to do a lot more with DevConf. I don't want to commit to a huge amount. One other thought I wanted to put on the table which came up during the SPI Boff and we were talking about this the other day, but just for the benefit of those here who might not have been there, this amount of money is not enough for us to mount any significant legal defense for any challenge that might be brought against DevIn in any first-tier jurisdiction in the world. On the other hand, we don't currently have any looming threats on the horizon, and so I'm not particularly hung up about that. That's one of the things in the past that we've used as a justification for just banking some of the money for a while. The second observation that I made the other evening is that the money that DevIn currently has is largely the result of accumulating donations that were not actively solicited. The best of my knowledge, certainly in terms of what SPI is holding, with the exception of things like sponsorship for DevConf, DevIn has never actually asked anybody actively to donate money. So the sense I have is if we find some reasonable ways to put some money to work and we use it up and we have some reason to need more or to productively make use of more, if we ever actually did ask for donations. The chances are we would start coming again. Chances are we'd get more than we've already been getting. I think that's the main point I want to make. Basically, the money of DevIn should actually be spent in a way that will improve the Debian project, improve the free software world. Your point about if they wanted it to go to somewhere else, they would actually send them somewhere else. It doesn't work that way. People would like us to decide what actually makes more sense for us to improve the Debian distribution. The Gnash thing is one thing I believe is very important for the desktop and the Linux penetration in desktops because it is the current Achilles heel of the free desktop. If you don't have a working flash implementation, they have to install the Adobe flash to get a lot of web pages working. And $100,000 is not a lot of money. I just did some calculations and the School Linux DB and EDU projects, we've spent €550,000 so far building the system and we have spent them on things that are hard to get volunteers to do and also things, projects that are important to us and we've spent them on developer gatherings and some things that are hard for volunteers to do in their spare time is contacted journalists in their work hours and to actually be able to get press coverage you have to contact journalists while they are still at work. You can't call them in the evenings because it doesn't work that way. We've spent it on marketing, we've spent it on walking around in schools and getting to know the teachers and the admin staff. You can't call them in the evening, it doesn't work that way. For development, we mostly spent them on developer gatherings. We tried to have eight gatherings with all the people that get funding for travel and lodging and food. Of course, that's a good point, so I don't want to interrupt you totally. That's one of the things that we do spend money on regularly. I've made a point, I know ever since I think Martin was in charge maybe even Beedale, I don't know how far back. We have been spending money on trying to get our developers together where it makes sense. Again, we're not looking to just spend money to send people to go and visit each other because it's fun for a holiday but if it really makes sense that we have one of our teams get together, spend a weekend and just hack on something whether it's the kernel, whether it's the release team getting together, if it's the known team, the KDE team. Frankly, anyone, sorry? Yeah, Vancouver meeting even. If we can get people together and spend money and it will really help the project, absolutely we're going to spend money on that. Next time we do rest on a lot to fund gatherings like that, they have provided all the infrastructure and just made it happen. But we should have more meetings. They have a limit on the number of meetings and we should do more than that. I don't think Debian has been very good at spending money wisely. It's like I've been trying to convince you to waste some money on things I believe is important and it's like, well, I don't know how much money we do have and it's like I don't really... We really need to start using money to get things done. $100,000 is not a lot and I think if we actually spend it all and ask for more, we'll get $300,000. And of course I would really like to have something for the Debian EDU project. We basically wasted all the money we got and need more now. And we will probably spend 100,000 Norwegian that is 10,000 euros a year on developer gatherings. Cool. We got half of it at the moment so we need to get more of that. But still we shouldn't be afraid of wasting money on the KDE project or IGNOME project or the Gnash project or the old... There are all these upstream projects that are very important to us. If the HPUX GCC guys need to get together, we should just fund a gathering for them or whatever strange architecture that we care enough about to actually try to improve. There is so much we could use those money for if you actually started actively to spend them. Sure, that makes sense. I think Zach has something. Yeah, regarding the... Do you want to go ahead? Just a question from Javier on RSE. Could someone ask Steve if it would be possible to pay professional technical writers to write our user administrator's manual since we haven't had an official one for years. No one's working on this documentation so paying a company to do this would not be dunk tank revisited. Yes, possible. If somebody wants to get an idea of... put together a proposal with an idea of how much it'll cost and what we should expect from it. Yes, sounds entirely sensible. I know he did send me an email about this. I was going to come on to some more of the suggestions I've had. But fine, he's interrupted already. Zach? So regarding the extrema Dua kind of meeting, I've been a regular of the QA meeting that was sponsored by them. I completely agree we should use money to make things like that happen. The difference is that they are actively advertising them. So they sent us an announcement or getting in touch with the people in single teams to propose, hey, do you want to meet? And we as Debian have never done anything like that. So if you really want to push in that direction you should either send us an announcement or contact single teams periodically and say, okay, do you want to meet this year again? If yes, Debian should use money for you. Yeah, cool. I should note Andy at the front did volunteer to take notes on all of this. I will push out a summary of what we've come up with, the ideas from the meeting later. So if you think you had a really great idea and you told me and I haven't mentioned it back, shout at me and tell me. We don't want to lose any of the ideas no matter how wacky they might sound. We haven't had any wacky ones yet, which is boring, come on. That's better. I have an idea about travel sponsorship for people in the new maintainer, Q or new Debian maintainer. I think we should encourage them to join the Debian conference because maybe they're already Debian developer or maybe they are in the Q and past all their tasks and skills but they are not sure is it important for me to go to a Debian conference. So I think it would be very nice to encourage them if they like to come to apply for it and maybe to give them with a higher priority travel sponsorship. Yeah, absolutely. It's a very good point. I know we had one of our new Debian developers actually had applied for sponsorship then at the last moment bailed out saying I'm not important enough I don't think Debian should spend money to get me here. Please God, no. We really want to get anyone who thinks that they would like to be at Debian conference they can make any technical contribution. We want to try and get them here. Especially for students or people from South America who don't have the money to be able to do that kind of travel. If we've got the money, we'll show as hell we'll spend it. Next. Before thinking of giving money to other projects, I think we need to look at ways where we can be more efficient in our work. I have one case. Most Debian developers engage lots of time just to keep up with what's happening in the community. I know at least for me, I read one to two hours' mail I see per day. I know it's the same for others. Last visit was recently commented. It's not going to be better for me since I'm going to be a father. One of the things that is really needed to make that better is getting the Debian weekly news going on in our regular Brazis and not as we have since two years. Even going further, most probably would benefit from regular summaries from our main mailing list because that way people can keep up without having to read everything. For those who were in Martinscraft talks, it clearly explains that projects like Canada Traffic did that for a long time, but it's exhausting. It's an exhausting task. Not many volunteers are ready to do that. Maybe it's an idea to use our money to get those summaries to get regularly Debian weekly news down. Sounds like a possibility. The question is what would be the conditions for this to be acceptable for most of Debian developers? I know, Tom, I was looking interested at the back, but did you have a comment? Sorry, I just heard Debian project news, but it actually was a buzzy elsewhere. Would you mind repeating what you said? There's a quick suggestion that it might be worthwhile spending some money to hire somebody, a contract, whatever, to just help out doing a lot of the summarising, doing a lot of the keeping up with the Debian project news, that frankly is very, very difficult, to be honest, demoralising for a volunteer to do every day, every week. I think it's a reasonable idea. I don't know where we'd find somebody to do it and how much it would cost. If anyone has any ideas on that front, if you could do some investigations, please, proposals with some meet on them, with some real ideas like that. Great, go for it. I think we should be very careful about paying people to do things that are already done in Debian. I think we should, if you actually want to fund people, we should make sure we fund things that are not happening in Debian at the moment. Yes, absolutely. My feelings on this, of course, is stuff like trying to keep up with summarising and whatever, trying to do the weekly news type of thing, of course. Let's be honest, that's something that isn't really happening at the moment. I think it's a good idea to actually pay some money to projects outside of Debian that are working on pieces that are important to us if they actually can use those money. There are a few projects that are actually set up to take funding and to work with it. The most we can probably do for most projects is developer gatherings, while the Gnash project is actually capable of receiving money. I've said enough about the Gnash project. The GCC project, how do you fund the GCC project? I don't know. We should limit the plans for spending money that actually can be spent money on. We need to know who to actually give it to and we need to see that something is going to happen with the money. For most tasks in Debian, it's not possible to put money on it. I agree. You didn't mention Dung Tank as more of a joke, but I'm not entirely sure it's totally a bad idea provided it's done well. If we look at the FreeBSD project, it got their own controversy about something similar a few years ago where a Paul Henning camp had an idea of rewriting large parts of their kernel and he did that for about two months and had people pay him because he was a contractor and he had no project for those two months. Initially they had a lot of controversy about that, but they eventually developed a framework where people could suggest things that would then get voted on by their entire community and if they were accepted, then they could also get funding from the FreeBSD Foundation. I think doing it that way would avoid a lot of controversy which we had with Dung Tank, which came mainly because it was decided from up rather than by the whole community while still making good use of monies. Of course it would require a good project which would require people to make good proposals but having a vote on that and allowing everyone to have their say in whether or not it's going to happen should make that work out, I think. I would like to add to what Walter said. I mean, not that I would like this idea to be implemented in Debian but to consider the different possibilities. The Perl community operates, I don't know the details, but they operate in a very strange way. There are projects for which there is a grant. The amount of the grant is to be determined by the sponsors that donate to the grant and once an amount is reached, the grant is given to the person who deserves it who will commit the time to do it. I know it can be flawed on very many levels if done wrong but they seem to be very happy with it. Are there any other projects out there that we know of who do something similar or their money? We'll come back to it. Daniel. I just wanted to go back to the comment that we shouldn't be trying to put money into things that Debian's already doing rather to fund things that we're not. I think actually putting money into things that Debian is already doing is a really good way to free up developer resource to go and do the things that they can't do because they're doing this other stuff. Funding something like the summarizing process which does happen to an extent would mean that we take that workload off developers who could otherwise be fixing RC bugs. Peter. You asked about other projects that have funding mechanisms. I know the GPL EDA community has gotten some money I think through Linux Fund though I'd have to go and check and they had a fairly involved community process to generate and prioritize a feature wish list for spending the money and it turns out that there's quite a bit of work that I think is going to end up going into the printed circuit board schematic capture tool chain to make this something that's easier for more people to be able to use and the process they use isn't necessarily immediately applicable but this notion that you engage in a community process to identify the wish list of things that could use some money to be worked on if they're only capable developers able to spend time, get that prioritized, get it sort of bought into by the community and then sort of work down that list spending money doing things it certainly seems like something that we ought to be able to do. So the problem with the idea of giving people money on tasks that they are already doing to fill up the list of those I'm not too sure if it's really a good plan to do because why do we now think that, for example, fixing RC-bugs is money worth but not processing the new queue or the other way around is other RC-bugs quite the same amount of money needed? Definitely of course not, some are just something like 10 minutes so how much money do I get from RC-bugs then? This leads to all interesting kinds of conflicts I rather prefer not to have in the project. So making the decision who gets how much money is the most difficult thing on that whole spending of money on current developers. I know Steve was waiting. Exactly how much does a black helicopter cost? Exactly how much does a black helicopter cost? That's the whole problem right there. About this problem that Andreas points out maybe if we find tasks that really nobody enjoys doing we could consider it but I agree in general that stuff that we concerned really our core stuff and that everybody is supposed to do we should not fund anyone. Somebody needs to make the decision as to what do we consider to be a core Debian task what do we consider something that frankly we're only doing because we have to. I'm not so sure it's going to be easy to find someone to do the tasks that we don't want to do if we pay them for everything. Frankly the whole road we're trying to go down in this discussion by looking for people who may want to spend all their day reading mailing lists about the subject that they're not interested in just because they're paid for it I don't think that's going to work. I'm quite sure actually that's not going to work. People don't want to do jobs just because of the money they also want to have some fun and I really don't think we'll be able to find somebody willing to do such things. So two events to be put together maybe arriving at a proposal. So one idea was by Raphael which has recently published a French book about Lenny and if I remember correctly you offered a free copy of your books to anybody who fixed it. Was it an assie bag or something like that? Okay. So you had an idea like this which worked quite well I think. And the other thing is that one of the biggest problems we have I think with respect to the community is attracting new manpower to the project. So someone which is not already related to the project. So an interesting proposal may be from time to time have a timeframe like one month in which you send out a call to people if you are not already involved in the project which might mean not being a DD and not being a DM or something such. If you fix a bag in this month you receive some gifts like a t-shirt, a book or whatever it will be relatively not much expensive it will probably be fun and it can be a way to attract new people. Yeah, sounds a cool idea. First five. Yeah, exactly. No, there's a lot of overlap of course from that. I mean this is where the Google Summer Code fits in. I think maybe a little. In a course they have or Google offers some money we have to go and find some projects we find some students, we pick the white ones hopefully so they come through. We convince some of them to stay on when you're sat next to one. We don't necessarily convince all of them to stay on apparently it's quite a problem they have even in the most successful projects only maybe about a third of the students will stay on at the end of the summer and stay involved with their project. There's a different issue of how we spend Debian money. That doesn't solve the issue of how we spend Debian money and it's once per year and it arrives at quite a few people because we have less than 10 students every year. Just going back to marketing the comment was made about having a full page advert and say a national newspaper that's marketing very much towards users what about some form of advocacy towards corporates I know of various people who would love to run Debian in their day job but there is some piece of the puzzle that is not certified to work with anything other than say Red Hat which means that they can't run Debian or get it past the bean counters or whatever and that could be one example is Oracle but it's hardware as well I know whenever I saw HP offering for sales support for Debian I was gobsmacked that a big company was doing this and it was great and maybe if we had someone who had enough money maybe if we had someone who would have to be their day job the comment was made about people not being able to talk to journalists things at night if you're going to go and talk to large software companies or hardware companies you have to be able to walk in during the day and talk the talk and whatever and maybe that might be a more useful way to spend money on marketing than a full page news ad which may not reach straight people. At that point it's almost a suggestion to me anyway we'd correct me if I'm wrong it's almost going out and finding itself a person is there somebody that we could put forward as some sort of Debian ambassador role in doing the sort of thing that Noodles is talking about Of course there's actually one thing that Debian spends a lot of money every year this thing here so we could consider to spend some amount of the money that we have to the Debcon every year which of course means if we don't get more income some amount that we could spend on Debcon will get smaller and smaller over the years but that will at least show that not all money is in our account probably not the best idea but perhaps some that will at least do it and we know how to distribute money inside of Debcon Very specifically can we sponsor better food in the future Wait, Bidal, did you have Hi, there are obviously some knowledge that Debian developers don't have not many of them others are doing some management communication skills maybe not be always the first priority of each one of us and so on even though we try hard maybe having some support every now and then from kind of mentors from outside which could advise team leader can I say team leader DPL or whatever to solve issue inside their teams Sounds like a reasonable plan Sorry Spending money basically mentors advisors for various people in terms of communications or just whatever comes up It's a communication course for the DPL Meh, if we think it's useful we can make it happen Or release managers No For my own experience I've been to some of those courses of those companies I've worked for they're very expensive and not very good It depends on who you're talking to If you're surrounded by friends and colleagues who hopefully you get on with well already it's a total waste of money Peta One thing that I think would make it easier to get people to propose things to spend money on is to make it more transparent how much money they've actually got I really love the SPI report that comes in monthly stating where what SPI got money for FFIS I've never seen anything like that from them and the others I have never seen anything from that either I think the Debian project accountant someone should actually generate a report and put it monthly email something specifying the amount of money we actually have around Killer was appointed as the Debian auditor and I know has last year produced a report showing what we had in each of the organisations around the place I hope that went out public or did you not see it No okay fine, I'll be now happily push that out we've probably well overdue for another one as well so yes, blatantly we need a better idea of what money we have were Absolutely It should also specify what we actually spent money on for the last period so people can actually get an idea of what we're actually funding I mean what was it going to say I know from my own activities in Debian UK and obviously from approving expenditure from SPI from FFIS over the last year and a half the most common things that we cover are reimbursement for people travelling as we've already mentioned or reimbursement for people buying bits and pieces of consumables bits small bits of hardware hard disk drives memory people who end up importing new and interesting hardware and just want us to ask can we pay them back the import duty all those kinds of things well obviously yes what do I sign shipping of course it's another big one the last idea I've had suggested and I think this is actually a very useful one is some new big hardware ideally for people who are working on the really big packages where it hurts I forget exactly who it wasn't Rene but somebody did suggest that he should have a really big box for building open office on he's been sorry we don't actually have our own S390 machine but I guess maybe some I don't know what the price is second hand but if that's reasonable I mean you were asking for world suggestions yeah yeah by all means I have no idea what one costs either so if there is anybody out there who feels that they're struggling just physically in terms of resources to do the job they've got and there is money that will help hey shout at me let me know and we'll see what we can do or tell DSA of course oh we have just had a very very large donation of a huge amount of hardware from a company in the Isle of Man that we I think it's currently under Marx and Steve's desks at home yeah so we have a stack of machines ready to go out and again if people will find some of those useful if you think it would help to just have a nice big box with lots of CPU lots of memory hey shout for it some people even need laptops some people bought a new laptop for one of the DbNU developers because he had been without a laptop he was one of the most active one in the projects and his laptop died in Australia stuck there for three months with no laptop and he only could use the university machines that was ridiculous he bought one to him and it was pain to get it actually shipped there but we should do things like that on one of the boot guys at the boot gathering in London doing one of the test machines so you can actually do boot speed testing which is what we are supposed to be doing and he basically didn't have a test machine and I know it myself I don't want to do continuous rebooting of the machine I actually write on again that's a obvious call people would find it would make a big difference to what they're working on be it test hardware be it machines to build with machines to break up to show that something doesn't work specifically if there's hardware out there that's causing us problems and you've got no idea where to find it where you can't afford it again shout all of these are possible but it's very difficult to know when to do it if it's well known that you can just ask and get a new laptop I'm pretty sure we will have heaps of people showing up for a new laptop we're not just going to sign off on them every day but if there is a good call for it really shout another question coming from IRC would be to advertise Debian and DevConf and open day about four weeks before DevConf actually starts in the country that is hosting the DevConf to make more people aware of it and bring more public yes we should coming up to this DevConf if anything we were short of resources not in terms of money or advertising or whatever just in terms of people to get the advertising out it's something that hopefully next year we're doing a better job of if it costs money I know we did spend money on some kind of newswire service so that we could easily just get lots of press coverage very quickly for the DevConf 7 actually that kind of thing costs very little it's just a case of emails or phone calls, faxes whatever go out to the journalists that's an easy thing to do for this specific DevConf there was a centre fold in a free newspaper with information both in English and Spanish and there was a press conference with the mayor of the city 15 reporters attending from radio, television and article newspapers and magazines and more newspaper articles on to that as well actually going on for DevConf stuff one of the things we have spent quite a lot of money on in the last couple of years is equipment to do things like DevConf we haven't been buying the video cameras themselves because they're just very expensive yes but for stuff like microphones for mixer desks whatever which should be robust should last well from conference to conference and they're not going to go obsolete yeah we've spent money on those already and we'll be shipping those around and as BDL points out yes the projector in here is awful we know that we actually we had agreed to go out and buy one at the end of last week we just utterly failed to find anywhere local that could get one to us in time any more? About marketing shouldn't we be interested in some targeted efforts in universities like next month I'll be back to school and people will be wondering so I've got this new laptop and I'm starting this September in school what should I install and I'm constantly battling mountains of open to disks that were shipped in September I'm even battling against open solar disks because open solar actually plays an ambassador son plays an ambassador at our school we have people at opera paying an ambassador at our school of course there's Microsoft with MSD and AA and all kind of stuff I'm not talking about paying an ambassador which is kind of annoying with a way that this ambassador behave in our school but having sending stickers, t-shirts that kind of stuff has a very useful impact in universities that's quite an important segment of our users and that's also why I have a very hard time recruiting students they're all running for open to and they don't even know what Davion is okay yeah good point if we do have any more any students who are going to university and whatever and could get us more coverage just by handing out some t-shirts, some stickers some DVDs whatever yes we can do that it's just a case of finding the people to do it Wackie ID paid the hardware renders to make the firmware available with a free license do you know who to talk to? I have no idea Bdell is shaking his head unfortunately at the front a couple of the wacky ideas have been wonderfully wacky but we're off by two orders of magnitude on the amount of money required to impress the likes of Nvidia or Broadcom Oracle or hate to be that way yeah I think we're winding down a bit do we have anything really cool to spend money on I have an idea basically what I've seen just last week OpenSUSE has a servers stack that you can upload your application to and get back a virtual image with install your application in it it can compile your application if you have the source it can produce the virtual images in all different kinds and it can provide you a live boot over the web over a flash application to actually see how it looks when it's booted up I think it could be useful to have something like that similar to launchpad PPAs where people that are not Debian developers could upload a package or two have it automatically compiled to all architectures and available as a download very very separate from the Debian archive it could sometimes even replace experimental for some causes yeah maybe I think we'd possibly have a problem though with volunteers to do the work we're not going to pay people to do that but the hardware definitely we could spend money on if there were people wanted it the project has a hardware it's only missing a location where to put it there's more than enough CPU power for that so the main thing needed is volunteers doing the work if anyone wants to volunteer if anyone wants to volunteer you know where to do it I think we're doing a pretty good job for regarding the legal aspect from our own point of view we are very careful about the license we provide from our recent experience I've noticed that seeing from the company's point of view dealing with license is something which is very different and maybe having some low use having a look from the license point of view and maybe so we could improve our tools and our distribution so the information we publish are even more useful for them for psychology is a good example of kind of stuff the companies are interested in on the legal front I have actually been talking to Jimmy at SPI is he still around or has he gone unfortunately we actually have a couple of questions open with the lawyers at the SFLC and Greg at SPI about some issues that we want some FTP master questions we've got a couple more things queued up in that as well there's more scope here to spend money maybe to make that happen faster if people have any really thorny legal questions again we have money we can spend it on lawyers if we want I'll freely admit I don't want to spend money on lawyers if we can avoid it you know we have some pro bono folks and I'm not a great fan of lawyers in the best times apart from the really nice pro bono folks if people think that that will help them if they've got a real problem again money is available we can do it so one thing that was muted a couple of times in the past is paying for card readers or something for each developer to help log on to project machines and try to help the security that way I know there's certainly some issues to do with accessibility for sometimes people who are blind can't necessarily use one time authentication keys and various other bits and pieces but it was certainly mentioned in the past as something that we may be able to fund so there is that as well I know Steve has just announced the last couple of days that they want to turn off all password login for Debian hosts it's about time I mean to be honest I know we talked about the card readers and stuff a while back these days that kind of thing at least to me I don't know to me that kind of thing is really cheap I can't imagine many people need help if they just don't have the money of course we can do it better again even cheap is too much for some people so we shouldn't just assume that it's so cheap that people that actually are paid to do a fund thing can waste them on anything at least some of the people I work with they don't have extra nickels to spend on funding hardware so if we actually wanted key cards whatever things to be available for all developers we actually need to spend money on it on the project I'm curious quick show of hands who here thinks it will be a useful thing to spend money on make sure that all DD's have physical tokens whatever for doing login to Debian machines we all look underwhelmed that's fair enough easy to lose as Bdale says we have five minutes left do we have any further points any further questions well yes it's not exactly a proposal but I would like every DD to be able to check our money's are spent so I'm subscribed to SPI private and there I can see how money gets in but I don't exactly see how money gets out okay Adam are you waving for a question? no okay fine I guess in that case unless there's anything more than IFC or any more points here as I said I will send out hopefully assuming I can read down these notes I'll send out some way of what the ideas that have come through today in the next week if you think I've missed anything if you think I've misrepresented anything please shout at me I'm not perfect honest equally of course if you have any more ideas at all in the future let us know we do have the money we're actively looking for better ways and more ways to spend that money to help Debian so let's do it