 are here as SPI board members. And they will talk about the current ongoing activities for SPI, and then a lengthy Q&A session about their work. So thank you. Great, thank you very much. And thanks, everybody, for coming this afternoon to talk with us about software in the public interest. To be very clear, we have a few slides to set a little bit of context and provide some sort of starting point or background information. But this is meant to be a birds of a feather session, not to be a presentation. So I'm gonna try and go through the slide material fairly quickly with a little bit of help from Jimmy to in various places where I may be a little jet lag still and not remembering all the details. But then we very much would like to open up to questions fairly quickly and spend most of our time in that regard. I am B. Dale Garvey. I serve as president of software in the public interest. We just went through another board election cycle and following that at the most recent board meeting, reelected the existing slate of officers to serve for another year. So that's a fresh appointment and I'll have the office of president for at least another year. And I guess we have three year board term, so I'll be on the board for a while yet. In terms of what I wanna do today, we wanna just briefly review who the board members and officers are. I think actually this is the smallest percentage of the SPI board of directors that's actually been present at DEBCONF in a number of years. That's partly due to just people's conflicting life schedules, but also it has something to do with the fact that we are slowly expanding the board participation to have more folks from outside of Debian, which is I think a great thing. I'll talk just a little bit about where SPI came from and what its purpose is. We've had a number of new associated projects joined in the last year. So the slides full of logos have gotten even denser than they were in the past. We'll talk a little bit about financial status and a couple of very specific recent events that I think are interesting. And then as I said, I wanna spend most of the time on questions and answers. So this is the current membership of the board despite just going through an election cycle. I believe everybody that was running for a reelection was in fact re-elected. Same board as last year, yeah. So there's no change in the boards since last year. Jimmy and I, who are the non-italicized names, are the two folks who are present here at DEBCONF. And certainly for the rest of the week, even outside of this BOF session, if you have things you'd like to talk to us about regarding softening the public interest, please feel free to come by and find us. Definitely. Several of the other folks I suspect are following along on the stream and perhaps available on IRC if questions should come up. But this is who the current board members are and I won't belabor that anymore. What is software in the public interest? We are a non-profit organization based in the United States that was originally created to provide a legal and financial existence for the DEBCON project in the US. Since the folks who started Software in the Public Interest had a broader vision, the organization was created in such a way that it can provide services not just to DEBCON, but to any substantial and significant free software project that seems to meet our objectives and whose activities are aligned with those that we believe are appropriate for an SPI-associated project. At this point, from a DEBCON perspective, SPI is one of a number of different organizations around the world that hold money and other assets, tangible assets on behalf of the DEBCON project. If you are, for example, a citizen of the United States and you want to make a contribution to a project like DEBCON or any of our other associated projects, there may be tax advantages to doing that through SPI. And conversely for folks outside of the United States, there are other organizations that act as fiscal sponsors for the DEBCON project that might be more appropriate depending on the situations in the different countries. And it's not all just about money. There are other assets that we hold on behalf of DEBCON and other projects that can include things like domain name registrations, logos, and so forth. We don't currently actually hold title to any or many physical assets, but there's no reason we couldn't if that were an important thing for us to do on behalf of a project. SPI was started back in 1997 and was organized in the state of New York and the United States. In 1999, we were declared a 501C3 non-profit corporation. This is the category that is, it's one of several designations in the United States that can be appropriate for a non-profit that's serving free software projects. It's, without belaboring the point, it turns out that there are a few limitations at places on what we can do with money that's donated through SPI, but none of those have so far substantially impacted our ability to serve the projects that we provide services to. And as I've already mentioned, while SPI was originally created to serve a need that the Debian project had, that need turns out to be a need that's common among many free software projects and SPI has now grown to have a really significant and diverse list of associated projects. Here's the first of a couple of slides with logos of the various projects that are now associated with SPI. What ends up happening is if there's a free software project that needs assistance of the kind that SPI can provide, someone from that project will approach one or more members of the SPI board asking if they can become an associated project. We have a process that we go through of explaining to them sort of what we can do, what we can't do, what the rules are that leads to either agreeing that something else would be a better approach or if it looks like they would be a good candidate for an associated project status. We'll write a resolution. We'll put that before our contributing members for discussion for a period of time and then we'll vote on it in one of our board meetings. And these are all projects that over time we have voted to invite to associated project status. Here's the second batch of logos. In fact, this slide has several of the ones that have been recent additions. Open Embedded, Tied SDK, Zero AD, what else is on here? Oh, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, I guess it's called, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but. There's a Malay alum language related project off on the right with the Wispy Curls. Right, right. I think that may be all of the new associated projects in the last year, but I'd have to go back and look. On our website there is a projects page that has a list of all the currently associated projects with links to their project websites and their logos and brief textual descriptions of what their projects are about and so forth if you'd like to learn more. The real message from all of this is that SPI is now doing a lot of stuff for a lot of projects not just for Debian, but in the process we have of course tried to make sure that all the things we're doing we're doing at least as well for Debian as we are for anybody else since that's Debian's the organization that caused us to come into existence and that many of us who are on the board probably would most closely associate ourselves with as the project that we work on out of SPI. So there are a couple of recent activities that I think are worth specific mention. One is that in recognition of the fact that as we continue to grow and as our transaction volume has gone up we've really gotten to the point where expecting volunteers to manage all of the transaction processing and to do all of the roles that are required of our treasure is just not appropriate. We have just completed the process of searching for bookkeeping firm. We've selected a firm and I expect sometime this month actually the initial meetings will happen with that firm to set up the processes by which they'll begin to take over handling our ever increasing transaction flow. This is kind of a big step in the evolution of SPI. We have flirted in the past with outside bookkeeping firms but I think we have this time a more significant commitment on the part of the board to have this be a successful transition and to get out of the mode of expecting volunteers to do all of the grunt work associated with the financial processing for SPI and its associated projects. Related to that, one of the problems we've run into is that trying to find a bookkeeper whose processes we could actually interface with has been really, really challenging. And part of the reason for this is if you don't know let me just tell you that there's no financial software in the world that is within the sort of reasonable price range that's available to handle the specialized needs of a fiscal sponsor non-profit organization like SPI. That includes QuickBooks, it doesn't handle this. Yeah, all of the sort of things that people think of is the standard tools for managing finances of corporations or small businesses or whatever just don't comprehend some of the special needs of a fiscal sponsor organization like ours where in effect we're running a hierarchical set of books because we're managing financial transaction records for a bunch of projects, each one of which looks kind of like a little company. And you can go completely broke trying to buy your way into really expensive proprietary software solutions that you would still have to modify, enhance, and customize. Or you can do what we did which was to agree to collaborate with the Software Freedom Conservancy. They've become a project or they've proposed a project to try and solve this problem by building a software solution specifically meeting the needs of fiscal sponsor non-profit organizations like our respective organizations and to do it 100% with free software. They set a statement of work, a set of objectives we looked at it and said that looks pretty reasonable and it would actually be very helpful to us as an organization if that were to be a successful project. And so at our last board meeting we voted to make our first ever financial grant from SPI's general fund, which is the fund that we sort of skim a little bit of the donations to all of our associated projects to use for covering our costs of operation and so forth. And we've been so frugal over the years and done so much with volunteer labor that that general fund has just sort of been growing. And so we decided that spending $10,000 making a grant to try and help aid the development of a completely free software solution to solving the financial software problem that we and other organizations like us have was a good idea. I hope you'll agree with us that that was a good thing to do with some of that money. I would admit that this was the closest to a split decision vote that we've had on the board in a while with a number of people choosing to abstain from the vote. But in the end, I think it was a good thing to do and I hope going forward that it'll help out a lot. I should also mention this will, like once we do proceed through all these transitions and have a solution like this up and running and even to a lesser degree in the interim with the bookkeeping firm, having these records done in a more systematized and appropriate way will in the future make things like giving Debian access to its own records a lot easier to do and other things that an organization like SPI should be able to do as it grows. Yeah, it's sort of interesting. We've just gotten to the point where the ability to continue to scale mostly manual processes has completely been exceeded and it's time for us to just do things differently. And to sort of put that point home, here's the financial statement as of the end of June in terms of the assets that we're holding in trust. I don't know how easy this is to read from the back of the room. So those of you who decided the back of the room was a good choice, you know, who on you. But the bottom line numbers here is we're holding just over $423,000 U.S. in trust for the various associated projects. As of the end of June, the largest balance was actually held on behalf of Debian. The second largest was on behalf of Libra Office and the third largest was the Debcont 13 year mark. So I'm sure that some of that money has been used or transferred or at least committed to be transferred in support of this conference since the end of June. The July report is not available yet. That's why I'm showing you the end of June numbers. But in addition to that, our general reserves had grown to a little over $56,000, which is the reason we thought making a $10,000 grant was completely reasonable because the new expenses we'll be incurring for bookkeeping are, you know, gonna be on the order of five or $6,000 a year or something to pay for those bookkeeping services if I remember the numbers correctly. So that reserve will still be completely sufficient to help meet our sort of ongoing expenses well into the future. Are there any questions about these financial balances or anything related to those recent activities that I can answer before we go on? Okay. One interesting thing to mention is just this year, breadth of how many projects hold substantial sums. There's a large number of projects in the list that have five figures, like over $10,000. And so it gives an idea of the broad scope. It's not just Debian, even if Debian is the largest number. It's not even the only Linux distribution that has a substantial balance. I also mentioned that Open Bioinformatics is a recent addition to our list of associated projects and they sort of showed up with, you know, over 37,000 in assets. So another recent development that actually we didn't talk about before, but you're certainly aware of, a software development contract, one of our projects at the top, zero AD, they're a game related project. And we had to pay attention to do it carefully to make sure that it would comply with all the relevant legal and tax rules, but they are actually, you know, funding some development with the developer in Eastern Europe to make some changes for pay on their project. And once we made sure that we were going to, you know, comply with all the relevant rules, we were excited and happy to facilitate that. Yeah, that's an example of something we've told people in the past in our various associated projects we were willing to do, but we just haven't had anybody that had pulled the trigger on doing something quite like that. So lots of things have been happening that are sort of interesting. They're not hugely visible because there are interactions between SPI and specific associated projects, but it feels to me like things have actually been going reasonably well recently, though we completely recognized that we had reached the point with the financial transaction processing volume, whereas I mentioned, you know, the processes we were using are just not appropriate anymore and that's why we're making those changes. So in terms of SPI membership, anyone who agrees with the principles of software in the public interest is eligible and encouraged to apply for membership. Those of you, and certainly I would assume that anybody in the room at the moment would qualify for a contributing membership because the requirement for that is that you need to be participating actively in the free software community in some way. Certainly if you were a DD or a DM within the Debian project, it would be clear to us that you would immediately qualify. And I don't mean to exclude other contributors to Debian, but those are ones that I'm sure we would instantly say yes, obviously. And once you become a contributing member, the only additional sort of thing that happens is you get the right to vote in our board of directors elections every year. Doesn't sound like a really big deal, but I'm actually strongly encouraging more participants from more of our associated projects to seek contributing member status so that as we have our annual board elections in the future, I'd love to see more candidates from more of the associated projects have a higher probability of being able to be successfully elected to the board because I think in continuing to increase the diversity of the projects that people come from, if you will, for the board members would be a healthy thing for SPI in the future. And if you're interested, that's the URL to Chase to go find out about membership if you aren't already. One more thing on that. It's also really unusual in the US nonprofit or free software nonprofit communities to have a fully elected board accountable to the membership that it represents. Most nonprofits in both categories, there are exceptions like KDE, I think, but the Apache Software Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Eclipse Software, et cetera, of most of the other ones and almost any US charity, there is either a self-perpetuating board or a very limited set of folks who can choose a board or a mixture. And the fact that we are accountable to anybody who bothers to sign up and vote every year means that there's more transparency, more opportunity to shape the organization to meet the needs and it's, I would say, more trustworthy. We certainly like to think so. So other ways to get involved. All of our board meetings are held on an open IRC channel. And the times and agendas for those are announced in advance on our website. Anyone who would like is welcome to show up on the channel and watch live as we go through the board meetings. I will admit freely that we have worked very hard to make board meetings as boring as possible. And what I mean by that is we try not to have hugely substantive debates or discussions during the board meetings, because they take a lot of time and when we're asking people to sort of drop everything else they're doing and focus on a meeting that's happening online at a particular time of day for people that are coming in from various parts of the world, it's just not appropriate to have those run on for a really long time. So we try to do the debating on the mailing list or on IRC in between meetings or whatever, so that by the time things come to the point where someone's written a resolution for us to vote on, that it's pretty straightforward and people pretty much understand by the time we get to the meeting what's going on, what's gonna happen. We tried very hard to not engage in lots of business that wasn't listed on the agenda ahead of time, because that just seems unfair to people who are trying to use the agenda to decide whether to show up for one of the meetings or not. Having said that, every once in a while something comes up where it seems appropriate to do that. We had an item, in fact, the vote on whether to make the grant to the Conservancy through a process error didn't actually get put on the agenda for this last board meeting, and yet it had been sufficiently thoroughly discussed by the board that we decided to go ahead and vote on it anyway. That may have had something to do with why the vote was less unanimous than sometimes, I don't know. There are also a number of mailing lists. There's a mailing list for contributing members only. There's a general mailing list. There's a board of directors mailing list. All of those can be found out on the spidashing.org list site. We do try to use the more open lists whenever the topic permits, which is most of the time, thankfully. Yeah, it's actually very rare that any discussion of importance happens on the board list. That's mostly discussion about who's gonna go talk to the lawyers about a question that's come up where we need to maintain attorney-client privilege or something like that. It's actually very rare for us to have a meaningful conversation on a list that's more private than the contributing members list. I know it's easy for me to say that, not everybody finds it easy to believe assertions like that, but it is really true. You can see everything that we're doing by watching the public mailing list archives and watching the published raw logs and cleaned up minutes of each of our board meetings. So with that, that's the end of the sort of semi-formal part of the presentation. We would love to hear any questions that you have about past, current, or possible future SPI activities. It's a bough, let's have at it. So for the questions, you have one microphone in the back and one in my hand. Come on now, don't be shy. We don't bite, I'm left your food. Okay, I'll try and start a discussion. Can we say that in the elections, it basically seems like anyone who's from Debian gets elected, which seems to, and we seem to have quite a pool of Debian people which, who stand. This is kind of good for SPI in some respect, I'm not saying that gives them a bad outcome, but in a way it's, well, in a way part of the idea of having SPI as a general organization rather than some Debian foundation or whatever, would seem to be to try to remove from Debian people the responsibility for always having to do this work. It seems a bit like we're just doing it now for a load of other organizations too. I mean, if you compare to the proportion of funds, it's a lot higher proportion of Debian people on the board than- Yes, that's true. On the other hand, I will point out that we do have a couple of explicitly sort of non-Debian people on the board now and that's a change from the past. And so I'd like to think that that's sort of a transition that's in process. I will admit that it was, I mean, it was really good to see the vote of confidence in the current board represented by the folks who were running for reelection being re-elected. At the same time, it was very disappointing to see the candidate who was running this time who was not from the Debian context not get elected. It would have been great to have had another non-Debian person on the board, but I don't say that to slight anybody that got re-elected because they've all been good people. I personally pitched my voting that way just because I thought it would be good to have another non-Debian person. It's a legitimate concern. And I mean, I agree with everything both of you said. I think it's mainly a tough issue getting anybody who's not already paying attention to SBI to be aware that there's an election, be aware that they're eligible to vote, follow the steps to apply for membership and request contributing status. And they only have to do that part once and then they can vote every year. It's a tough problem. It's mainly a matter of education, I hope. I mean, part of the reason that we hold things like this BOF session is to try and spread the word that, A, SPI exists and it's doing things for Debian, which not everybody knows. And then secondly, to try and fan the flames of interest a little bit. I think when things are going reasonably well, there's a strong tendency to go, ah, great, just carry on and I don't want to be bothered. But when things aren't running great, if you let it sort of go without paying attention for too long, it's hard to know how to effectively make things change. So one last briefing before we go to Zach's question or whoever else. Most of these BOFs happen at Debian Constantly because that's the main conference most of us go to. I did hold one recently in December, at LESA 2012, which is the System Administration Conference. And I think it would be great if either SPI board members or members who are not on the board, if anybody is interested in at other conferences where SPI project members might show up. If you want to hold a SPI BOF there, talk with us, we can probably share the slides and adapt them as necessary. I can share what I did with LESA, et cetera. So getting the word out is a great idea. I know there was at least discussion about a BOF at one of the PostgreSQL events. I don't know if it happened or not. But that's the kind of solution that would help raise awareness, yes. So yes, I was just going to comment on that as well. So it seems to me that in Debian, we have been having BOF like this one since like ever, at least as far as my memory goes. So people in Debian are reasonably aware of what SPI does for Debian. It's probably the case that other affiliated projects are not making the same kind of advertisement within their projects about the existence of SPI. So we have essentially a overrepresentation of Debian contributing members in comparison with the others. I think it's also true that if you look at the list of associated projects, there are few, if any, that have as large and active population of contributors as Debian. Again, I don't mean to slight any other projects, but if I look down the list, there are a number of them that represent six or eight or 10 people. And the probability that in a project of that size, there's someone who would think this was more important to do than other things they might be working on may just be lower. There are a couple like Postgres and maybe a few others, you know, Drizzle and Jenkins, but yeah. They represent really large user communities, which for example, even in the Drizzle community, the number of active developers is modest by Debian standards. And that's great. It's a software project as opposed to Debian, which is a freakishly hard entity doing lots of stuff with lots of software. So again, the fact that we mentioned this even before being asked a question should indicate that it's something we're thinking about and are concerned about and would like to do an even better job from a diversification standpoint in the future. But I don't think there are any magic beans here. I think this is something where, you know, we just have to keep trying to get the word out and making it clear that we'd love to have other participation. It's also not even something that, so yeah, it's just a related point. It's something that would be, you know, we all want this goal to get the rest of SPI more involved in SPI. At the same time, it's not like we're paying a huge manpower or effort price to have these other projects, even if they don't get as involved. The work is mostly the same and if we were to do something separate for Debian or from SPI, the work would still be the same. It's the work scales better than human attention does. We should try to fix the mismatch, but yeah. Other questions? When you are developing or have this idea of developing, letting develop financial software do you think that someone outside could use a profit? I mean, it's free software, it will be available. But I'm thinking of, say, independent consultants. Could this software be useful to those types of people or are non-profit organizations that different? They are. So the answer is yes and no. And the yes part is related to the fact that I don't believe that there will be any instance here of starting a new software project completely from scratch. The, if you actually go and read the proposal that Bradley and the other folks at the Software Freedom Conservancy put together, their first phase was to evaluate all the currently available free software for doing accounting stuff to pick the sort of closest best in class solution. And then in the second phase to work on enhancing that to incorporate the functionality that's needed that's not already present. So the yes part is, I think they're gonna be adding attention, extra developer hours and functionality to an existing free software solution. And that can only help that particular free software solution be more applicable to more people. The no part is that, yeah, there really are a few things that we have to do to manage the financial transaction processing for a large set of associated projects that are really, I think, quite different from the way this gets handled in other kinds of organizations. I personally have, through my career at HP, I had the opportunity to watch, thankfully from the outside, how a finance organization managed gazillions of dollars for a really, really large corporation. And there were some things that were sort of similar in that there were lots of different departments, there were different subdivisions of the company as they merged and acquired and divested various businesses. There were all sorts of complexities, but none of the things they did had exactly the same workflow or exactly the same transparency requirements that we have. We would really, in the limit, like to be able to ensure that whoever is the sort of fiscally responsible representative for each of the projects could just go look at their transactions and data directly, securely, online without seeing all the data for all the other projects other than the kind of summary things we show. We'd like for some kinds of transactions to be a little more automated than they have been in the past. The processes that we go through we're really fortunate to have volunteers within SPI. Josh Berkus comes to mind as recently volunteering to handle a bunch of the paperwork associated with managing the Google summer of code, cash flow, in and out of our associated projects. I would love to think that over time we'll be able to transition some of those either to better oiled processes using some of the new software we hope comes out of this activity or perhaps, as has been proposed a couple of times recently by taking advantage of existing services that are out there, cloud-oriented web service providing companies that can do certain kinds of reimbursement or other transaction processing for us. That, of course, always leads us down a discussion about are they using free software or not? Is it okay to use a commercial service that's not using free? And those are all discussions that will continue to have every time anything ever gets proposed. But in all honesty, in some of these things what's important to me is that we're providing the best service we can to the organizations that we're trying to support and to every extent possible doing that in a way that's compatible with our mission and vision and objectives. But I also don't wanna be pedantic about if there's a way that we could save a lot of human effort and do a better job for our projects. Happens to involve using a cloud service provider or something, we'll investigate that and make the right decision. So, only two things to add to that great answer. One of them is that the main reuse case outside of like SPI and the Conservancy for these particular additions, as he's right, it'll make the software better for everybody in the community. But the main use case for these new accounting additions for nonprofits, those are other nonprofits outside of the free software world, like charities and other fiscal sponsors that have different programs or similar things to keep track of if there's nonprofits that sponsor artists, for example, et cetera. And hopefully some of these projects will not want to be paying the huge ransom fees to the really expensive solutions or will not have been able to do that and won't have a good solution yet. And once this actually gains traction, if it does, hopefully then we and the Conservancy and the individual donors won't have to keep providing 100% of funding. Hopefully the funding base can become more diverse and the user base can become more diverse which is great for everyone. And the only unrelated point is he mentioned Josh Berkuth as helping out. It's worth noting that Josh is not on the board, he used to be, but he's not on the board and he's assistant treasurer, he was a treasurer, but right now he has no official status beyond helping out Michael. He's a contributing member. Right, he has official status as a contributing member so do many of you if you want it. So my point with mentioning that is that you don't have to be on the board to contribute if you were to run for election like Weggers did and didn't get elected. There's still lots of ways to help out or if you want to be more selective about which tasks you handle, et cetera. Yeah, exactly. Other questions? Lucas, you have a question? So I was thinking about the SPI 5% you take on donations for general reserves. Are you planning to increase that because of the bookkeeping firm? No. Are you planning to decrease that? Possibly decrease. We've not actually had a recent discussion about that so that everyone understands what we're talking about. The sort of standard deal that SPI has for associated projects is that we take 5% of the donations that come into each project and put those in the SPI general reserves to use for covering our expenses of operation. That's actually within the context of organizations like us, it's one of the lowest if not the lowest fees I'm aware of. And as I mentioned earlier, we haven't been spending a lot of that money and so that number's been growing. There are different schools of thought about this. There's a belief that any organization like SPI needs to maintain a general reserve large enough to handle one to two years worth of activity should all of a sudden something happen economically that causes the income stream to dry up. On the other hand, the kinds of things that you could think of as possible sort of horrible situations that we might need a lot of money to go deal with would all require so much more money than what we have in our general reserves that we really have mostly focused on sort of thinking about the contingencies associated with the commitments to things like bookkeeping. In other words, I'm more worried about making sure we have six to eight K a year to pay for bookkeeping than I am about having enough money to mount a legal defense fund or something like that. So having said all of that, this is the first time we've ever made a grant out of the general fund that I'm aware of and I've been involved in SPI for a pretty long time. I think that there's gonna be a question in the future about whether being in a position to do something like this once in a while is a good idea or whether this particular grant was for something that's so specifically demonstrably useful to SPI itself that it was a good thing to do and that we should not really generally be in the business of making grants to people. But I think we've certainly demonstrated that we're growing the general reserves faster than we need to. And so I would definitely not expect that percentage to go up. And if anything, I'd like to see it go down a little bit just because I'd like to be more efficient on behalf of our associated projects. But all the projects we've talked to so far when they've been trying to decide whether to associate with SPI, I've never had anybody tell me that 5% was too much. In fact, everybody's always said that's a pretty good deal compared to the other options that we have available to us. So if you ever feel any pressure in your role as DPL or if anybody else in one of our associated projects has a concern about that, we'd be happy to have input. But right now, I would say no change in the near term and if it changed at all in the longer term, it would probably be to go down. But we'll just have to see if we dream up other good things we ought to do that cost money our thinking might change. Have another question? Yes, will the bookkeeping company also use the software and will the fees go down then? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. Hold on. Will the bookkeeping company also use the accounting software and will the fees for them go down when they use it? That's a really good question. I don't expect that their fees would go down if they switched it. The question was, is the bookkeeping company likely to switch over to use the software that we're gonna pay to develop? That software is really more for our internal use than something that's important for our bookkeeper to be using, though it would be nice if our bookkeeper were using the same software. I don't know whether we can get them to switch over. This is all a little bit speculative because of course what we have right now is a project that we're trying to help fund that will hopefully deliver a useful result sometime in the future. And so until we actually see the results of that, it's hard to even have that conversation with the bookkeeper. I will tell you that the bookkeeper we have chosen is currently not using free software and that's annoying but it falls in the category we need a service, they have the ability to provide a service and so we've selected them to provide that service to us. We certainly intend to have that conversation with them when we get through this. I was assuming the Conservancy's project becomes fully funded. By the way, the grant we made is not enough to help them reach their final funding objective but they're getting close. They've received quite a few contributions from various other places and the last time I looked they were now, something like 80 or 85% of their funding targets. I think their funding objective total was 70 or 75,000 and we got them from maybe the 50,000 something to the 60,000 something so it helped a lot. They can use more help. Right, so anyway we hope that that project becomes fully funded. Obviously if it doesn't become fully funded and they decide not to proceed then the money we've just granted them comes back to SPI that's not a problem. In fact I suspect we won't actually give them the money until they find out if they're fully funded but I haven't personally worried about the logistics on that too much. But to sort of bottom line your question, I don't expect that talking a bookkeeper into changing their software tools would actually cause them to charge us less because we would be driving them to have to learn something new, to do something different than what they do normally for all of their other clients. So unless they got so excited that they said oh yes this would make our lives so much simpler for everybody we do work for I would expect if anything forcing them to use a tool that we selected would cost us more and not less even if it's free software. If they do use a lot of non-profits as a client if they do have a lot of non-profit clients and if a lot of non-profits gain traction with this and it becomes the default small to medium non-profit solution it's possible that it could become an easy sell eventually but that's an optimistic outcome and the thing doesn't exist yet so yeah. Okay well I wanna thank you all very much for your time and your attention and the questions this afternoon I understand we're essentially completely out of time at this point so I'll thank you all for your attention and let you know that I'll be back to run another boff here in another hour and a half or so. Thank you Jimmy, thank you for being here. Thank you. Thank you.