Luanti Non-Profit: We've Joined Open Collective Europe

[rubenwardy]

https://blog.luanti.org/2025/11/05/non-profit/

[ROllerozxa]

Luanti is all grown up now... =)

[davidruffner]

Congratulations! It sounds like a smart move for the project.

In the post you mentioned you're in the process of creating governance policies. I have some experience with governance in charities and for-profit organizations (although not yet in an open source project). Currently I'm interested in sociocracy, which can strike a good balance between effectiveness and equivalence. I am part of a peer support group associated with the Sociocracy For All organization and could ask them for tips. I would also be up for helping if it made sense.

[Wuzzy]

0) I like the idea of Luanti finances stabilizing, but I'm sceptical about the "how"
1) I didn't realize that FOSDEM is so expensive. 95% of yearly Luanti expenses???? o_O
2) OpenCollective is free software. Good. So maybe me (and others) being SUPER annoying about free software are finally getting through. I like this trend. Luanti ditching GitHub, Discord and -NC when? :-)
3) Will Luanti members be able to take money from the donations pool or it is exclusively for paying expenses? If it's the former, who decides who is "worthy" of donation money?
4) 8% to 10% fees just for moving other people's money around. Ooofffff. Not even PayPal is that greedy. So for every donation, you have to already calculate in that 8% to 10% will be lost. This perverts the idea of donations IMHO. Fees should be 0%, anything else is BS. "But how will OpenCollective finance itself then?" By asking for donations like every other project on this platform, obviously. Platform capitalism must die.
5) I am concerned that donation money is dedicated to "APIs and subscriptions". What kind of APIs? SaaS bullshit? GitHub SuperUltraPremium? Or something else?
6) Some donation money is dedicated to "software". Which software? Do you pledge that donation money will never be abused to pay for proprietary software or open core / source-available scams?
7) I am aware that other options are likely less than ideal as well. It may very well be this might sadly be the least bad option available. It still sucks tho.
8) In an ideal world, we could donate to free software without a) having to go through any middlemen b) having to run proprietary software c) burning the planet
9) Why are the only official team members rubenwardy and celeron55?

[Linuxdirk]

What will the €3,000 for FOSDEM be used for? Last time I checked, there were no fees. If “merchandise, promotional materials, travel, and accommodations” sum up to a total of 3-4 months of rent in Germany, then something seems to be fundamentally wrong here.

[celeron55]

I'll answer some of Wuzzy's questions:

3) OpenCollective will refuse to give money out from the account to anything other than expenses. To pay someone, that someone will have to make a freelancing agreement beforehand and produce an invoice.

9) AFAIK only registered accounts can show up there and only those who donate and those who will have costs-to-be-reimbursed need to register. It's not a freeform member list.

*) If you're offering to do this all cheaper and still be trusted, you should speak up of course. But think this is a good deal. Accounting is expensive.

[rubenwardy]

I have removed the example future expenditure list from the page as it's just an example and hasn't been properly reviewed yet. It's not a budget or proposal. For reference:

Code: Select all

(Note: The following is a draft and may change)

    Keeping Luanti running
        Hosting costs for servers 
        APIs and subscriptions
    Promoting Luanti and bringing the community together 
        Merchandise and promotional materials 
        Conferences, meetups, and events
            This may include travel, accommodation, hiring spaces, and food
    Supporting development
        Paying contributors for work 
            Bounties
            Freelancers
            Employing developers and designers to work on Luanti
        Licenses, software, hardware, and other development expenses
    Risk reduction
        Legal fees, training, consultation
    Charitable donations 
        We may donate to other non-profits working in open source and tech freedom/rights

1) I didn't realize that FOSDEM is so expensive. 95% of yearly Luanti expenses???? o_O

What will the €3,000 for FOSDEM be used for? Last time I checked, there were no fees. If “merchandise, promotional materials, travel, and accommodations” sum up to a total of 3-4 months of rent in Germany, then something seems to be fundamentally wrong here.

The costs for FOSDEM 25 were:

• Travel: 640 € (for 4) *
• Accommodation: 725 € (for 4, Friday-Monday)
• Public transport: 100 € (for 4) *
• Meals: 440 € (for 4)
• Stickers (5K Luanti, 300 Lua): 598 €
• Luanti flyers (EN, FR, DE, ES, IT): 150 €
• Luanti edu leaflet (EN, FR): 150 €
• Total: 2800 €

* - I do not have figures for what Italian Linux Society (ILS) paid for, so assuming 150 € for travel and 25 € for public transport for Zughy

We will not have to buy any stickers this year, which saves us 600 €

IRI/ILS paid for meals but I paid for my own. I don't know whether Luanti would cover all meals. On Saturday night, we had pizza with 4 core devs and a bunch of people which led to some productive conversations, I think it would be cool if Luanti could pay for gatherings like that

Edit: for reference, postmarketOS has 3400 € for FOSDEM including fungible materials in their budget: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2025/03/1 ... al-update/

3) Will Luanti members be able to take money from the donations pool or it is exclusively for paying expenses? If it's the former, who decides who is "worthy" of donation money?

It's a non-profit, we can't just take money from the pool.

The closest thing we can do is pay freelancers for work, some projects like postmarketOS do this a lot to pay for feature development. We'd love to be able to pay for a full-time developer one day, but we don't have any concrete plans.

Financial decisions will be made by whatever governing body we set up, in accordance to an annual budget

4) 8% to 10% fees just for moving other people's money around. Ooofffff. Not even PayPal is that greedy. So for every donation, you have to already calculate in that 8% to 10% will be lost. This perverts the idea of donations IMHO. Fees should be 0%, anything else is BS. "But how will OpenCollective finance itself then?" By asking for donations like every other project on this platform, obviously. Platform capitalism must die.

The 8-10% goes to Open Collective Europe, the non-profit body, not the Open Collective platform. When donating, you have the option of leaving a tip for the Open Collective platform.

PayPal does not provide us with a non-profit body, tax filing, accounting, equivalency determination, or support for applying to grants. It's not just for moving money. The non-profit body/fiscal host part is very important - it means that it's not an individual (ie: for-profit) holding the money. Any money that is donated to someone personally would be subject to income tax (for me, 40%) if not spent in a tax year. If the individual dies, Luanti would lose all the money

Setting up and maintaining our own non-profit organisation would be more expensive at our scale.

5) I am concerned that donation money is dedicated to "APIs and subscriptions". What kind of APIs? SaaS bullshit? GitHub SuperUltraPremium? Or something else?

We do not currently pay for APIs or subscriptions. An example for the future would be an email subscription to move away from Yandex.

6) Some donation money is dedicated to "software". Which software? Do you pledge that donation money will never be abused to pay for proprietary software or open core / source-available scams?

We do not pay for any software. I don't think we can justify paying for proprietary software.

As an example of what I meant by licenses - this would include the Steam developer fee (likely) and Apple developer fees (unlikely).

9) Why are the only official team members rubenwardy and celeron55?

OCE requires specifying two administrators to begin with. We now need to work out what we're doing.

We can also add "Core contributors" to the collective, they don't have any permissions but are listed as part of the team on the collective. We can do this for any developer or other staff member

It's very much early days. I would like to have a board of 3-6 people, produce a public annual budget, and have up-front transparency. I've been looking into how other projects do it, eg: GNOME, postmarketOS

[Blockhead]

It's a long road to becoming a non-profit. A lot of rules and structure. Still, hopefully that means benefit long term. Thanks for the transparency in your responses. Ultimately it should in fact be more transparent than the existing mess of who-pays-for-what.