Like last month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In September 2014, 3 contributors have been paid for 11h each. Here are their individual reports:

• Holger Levsen
• Raphaël Hertzog
• Thorsten Alteholz

Evolution of the situation

Compared to last month, we have gained 5 new sponsors, that’s great. We’re now at almost 25% of a full-time position. But we’re not done yet. We believe that we would need at least twice as many sponsored hours to do a reasonable work with at least the most used packages, and possibly four times as much to be able to cover the full archive.

We’re now at 39 packages that need an update in Squeeze (+9 compared to last month), and the contributors paid by Freexian did handle 11 during last month (this gives an approximate rate of 3 hours per update, CVE triage included).

Open questions

Dear readers, what can we do to convince more companies to join the effort?

The list of sponsors contains almost exclusively companies from Europe. It’s true that Freexian’s offer is in Euro but the economy is world-wide and it’s common to have international invoices. When Ivan Kohler asked if having an offer in dollar would help convince other companies, we got zero feedback.

What are the main obstacles that you face when you try to convince your managers to get the company to contribute?

By the way, we prefer that companies take small sponsorship commitments that they can afford over multiple years over granting lots of money now and then not being able to afford it for another year.

Thanks to our sponsors

Let me thank our main sponsors:

• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet
• Silver sponsors:
• AD&D – David Ayers – IntarS Austria
• Blablacar
• Domeneshop AS
• Evolix
• Trollweb Solutions
• Université Lille 3
• Bronze sponsors:
• Freeside Internet Service
• Intevation GmbH
• Linuxhotel GmbH
• MyTux
• Nantes Métropole
• Offensive Security
• Seznam.cz, a.s.

When we setup Freexian’s offer to bring together funding from multiple companies in order to sponsor the work of multiple developers on Debian LTS, one of the rules that I imposed is that all paid contributors must provide a public monthly report of their paid work.

While the LTS project officially started in June, the first month where contributors were actually paid has been July. Freexian sponsored Thorsten Alteholz and Holger Levsen for 10.5 hours each in July and for 16.5 hours each in August. Here are their reports:

• Thorsten Alteholz: July / August
• Holger Levsen: July / August

It’s worth noting that Freexian sponsored Holger’s work to fix the security tracker to support squeeze-lts. It’s my belief that using the money of our sponsors to make it easier for everybody to contribute to Debian LTS is money well spent.

As evidenced by the progress bar on Freexian’s offer page, we have not yet reached our minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position. And it shows in the results, the dla-needed.txt still shows around 30 open issues. This is slightly better than the state two months ago but we can improve a lot on the average time to push out a security update…

To have an idea of the relative importance of the contributions of the paid developers, I counted the number of uploads made by Thorsten and Holger since July: of 40 updates, they took care of 19 of them, so about the half.

I also looked at the other contributors: Raphaël Geissert stands out with 9 updates (I believe that he is contracted by Électricité de France for doing this) and most of the other contributors look like regular Debian maintainers taking care of their own packages (Paul Gevers with cacti, Christoph Berg with postgresql, Peter Palfrader with tor, Didier Raboud with cups, Kurt Roeckx with openssl, Balint Reczey with wireshark) except Matt Palmer and Luciano Bello who (likely) are benevolent members of the LTS team.

There are multiple things to learn here:

1. Paid contributors already handle almost 70% of the updates. Counting only on volunteers would not have worked.
2. Quite a few companies that promised help (and got mentioned in the press release) have not delivered the promised help yet (neither through Freexian nor directly).

Last but not least, this project wouldn’t exist without the support of multiple companies and organizations. Many thanks to them:

• Gold sponsors:
  • The Positive Internet
• Silver sponsors:
  • AD&D – David Ayers – IntarS Austria
  • Blablacar
  • Domeneshop AS
  • Evolix
  • Université Lille 3
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Freeside Internet Service
  • MyTux
  • Offensive Security
  • Seznam.cz, a.s.

Hopefully this list will expand over time! Any help to reach out to new companies and organizations is more than welcome.