Summary
As part of our commitment to be transparent with the community, the team is pleased to present a short statement of our financial position covering 2017 to 2018.
History
- Budgie Remix had launched in April 2016
- In Nov 2016 Ubuntu Budgie was granted the status as an official community flavour with Ubuntu/Canonical.
- 17.04 was our first release “official” release as a flavour.
Goals
As we close off our fiscal year for 2018 (Apr 2017 – Mar 31, 2018), the financial position of the project is very healthy. We have met several goals this year and including our stretch goal:
- LTS Fiscal Goal – ensure that the costs to support a three-year LTS were in place.
- Contribute on behalf of the Ubuntu Budgie community – a financial contribution for 2017 was donated to the Solus community since Solus provides much of the development behind the Budgie Desktop.
- Stretch Goal – ensure we have reserves to meet five years of costs (2018 – 2022).
Operating Costs
- Infrastructure costs relating to the website, test build servers, domain registrations
- Reserves are in place as a contingency to account for unexpected expenses.
Donations
Patreon
For 2017-2018 we did have a sizable number of Patreon donors – but due to Patreon changing their financial model in Dec 2017 we, unfortunately, lost many donors. Patreon has since rescinded this change, and our previous donors may want to reconsider becoming a Patreon since this gives Ubuntu Budgie a regular income.
PayPal
We have had many individuals who donate via Paypal, and we thank you all!
Sponsorship
Digital Ocean
We have had a significant vote of confidence by DigitalOcean paying for all of our 2017 hosting and infrastructure fees and have committed to continuing this through to 2018-2019 fiscal year as well. https://www.digitalocean.com
Discourse
As some of you may know, we recently moved our community over to a discourse forum which was generously provided through sponsorship as well. https://www.discourse.org/
Status.io
While this is yet to be implemented on our part, Status.io has provided a sponsorship that will help us keep our community up to date with system interruptions in our infrastructure. https://status.io
Partnerships
Briefly, we had begun to offer Ubuntu Budgie preinstalled on systems from Nimbusoft. Unfortunately, due to the founder deciding to move in an alternative strategic direction, that association had to end. We do thank Chris Harvey (owner of Nimbusoft) for the very sizeable donation he has given to Ubuntu Budgie. https://nimbusoft.com
Future Goals
We have set our sights this year to meet two very sizable cost goals; looking to fund equipment with HiDPI capability and with multiple HiDPI monitors. We recognise that more and more of our community use multi monitors and increasingly with HiDPI type resolutions. Unfortunately, we do not have such equipment to provide both development and support activities.
Contributions
- This year our community has contributed £2460.
- We have a nominal £953.86 in the bank, with set-aside costs for 2018 to 2022 + reserves.
Our confidence level for our financial viability is as close to 100% as you can get.
As a comparison for 2016-2017, our community contributed £248.90 with no set-aside costs and no reserves
With your help, we look forward to making more donations to developers and organisations who have helped Ubuntu Budgie.
The Team
All Ubuntu Budgie team members including myself are volunteers. At this point we the team do not benefit financially in anyway from your generosity. If we had one or more full-time developers, then the speed of development and improvement would be exponentially higher. For this to become fiscally possible, the project would need to grow to approx 20x the current contribution rate to achieve that.
Canonical Support
Although we are now an official flavour of the Ubuntu Family, we do not receive any financial help from Canonical. Canonical supports Ubuntu Budgie through their launchpad build systems and ISO distribution costs.
Thank You
All donors are displayed on our website unless you specifically request not to be presented.
Donations
If you would like to support Ubuntu Budgie , please feel free to donate to the project through either Paypal or Patreon.
Thank you to all who have chosen to join our community.
David (project lead)