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 2019 to 2020.
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.
- 18.04 was our first Long Term Schedule release
Goals
As we close off our fiscal year for 2020 (Apr 2019 – Mar 31, 2020), 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.
- Stretch Goal – ensure we have reserves to meet five years of costs (2019 – 2023).
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.
- Two IRCCloud monthly subscriptions have been purchased since August
Purchases
- 4K resolution development laptop
- GoDaddy Domain costs
Patreon
For 2019-2020 we did have a handful of Patreon donors. Please do consider 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 2017-2020 hosting and infrastructure fees and we hope to continue our partnership through the next fiscal year as well.
https://www.digitalocean.com
Discourse
Our community support is via a hosted 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
We have forged a strong partnership with UpCloud https://upcloud.com who provide Cloud hosting for developers, UpCloud are a Platinum client hardware partner for the Ubuntu Budgie team
Future Goals
Last year we 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. Through your contributions we have purchase one 4k laptop which has proved invaluable to resolve 4K issues with budgie-desktop and various budgie-applet developments.
We’ll be looking closely this year towards multimonitor development.
Contributions
- This year our community has contributed £3258.
- We have a nominal £4701 in the bank, with set-aside costs for 2020 to 2024 + reserves.
Our confidence level for our financial viability is as close to 100% as you can get.
As a comparison:
- 2016-2017, our community contributed £248.90 with no set-aside costs and no reserves
- 2017-2018, our community contributed £2460 with set-aside costs for 2018 to 2022 + reserves
- 2018-2019, our community contributed £2919 with set-aside costs for 2019 to 2023 + 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 10x the current contribution rate to achieve that.
Canonical Support
Although we are 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)