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 2020 to 2021.
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
- 20.04 is our second Long Term Schedule release
Goals
As we close off our fiscal year for 2021 (Apr 2020 – Mar 31, 2021), 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 (2020 – 2024).
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
Purchases
- Tuxedo Pulse 15 development laptop
- Raspberry Pi 4 and related equipment
- GoDaddy Domain costs
Patreon
For 2020-2021 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
SerpAPI.com
SerpAPI has invested a substantial contribution in Ubuntu Budgie. We are very grateful for their generosity and their commitment to opensource projects such as our own. https://serpapi.com/
Future Goals
Through your contributions we have purchased development laptop which has proven invaluable to support development and support across all our supported platforms – 18.04, 19.04, 20.04, 20.10 and developing 21.04. We’ll be looking closely this year towards multimonitor development.
We have also purchased a Raspberry Pi4 with related equipment which as proven invaluable to help develop our first 21.04 Raspberry Pi Ubuntu Budgie image.
Contributions
- This year our community has contributed approx £5507 which is up from last year by almost approx £2250
- We have a nominal £8742 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
- 2019-2020, our community contributed £3258 with set-aside costs for 2020 to 2024 + 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)