On Friday 16. June 2017 16.28.41 Matthias Kirschner wrote:
I missed your blog entry before, so thanks for your summary!
That was just one part of it, though. Indeed, I had promised to discuss issues of Free Software funding on this list, but I have had other things to do.
[...]
Actually I would be very interested in the percentage of Apache developers who do their work on a paid basis. My impression always was that the percentage of paid developers is quite high in that area. Does anyone of you have any insights there? Else I would ask the author.
I looked at the ASF annual report for the 2015/2016 financial year...
https://s3.amazonaws.com/files-dist/AnnualReports/ASFAnnualReport- FY2015-2016FINAL.pdf
...and it looks as if more than half of the ASF's funding goes on "infrastructure" ($571050 out of $948339), presumably things like providing hardware, bandwidth, services, and so on (with "10 rotating volunteers and 5 paid staff").
I would imagine that quite a few people contributing to Apache projects work at companies like IBM who like to keep the ASF well-stocked with projects, some of which are perhaps not lucrative for those companies any more, at least in their original form as proprietary software. Whether this apparent generosity increases the infrastructure burden or not is perhaps a question for people who know the ASF a lot better than I do.
Paul