Donations for the foundation

Organisation
15

There are other ways to contribute than adding new feature.

So we will have no more any quality check. It is just plain advertising. We know how such rule leads.

16

Sorry but I did not understand your last comments.

Which quality check?

Yes, having a page listing service providers is advertising.

I do not know what do you want to say with this sentence. Could you please elaborate? I imagine you mean advertising leads to something but is not clear to what it leads.

17

The quality that the provider has shown some knowledge of Tryton.

I said “plain advertising”.
For now the provider page is just a way the project gives back gratitude to contributors.
Your proposal is just about selling Tryton’s website space for advertising to anyone.

I leads to attract a bunch of companies interested only by monetizing for themself the project without contributing anything (or only a small fees).
We should not care about such bad players because they will never make Tryton sustainable but just gnaw it to the bone.

18

I think part of the problem is even asking for contribution in order to get the company listed in the services section.

Sharoon Thomas mentioned a long time ago that the only requirement for a company to be listed should be that they asked for it. And I tend to agree with that. I would only add that we should require the company should link to the Tryton website.

Any trial of going further than that will easily be unfair or go towards a conflict of interest situation.

I think it is easier to just add a text at the beginning of the service providers page saying that the companies listed are there just because they claim they offer Tryton services and that the tryton project or the foundation does not endorse them. They’re available for customers to freely choose among them and that we encourage potential customers to investigate in the forums, bugtracker and the rest of the tools of the project those who are more active.

That would:

  • Make it much easier to decide who can be listed there
  • Make it clearer than it is now who is listed and why
  • Benefit those who contribute the most
  • Encourage service providers to contribute

Those that desire it, could add the name of their company in their name in Discuss, bugtracker and the rest of the tools to have better visibility.

1 Like
19

And how will you treat companies that we really do not want for many reasons like they are scamming or they redirect contact to concurrent solutions etc.

It really depends on the goal. I’m pretty sure the goal here is to have as much as possible to show a big number. But I tent to think that Tryton community is not about numbers but quality. And this should reflect in every aspect.

There are ways to deal with conflict of interest. And the by-laws of the Foundation has rules for that.

For sure it will be good to have a text that says that it is not an endorsement.

But this is a service that we currently offer. I think it is complicated for newcomers to correctly evaluate the expertise of other on something new to them.

I would say that it is really not difficult.

The rules are clear: Tryton - Become a Service Provider

Being active does not always mean having expertise. Also this could push to wrong behavior to increase the “activity”.

The current rules already do that prior to become a provider.
And if we did not put recently a new constraint on providing success stories, we will still have half of them.

I think it will damage the community if the tools become propaganda or advertising for companies.

1 Like
20

To anyone how wants to sell tryton services (otherwise they won’t be interested) and give something in exchange (money or contribution).

For me having more engaged services providers will ensure having more contributions.

I do not think anyone not interested in giving back to the project will be interested on beeing a service provider because there are other projects that ease the benefit for the service provider. For example selling user licenses and getting a commission of it.

I do not agree rhis is checked with requiring a success story and conttibution. The only way to have a check on the service provider quality is to have certification exams that ensure they knowledge about Tryton.

21

I have to add that this conflict of interest exists. When the new website was created and service providers were asked to provide success stories we communicated with the foundation that we principally don’t do so for privacy reasons. We are known by our customers to strictly adhere to this principle and we will not concede on this matter. We also know that MBSolutions was removed from the service page because there obviously was no way to deal with this conflict.

From an outside perspective those rules are handled at least intransparently. Let’s take a look:

  • Almost half of the success stories are disabled. This is probably due to violation of rules

Keep up to date
You must:

  • keep your company information and existing success stories up to date,
  • submit new success stories.
  • Looking at service providers there seem to be listed some that never did submit a success story. This is probably in violation of at least rules

Submit Success Stories

To stay listed, you must provide at least one success story within 6 months.

Just to summarize: there seems to be currently a quite substantial mismatch between published rules and reality.

The current handling of the rules is at least intransparent apart from the fact that they are for sure inflexible, unfair and discouraging in our case.

22

This is because we changed the success story format and we requested the service providers to rewrite them but they did not do.

This is the case, so probably we need to take and action to make this fair for everyone that are following the rules.

I think there is always something to lear from discouraging comments like this one.
May I ask you which kind of rules will be fair and encouraging for your case?
Do you think giving some money to the foundation will be something fair to compensate the fact that you can not share success stories?

23

This is absolutely not a conflict of interest. There are rules, you do not apply then do not complaint.

You are completely fantasizing. They are disabled because we are waiting for a rewrite using the proper template.

Again you make accusation without any knowledge.

Yes we are lacking resources to follow everything. But we welcome your help any time.

How could you know? You did not want to participate so you are out of the loop.

24

So it seems that it is correct to assume that those success stories do not follow the rule

keep your existing success stories up to date,

Thanks, very much appreciated.

I am quite inline with the post of Albert. It should be an easy procedure to be listed on the service page (JFTR like it was before). Abuse like redirecting to unrelated sites etc. can easily be prevented. It should not be restricted to some sort of forced contribution or giving money. Motivation is never produced by restrictions, but by a positive and welcoming attitude. If you feel proud of being part of a project this will be the best motivation at all. You gave some notions of contributions already. They will grow as soon as you allow people to get a respected and valued part of the project. Finally it is a question about being inclusive vs. exclusive.

25

I see that the dolibar project follows a more inclusive policy but they destinguish by prefered partners (which follow the rules) and non prefered partners where there is no requirement.

Does it sound like a reasonable solution to be more inclusive (while keeping the quality)?

26

No we do not care to include people that do not follow the rules.

27

To stop the discussion about the Foundation selling anything. The Foundation is not a commercial entity and so it can not sale anything. The only ways that it can get money is by donation or if it adds a fees to the supporters.

28

But you do care to include people that do not even have a webpage to present their services. I can not see that this is in line with ‘the rules’.

29

https://bugs.tryton.org/issue10035
Maybe removing the obviously wrong entries before ‘rewriting to new structure’?
The more I think about it the more I like the approach from @albert

30

Well the proposal was to have more inclusive rules.

I see no issue to have a fee based supported type for service providers.

31

You can not invent stuffs that are not in the statutes.

32

If there is only two ways to get money:

  • donation
  • supporter fees

Then those companies should be requested to become supporters with an annual fee. Then we should tell them that to advertize on the foundation page they should become supporters.

Some issues I have with that:

  • What about other supporters? Should they also pay? And what about people in less fortunate countries?
  • I don’t like “pay to win” games, if they want to benefit from an exposition (and that’s why they are asking to be listed) then they should earn it
33

Are there many companies interested in a listing whose quality is questionable?

As everybody knows each other: MBSolution has knowledge in Tryton, they are trusted from my side :slight_smile:

A small hint - on the donation page nobody is listed - this list should be up to date to say thanks to donators.

About the success stories: I think (while writing) we should search for a way to publish kind of ‘good news’ about the project. A nantic event, a use case of GNU Health in the world, a new module on pypi, a finished project and also a single installation like the one from @herrdeh is a good news for Tryton - and all are success stories by its own. Possibly we should think about a simple way to publish news about projects without the burden of formality.

On the subject of service providers: This should never be dependent on a contribution. Someone who implements projects on behalf of a client is by definition a service provider. If one wanted to check it, the Foundation would have to obtain confirmation from the client. And we have the Board of the Foundation, which can decide in case of doubt.

2 Likes
34

Donation and highlighted donators are good for that. A donation is not tied to anything but money. And if someone donates a lot, they also get a big mention - but nothing more.

Support is a service in itself, why should you pay for it? I prepared the stand at the Linux Days Chemnitz. I do that because I want to support the project. I would like it to be mentioned, but even if not, I don’t care. I hope that Tryton will become better known in our region and that I may also benefit commercially from it. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is a form of support. Payment is already done in this case :slight_smile:

3 Likes