Million Dollar Baby…

…or at least almost € 15 000 ($ 20 174) since September 18th of 2010!
From this huge donations, it remains € 9 676.31 after having bought Tee-Shirts, hardware for build nodes, flyers for events, stickers, trips to Marseille or Brussel.

Since the begining of the Mageia adventure, 243 people gave money to Mageia.Org, helping us to buy hardware, domain names, goodies, …
It makes an average donation of € 62 ($ 83) per donor! Thank you to all the money donors or ressources partners (ielo, gandi, online) but also to all other people offering in the way they want: time (packagers, triage, qa, artwork, marketing, bug report, dev…) or just by spreading Mageia arround them by buying TS or talking on forums, events…

For now, you can follow how are used the funds received by reading the report section of our website. Here is a small summup of the 2011 financial report:

Mageia.Org - way of donations

Mageia.Org donations: 2010 versus 2011

We clearly see a significant drop in donations (which remain high). Do you have comments explaining the drop in donations or a brake to them? I think it’s just a lack of spending your donations or asking you for dedicated donations. As explained below, there are big expenses planned soon.

Our next big expense (around € 7 000) will be for our annual upgrade and maintenance of our infrastructure with a trip to Marseille (to ielo data-center) to rack:

• fiona, our backup server (~ € 2 000 for fiona + HDD (only if we have to buy a server. Perhaps we will have a gift and so will just have to buy HDD)) ;
• a ARM build system for our ARM port made by rtp (~ € 500 for HDD, power supply, SoC));
• updating HDD of our build nodes (~ € 1 200) ;
• adding a new server for offering packagers and QA a way to build package for test or to run VMs (~ € 2 800).
• + ~ € 500 for train, car and hotel for 2 or 3 people.

This is a non-exhaustive list! So we can spend a few more if we encounter a few issues. I will keep you in touch of expenses for this need in an other blog post.
If you want to give money or hardware for this upgrade of our build system, you can add a comment when making a donation, comment on this blog post, send a mail to the sysadmin ML or contact me (careful to fix the mail address…).

Moreover, before the end of November:

• the financial report page will be updated to offer you a better way to give us money. Indeed, you will be able to see a graduated scale with colors (red, orange, green) to have a quick status of our financial health. As a lot of people would rather give money for a decicated cause, you will also soon be able to see our forecast with a easy way to choose the line you would like to donate (all the need or just a part of it) for ;
• the donate page will be updated too to offer you a faster “donate button” and a way to make monthly transfer ;
• a goodies shop will be started to let you buy stuff to spread Mageia and support Mageia.Org.

I will write a new blog post before the end of November to tell you more about these new features. Meanwhile, thank you all for your donations coming to support us and help us move forward together and still faster!