Expenses & Donations

Since late 2018, I have worked full-time on darktable, including solving bugs in bed at 2 am and answering people on different time zones at ungodly hours, 6 to 7 days a week. The Covid lockdowns were an excuse to cram work past the safety threshold since there was not much else to do. But this was of course not sustainable long-term and computer job well-done should incur a decreasing amount of work, not an increasing one.

The fact that the code is open doesn't mean the work is free. And by work, I mean — obviously – the programming part, but also the debugging (not necessarily of my own code), the theoretical research on algorithms and calculation methods, the extensive testing, the user support, the documentation writing and video production, but also the reviews & testing of other people's code. That's a lot of work, of which people will only see the shiniest bits in each new darktable's release.

Working on FLOSS is a job if you want to do it well. A job is skills meeting paid time to deliver a valuable good or service to a client. There is no shortcut, and amateurs developing for themselves on saturday evenings mostly deliver bugs, regressions and awful UX, as FLOSS history has shown times and times again.

Starting in August 2022, my work will be organized through Github issues (= tasks) and the time spent on each task will be logged through Harvest. This working time spent will be reported while closing issues and invoices will be symbolically billed to "the community" at the end of each month, at the rate of 25 €/h (twice the minimal net wage and 40% of the average engineer gross wage in my country). The history of invoices will be publicly available so people can see how much "free" software costs.

The monthly number of hours allocated to the project will be computed by dividing my Liberapay donations by 25 €. Since May 2022, it averaged 225 €/week, that is 980 €/month and thus 40 h of work paid each month, meaning an average of 156 h/month were left unpaid in 2022 (and more in 2020-2021). When the monthly threshold of paid hours will be reached, I may choose to keep allocating lost hours on it or to switch to other lucrative activities to handle the current 15% inflation in the Euro zone.

There are multiple end goals here :

1. the people who support me (thanks to them !) may want to know how their money is used, it is a legitimate request and this will provide some transparency in that regard,
2. the people who confuse open source/free (as in free speech) with costless need to understand how much expenses go into the things they don't pay, and they would probably not work under those terms themselves ; this will provide some much needed factual data to kill those beliefs and fantasies feeding unsustainable working conditions,
3. ambitions need to match available resources and if users are not ready to invest further in the development and maintenance of their tools, there is no reason to extend and over-commit to new features,
4. seeing how many hours go into maintenance vs. development of new stuff will hammer out this idea that "darktable is an healthy project because it gets a lot of activity". The ugly truth is a lot of that activity, over the past 2 years, has just been accumulating technical debt and sneaky bugs and part of that is because people engage into too complicated projects trying to do too many things at once, but don't have the time to write testing procedures. darktable is a terrible code base to maintain, and it's only getting worse.