SPI Has Published Their 2015 Annual Report With A Look At Debian, Arch Financials

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 16 July 2015 at 12:29 PM EDT. 1 Comment
FREE SOFTWARE
Software in the Public Interest (SPI), the organization that represents the finances for Arch Linux, Debian, FreeDesktop.org, and other countless other free software projects, has published their annual report that offers a glimpse into the financials of these open projects.

SPI generated a lot of attention earlier this year when the X.Org Foundation wanted to dissolve itself into the SPI but that merger ultimately failed for lack of meeting the number of necessary votes. There was also controversy a few months back over an SPI representative arguing with Elementary OS.

Anyhow, the SPI 2015 Annual Report was published last week and it offers a glimpse into the financial performance for the projects they represent. Here's a look at the ordinary income for the associated projects over the past year (ending 30 June):

0 A.D.                           2,041.42
aptosid                             40.02
Arch Linux                       6,103.91
Chakra                              52.00
DebConf 14                      39,541.62
DebConf 15                      73,648.46
Debian                          66,449.10
FFmpeg                          11,100.00
FFmpeg (OPW)                       201.00
The FreedomBox Foundation           35.30
freedesktop.org                    666.00
Gallery                             55.00
GNU TeXmacs                         65.00
haskell.org                      9,281.00
The HeliOS Project                 196.12
Jenkins                         11,710.00
LibreOffice                     50,512.10
MinGW                            2,476.00
Open Bioinformatics Foundation  11,791.99
Open Voting Foundation               2.00
OpenWrt                            745.02
PostgreSQL                      33,079.93
Privoxy                            107.00
SPI General                     46,834.11
SPI 5%                           3,532.76
Swathanthra Malayalam Computing  5,416.30
TideSDK                            353.00
Yafaray                          1,155.00

The Debian-related activities pulled in the most money while Arch Linux took in over 6k USD, FFmpeg a little more than 11k, PostgreSQL at 33k+, and LibreOffice at more than 50k. In total the ordinary income amounted to 377k USD over the past year. SPI takes their cut of 5% of managed money, on top of processing fees.

In terms of the state of the organization, SPI President, Bdale Garbee, wrote, "While the organization remains healthy, it has become clear that maintaining the current level of service to our existing projects is reaching the limits of our ability with an all-volunteer staff. For that reason, the board and I are currently investigating alternative approaches to paying for part-time assistance with routine activities. It seems likely that some action will result in the next year, which I hope will enable SPI to continue to grow and provide superior services to our associated projects well into the future."

Those wanting to learn more about SPI's balance sheet for the past year and the expenses of the various projects, the report in full is available in PDF form.
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