Last year the main Ubuntu download page was changed to include a form for users to make a donation to one or more parts of Ubuntu, including to the community itself. Those donations made for “Community projects” were made available to members of our community who would use them to benefit the Ubuntu project.
Every dollar given out is an investment in Ubuntu and the community that built it. This includes sponsoring community events, sending community representatives to those events with booth supplies and giveaway items, purchasing hardware to make improve development and testing, and more.
But these expenses don’t cover the time, energy, and talent that went along with them, without which the money itself would have been wasted. Those contributions, made by the recipients of these funds, can’t be adequately documented in a financial report, so thank you to everybody who received funding for their significant and sustained contributions to Ubuntu.
As part of our commitment to openness and transparency we said that we would publish a report highlighting both the amount of donations made to this category, and how and where that money was being used. Linked below is the first of those reports.
Originally posted here by Michael Hall on May 29, 2014