In the interest of transparency, the Wildfire Games team would like to report on the finances of the project as of 2013-09-04.
0 A.D. has funds in three places: (1) Funds earmarked for the project and held in trust by US-based non-profit organization Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (hereafter “SPI”); (2) A private account in the US, under the name of former project leader, Jason Bishop (Wijitmaker). This account is a legacy of the time before we became affiliated with SPI; (3) Flattr, a Sweden-based microdonation provider.
SPI Earmark for 0 A.D.
As of 2013-07-10, 0 A.D. has an earmark of USD 5743.51. The bulk of that (USD 4,140) comes from funds raised in two Pledgie fundraising drives in 2010-2012, which were only partially used (Links to fundraisers: #1, #2). The rest of the sum comes from other small donations, collected without any fundraiser.
On 2013-08-09, the 0 A.D. treasury committee and an SPI board member approved an agreement with contractor Jorma Rebane (RedFox) that will cost a total of USD 3,310, or approximately 80% of the Pledgie funds.
Under the agreement, Jorma is set to perform the following duties:
- To enhance the memory performance and allocation of the game, its GUI rendering and implementation, and add a new efficient and feature-rich text rendering module.
- To overview implementation of code architecture and design decisions, while also consulting other developers.
- To review patches submitted by other developers.
- To assist the programming team in efficient task management.
- To publicly report on his activities to the team and the fans no less than twice per week, with the intent of encouraging public interest in and engagement with the game, as well as inviting new contributions from the FOSS community.
You can follow up on Jorma’s contributions on the forums. Here is his activity status report for August 2013. So far he has made extremely large improvements to the game, that will be readily apparent in Alpha 15.
Other Accounts & Total
In our “legacy” US bank account, we have USD 130.05.
On Flattr, we have EUR 276.06 available, which are approximately USD 363.87.
In total, at the end of Jorma’s contract, and assuming no more revenue, we will have USD 2927.43. This sum would allow us to keep contracting out work at the current spending level for just 9 more weeks.
Concluding Remarks
A monthly report of funds held by SPI in trust for 0 A.D. is also available on the SPI website under “approved minutes of past meetings“.
The 0 A.D. project finances are managed by the Treasury Committee: Erik (“feneur”), Kieran (“k776″) and Aviv (“Jeru”). We welcome your comments on the forums.
Thanks to all our donors. Stay tuned for the release of 0 A.D. Alpha 14 and the announcement of our biggest fundraiser ever.