0004: Contributor Compensation Plan

Summary

This proposal establishes an hour-based payment plan to allow to sustainably compensate ongoing postmarketOS work by Core and Trusted Contributors. It’s funded by the previous quarter’s income and prioritizes fairness, transparency, and administrative simplicity. Contributors can choose to adhere to it, given they fulfill the minimum requirements and follow the process.

Motivation

This compensation plan addresses the sustainability challenges facing postmarketOS development. While project-specific grants support feature development, other work like essential maintenance, support, and administrative tasks remains difficult to fund through traditional channels. Currently, several contributors dedicate substantial time to these critical tasks - with some working half-time or even full-time hours - largely uncompensated, a model that cannot sustain long-term development.

The plan is designed with three core principles: fairness and equality among all contributors regardless of task type, transparency in how compensation is determined, and simplicity in process—ensuring it’s straightforward for participants to follow and requires minimal time commitment from the team to implement and maintain.

This plan fulfills our commitment to supporters who have donated specifically to compensate contributors, as stated on our Open Collective page. By formally tracking contribution hours, we establish metrics that strengthen future funding applications by demonstrating our current resource investment. This plan establishes a framework to distribute funds fairly and efficiently if the project’s income grows in the future.

Consequences

Compensation will only come from budget remaining after critical expenses are covered. Infrastructure and essential operations remain protected, but it may result in fewer funds being available to pay for project-based contributions in the future. See the Guidelines section below for more information about where the budget for this will come from.

Implementing this plan will require administrative investment as someone must manage the process detailed below. See the Administration section below for more information.

The plan may affect community dynamics by creating distinctions between compensated and non-compensated contributors. Additionally, the increased financial governance necessitates transparent processes to maintain trust across the community, which require more public update postings than we currently do (e.g. on OCE) to keep folks informed. See the Process section below for more information.

Implementation plan

Eligibility and Requirements

  • Core Contributors (CC) and Trusted Contributors (TC)

  • Development work must be contributed under an OSI Approved License. Extremely rare and specific exceptions might be made by the Core Contributors for situations where, due to pending legal work, FOSS projects have not yet clarified some licensing requirements, but are expected to establish an OSI Approved License in the future.

  • When new projects are started which are not part of an existing upstream effort, participants must bootstrap those projects under postmarketOS infrastructure. Participants must choose copyleft licenses for those greenfield projects. Further guidelines on licenses for associated projects may be established by the Core Contributors.

  • Participants must sign-off with the @postmarketos.org address any development work related to this programme, providing a “Developer Certificate of Origin”.

Guidelines

  • 16hr/week minimum commitment, to keep administrative overhead manageable

  • 32hr/week maximum commitment, to prevent budget overrun and promote a healthy work/life balance

  • Hours can vary week-to-week, but total quarterly hours should not exceed weekly commitment × weeks in quarter

  • This plan operates on an honor basis, with natural accountability through the public and transparent nature of project work

  • Participants will not be paid for hours that exceed their committed quarterly amount (weekly hours × weeks in quarter)

  • Any unused hours budget (from participants billing fewer hours than committed) will be returned to the general fund

  • Any contribution or task already being remunerated by any other payment scheme, either by postmarketOS or other entities, e.g: NLnet, is explicitly forbidden to qualify for payment under this scheme. Contributors doing payment requests must make sure to not include hours already remunerated in other ways.

Every contribution that qualifies to be part of the TC team is valuable and qualifies to receive compensation from this plan. However, this is designed from the premise that there will be a global equilibrium between tasks of different nature executed by the different members of the team, like technical work, design, or user support. For example, being a project with a strong technical focus, it would be unexpected for all paid contributors to be assigned to artwork or user support. If the wished equilibrium is not reached, or is disturbed in the future, the project may implement additional guidelines for specific task categories to maintain balance across contribution types.

Process

Yearly

Consider to allocate a fixed part of the budget to this work, named Contributor Compensation Plan. There may be no budget allocated if other tasks are considered higher priority.

Quarterly

  • Eligible participants identify themselves and # of hours per week they expect to bill.

  • Determine the budget for paying participants (see below).

  • Determine hourly rate, based on # of participants and # of hours they expect to work per week during the quarter. The hourly rate will be equal to the budgeted amount divided by total number of expected hours for all participants for the upcoming quarter. Every participant will be paid the same hourly rate regardless of their living location or personal circumstances. Everybody’s time is worth the same.

  • The hourly rate will be capped at a maximum of 1.5 times the minimum hourly wage in Germany. The cap is to prevent excessive compensation during periods of unusually high funding or low participation. The amount and location are chosen to have something indexed to the real economy and that roughly represents our donation base.

  • Publish the new budgeted amount and rate.

Determination of budget available for the quarter

The budget available will be based on yearly budget approved, execution of the yearly budget, and income from last quarter:

  • Using the yearly budget, as well as its execution, has the goal of avoiding this program from using funds allocated for other tasks.

  • Using the previous quarter’s income allows creating a one-quarter buffer that insulates participants from immediate funding fluctuations. For example, if donations for the current quarter drop to 0, there won’t be an effect until the next quarter, giving participants in this program some time to plan.

The formula for calculating the quarterly budget considers:

  • One fourth of the yearly budget for the Contributor Compensation Plan

  • The excess income year-to-date. If we make more money than we expected, then we can spend it in this plan.

  • The execution of the planned expenses. We want to avoid using money that is already spent. If we over-executed for a specific task, we subtract that amount to the budget.

In more mathematical form:

ccp = yearly budget for Contributor Compensation Plan / 4

in  = income year-to-date
bin = budgeted income year-to-date

ex$i  = expenses year-to-date for item i
bex$i = budgeted expenses year-to-date for item i
----

budget = MAX(ccp + (in - bin) - (SUM(MAX(ex$i - bex$i, 0) FOR i), 0)

Monthly

  • Participants submit (to OCE) hours for the previous month for payment. Deadline for payment requests will be set by the participants.

  • Amounts are reviewed/approved by the pmOS board through Open Collective’s standard expense approval process.

  • All approved payments will be publicly visible on Open Collective, providing transparency.

  • Participants are required to handle taxes and other location-based requirements themselves.

  • Participants will make reports available to the Administrator with information about monthly spent hours. Format and details will be agreed by the team.

Daily

  • Participants log hours spent working on eligible tasks, with the tool agreed by the team.

Administration

This compensation structure requires ongoing management to ensure smooth operation. This includes:

  • Calculating quarterly budgets and rates

  • Tracking participant commitments and remaining hour allocations

  • Reviewing submitted hours for adherence to guidelines

  • Coordinating with the board for payment approval

  • Making monthly and quarterly reports public to the community

Time spent performing these administrative tasks qualifies for compensation under this process.

The initial member in charge of this process will be @pabloyoyoista. But this position be changed at the discretion of the Core Contributors.