Contributor Compensation Programme

The Contributor Compensation Plan was originally devised in PMCR0004, however the immutable nature of PMCRs it does not make it suitable as the sole source of documentation for this programme. As such, this exists as a living document form for information about the running programme.

Purpose

Not all work is suitable for project-based funding. Much of the work that needs to be done in postmarketOS consists of smaller, more menial maintenance tasks. Funding these as projects would require significant overhead and as such is not feasible. Thus, this programme exists as a means of funding miscellaneous work that moves postmarketOS forward yet isn’t significant enough to be its own project.

Eligibility

  • You must be either a Core Contributor (CC) or a Trusted Contributor (TC)

  • All work must be licenced under an OSI Approved Licence with an exemption for certain projects where the licencing situations has not yet been figured out, in practice this exists to allow contributions to the postmarketOS pmaports and the Alpine aports projects. If you are interested in being compensated for contributions to other projects that have an unclear licencing situation, this must be discussed with the rest of the team first.

  • If you are starting a new project, it must be bootstrapped on postmarketOS infrastructure. You must also choose a copyleft licence for the new project.

  • All commits you wish to be compensated for must contain a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), signed-off with your @postmarketos.org email address.

Guidelines

  • 16 hours per week is the minimum commitment.

  • 32 hours per week is the maximum commitment.

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

  • This programme operates on an honour-basis, with accountability provided through the public and transparent nature of free/open source work.

  • You will not be paid for hours that exceed your committed quarterly amount.

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

  • You’re not allowed to bill for work which is remunerated in any other, either by postmarketOS or other entities such as NLnet. Ensure that your committed hours take this into account.

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.

If you have found that you are eligible and want to take part in this plan, please open an issue in the operations repository to apply. Please note that new participants only can join on a quarterly basis due to how the programme is structured. So, suppose a given cycle starts on 1 November 2025 and you apply and get accepted on 3 November 2025, you wouldn’t be included until the next quarter which would be 1 February 2026. As a result of our current financial year starting 1 February, our quarters are skewed and start on 1 February, 1 May, 1 August, and 1 November in a given year.

Obligations

Once you have joined this programme, you must use our postmarketOS Solidtime instance to track your hours worked and submit your hours to Open Collective Europe, after which they go through the typical approval process. You need to handle taxes and other location-dependent requirements yourself. The deadline to do this is one week after the end of the month you wish to be compensated for.