On my timesheet I have another 51,4 hours for the release (excluding 9 hours, to adjust packges in the Neos / Flowpack namespace ). Most time consuming were the adjustments for the PSR-7 change as they were often not straight-forward.
@robert can you give a rough number how much costs we have so far for the trademark topic? I would like to avoid 5 digit surprises 
Regarding your other question: I don’t see a problem regarding funds to shut down the CIC or start the e.V., as we have a continuous income with the funding platform. Both should be doable budget wise.
@kdambekalns and @daniellienert my current state of knowledge regarding release funding is:
we budget 4.000€ per release (this number was provided in this thread: Funded release work).
I can see from your actual hours that this budget does not cover your efforts for this major release. I see the following options:
- you agree to share the budget of 4.000€ between the two of you
- you request additional budget from the next minor release (“just” a shift in budgets)
- you request additional budget to cover more of your actual hours (if approved by the team -> possibly squeezed out this year, otherwise next year)
Up to you which way you want to take it 
(as a personal note: I have no strong emotions here. If you feel that your work would be undervalued with the 4k€ budget, I am totally fine if you ask for more compensation. imho there are no right/wrong solutions here. Both of you put in a lot of effort to make this release happen and imho it would be a shame if that left both of you unhappy.)
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4.000€ would mean that every release gets the same budget, but my last understanding was that a major release was way more effort and hence should get more budget.
So a major would come at an expense of
40 + 40/3 ~ 54hours and each minor at16 + 40/3 ~ 30hours.
With this rough approximation that would mean something along a split of 50:25:25 for major:minor:minor, so with a 12.000€ yearly budget, 6.000€ for the major release.
Would be okay for me, majors are most important releases probably with lots of thought and work needed to put into backward compatibility vs. breakiness decisions, more work to check all is working out, release documentation, etc.
And then there’s ofc always the option to put up a request for additional budget as Tobias stated. And I fully second his “personal note”!
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I also think that major releases need a bigger budget. I am not opinionated how exactly the formula works but the suggestion of @aberl sounds reasonable.
This will lead to not using the full budget in years without a major release but this is imho ok.
Hey everybody,
just wanted to express here as well that it’s totally fine for me if the release budget should to be higher, even if that would mean that the ES CR would get less than the initially proposed 15k this year.
I totally second what @tobias wrote beforehand
All the best,
Sebastian
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So far we have costs of roughly 3000€ for fees and lawyer. There is more, since some more things were paid, but we are well below 5000€, I am sure.
Then there a budget of 2400€ for the “Trademark Management / System”, of which about 250€ have been “worked off” so far, but since that’s a budget, it is planned in and will not be a surprise, I assume.
@tobias as a rough number, we have, so far, paid 8286,67 € (net) to lawyers and the EUIPO. I guess that it’ll be roughly 10.000 € by end of November, because there’s some further action happening now. I currently don’t plan to invoice my time I spend with the matter.
@kdambekalns I think you found some outdated table in our docs folder. There was at least one invoice not added to the list which we paid though.
Huh, well. I checked our time/expense tracking… Why is everything so fragmented in these times… sigh Sorry for the confusion.
thanks for the numbers @robert we should discuss at the sprint how we plan to reimburse that money. The sum almost makes up half of our budget for next year…
Ok, to move forward with this, here is a first poll, to get at least one of the confusion points out of the way.
What budget do we assign to release types?
-
- 4k per release
-
- 3k per minor, 5k per major release
0 voters
Are 3k/5k enough? Just by my feeling @kdambekalns and @daniellienert spend quite a lot time for the release and so it feels not enough to cover the expenses?
Or is the additional time kind of a donation then
Ok, finally going forward. Thanks for the votes. That leaves us with 5k for the Neos 5.0 release. As written earlier @daniellienert and me in total spent 91.4 hours on the release. We discussed internally a bit, and while Daniel and I are fine with some stripping down of the hours, at least we at Flownative came to the conclusion, that we would not like to go down with the hourly rate “to make it work”, since:
- we agreed on 100€/h in the past
- other parts of the project (e.g. ES CR) are using that rate as well
- it was what we calculated with along the way
Now, @daniellienert and I agreed on splitting “whatever we get” in half, neglecting the few hours our investment differs. That leaves us with the ast question: Can we get some more budget for this?
Who’d be willing to share some of the year’s remaining money? If we get 4k extra, everything would be settled basically, with an extra 2k we’d be better off already. What do you think would be fair?
- no extra budget
- 2k extra budget
- 4k extra budget
- fine with whatever
0 voters
To give some context to my vote “4k extra budget”: imho it is very important that we don’t frustrate ourselves or even burn ourselves out with releases. If we ended up with at situation where no one wants to do releases any more, all the cool new features we develop won’t make it to our users.
Thus it is a priority for me personally, to make sure that @daniellienert and @kdambekalns walk away from the release with good feelings and the will to take on responsibility again in the future.
The two of you did a great job with the release, thank you!
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I’m all for spend the 4k for important work that was already done, as long as there is room in the budget.
What I’d like on top is: can we open up some additional budget in some form that is specifically targeted at “improve the process”? I’m thinking in terms of “there’s 1k (or w/e) extra budget available per release/per quarter for efforts that improve our release process” - make it easier, faster, more reliable, etc. and which will only be spent if time for the process is spent. If not, that budget is opened again for some other things. Some kind of financial incentive to not just do the work that is required to get the current release finished/out - which is awesome in itself -, but to improve the process for the next. Optimally, the goal should be that our budget we planned (3k/5k) is always enough to cover the work for 95% of our releases or sth. like that.
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Now that I start to feel a bit more alive again, I want to shortly explain my “No extra budget vote”.
- We already had a vote to increase the budget and lower the other release budgets.
- We already had trouble to fulfil the other budget applications some weeks ago.
- From which bucket do we take the 4k from?
- When we agree on the 2k or 4k how do we actually handle future releases and their budgets?
I would absolutely love to have everyone paid what they deserve. But I somehow felt this second poll didn’t take some of those points/questions into account.
And I want to add that I will fully support whatever decision the majority makes.
Thanks for adding that explanation!
That was mostly to clarify the “split as such” – as there was some confusion around that…
I was told that the CR budget was nice at 15k, but even 10k would get the project quite further and could give some part up… 
Looking back I can see that minor releases take substantially less effort and even this major was an outlier in terms of needed work. That being said, further improvements in the release process might ease the workload, but of course we’ll never be able to guarantee there won’t be unplanned impediments during a release.
I also have to admit that I was a bit too optimistic, or rather ignorant. Had I know that we run over budget that much, I’d probably have slowed down at least a bit. That would not have helped the budget, but would make it easier (for me) to write off the extra hours.
So, we can keep the 3k/5k budgets, try harder to stay inside and maybe have them “roll over”, so that anything not spent earlier in a year can be used later.
As Karsten said, that was not to increase the budget for releases, which was already done way ago (12k/year IIRC), but how to split that budget among major/minor releases, which seemed was not clear for everyone (though it was for me).
From which bucket do we take the 4k from?
That is a fair and important question, which I can not answer, but only the people behind the projects that already got their budget granted. It is basically up to them to decide how much they can and want to give away from that to distribute back to the major release over-hours. I personally won’t have any bad whatsoever feelings to projects not being able or wanting to give up some of their budget - they got it granted already, so it’s basically their decision without regrets IMO.
How much is then “available” up to the 4k should IMO be given to Karsten and Daniel, and, if there is any remainder, redistributed back to the projects.
I see the poll above (4k/2k/none/whatever) as just the democratic permission to ask for up to that amount from the others - not so much as “exactly that amount is garanteed to be taken from the others”. Maybe some see that differently?
When we agree on the 2k or 4k how do we actually handle future releases and their budgets?
Also what Karsten said - I don’t take this as a measure for future releases, rather as a singular request for compensation on an outlier. So in the future it’s still 5k/3k fixed granted for the release work and anything spent on top has to be requested for compensation from the team.
So it’s basically a decision of the release team how much they want to invest into the release and then the team on how much they think this effort was justified.
In retrospect, it probably would have been more “optimal” if as soon as the work covered by the budget was put into, the team would then have been informed that more work is necessary and if the team agrees to grant more budget for this release. That would at least have avoided the situation of “this much time was already spent uncovered and we ask for some coverage retroactively”.
But then again, it’s not easy and I trust the people enough that they didn’t just senselessly put work into this to profit from and also I see how much work that major release was and think it was important enough to justify that amount (if available).
I probably wouldn’t support much more for a single release though, because rather then spending 10k+ for a single (major) release (which IMO just highlights a process deficit), I’d rather spend 3k for improving the process and then 7k for a more minimal release this time. Hence also my suggestion to grant an ongoing small “on top budget” into the process.