Yesterday I had a conversation on Twitter which started with addressing concerns regarding the Flow license change but then somewhat slipped towards the ELTS business model. I’m not really keen on leading such a conversation, and even less in public, but I consider this topic to be rather important because I somewhat still do care about TYPO3. I think that there is a lack of transparency where it would really be necessary.
I’m not criticising that funds are raised for TYPO3. However, I feel like this is not done with the necessary transparency which is indicated when so much money is involved.
In the FAQ the team states that the money is actually needed because maintaining 4.5 is a tremendous amount of work. I can buy that, and I can imagine that it is not work someone would love to do on a voluntary basis in her spare time. The numbers given as examples are actually quite extreme: according to the FAQ the fix for the absPrefix cache poisoning bug took 125 person days to fix (which would be a 100,000 € based on an average daily rate for freelancers). However, on the income side, it’s very well possible that the ELTS program will raise 500,000 - 1,000,000 € until it ends in March 2016.
I asked Mattes if he could imagine publishing some numbers, so people ordering the ELTS would actually know more about the program. But, at least yesterday, Mattes refused to do so and wrote that they would only publish details when the program has ended next year.
What is your opinion on that? Is it worth a public discussion or should we leave it at rest? This hasn’t anything to do with Neos of course, and we certainly have other things on our agenda at the moment. But doesn’t someone have to speak up?