[humanistbot]

So I have no direct knowledge of this case, but this seems to be an issue over fiscal sponsorship. Like a lot of smaller and younger open source projects, PyPy had delegated financial and accounting responsibility to the Software Freedom Conservancy, who acts as their fiscal sponsor. SFC is a registered non-profit with professional accountants, taking donations on behalf of lots of projects including PyPy and distributing it to the project on request from the project's leaders. This is a common model in open source, there are similar organizations that do this like Software in the Public Interest, NumFocus, or the Open Source Collective.

One issue that happens is when fiscal sponsors take a cut on all revenue/donations raised by the project in exchange for their services, which is 10% for SFC [1]. Fiscal sponsors also have policies around what they will reimburse, which can become as stringent and as corporate travel policies [2]. I can totally understand a project getting frustrated at their fiscal sponsor and wanting to either start their own and do it all themselves or find another sponsor.

[1] https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply/

[2] https://sfconservancy.org/projects/policies/conservancy-trav...

[jamesdutc]

The admin fees you refer to are typically assessed in the context of large, institutional grants. These are grants from private organisations like the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or government agencies like the US National Science Foundation. These grants have significant financial accounting requirements. There are also many other legal or operational costs associated with these grants.

When projects run these grants through parent institutions like universities, the typical admin fee is >40%. In some cases, it can be as high as 60%. Many projects are eager to enter fiscal sponsorship agreements with organisations like NumFOCUS, because so much more of their grant money goes to funding the work.

In the case of NumFOCUS, admin fees do not adequately cover the staff requirements to manage these grants. NumFOCUS "loses money" when servicing the administrative needs of these grants & it takes this responsibility onto itself solely for the betterment of the projects.

Rather than assess administrative fees similar to universities, NumFOCUS uses its other fundraising—corporate donations, event (i.e., PyData) sponsorship, individual giving—to finance its operations.

source:

- I serve on the NumFOCUS board of directors as its co-chair.

- I presented on this topic last year at the NumFOCUS Annual Summit to an audience of core developers from projects like Julia, Jupyter, Pandas, NumPy, AstroPy, &c.

- NumFOCUS budgets are public, and all of the above information can be corroborated from materials published on https://numfocus.org/