[Cake] Donation

[Pete Heist]

> On Nov 12, 2017, at 6:00 PM, cake-request at lists.bufferbloat.net wrote:
> 
> I sometimes think we should establish an organization, with a board of
> directors, a bank account, etc, but aside
> from grant money, donated computers and computer time, and all the
> massive efforts of all the volunteers, that's most of the donations
> we've ever got, and it would be, at least, 800 bucks to start a
> non-profit, + an accountant to "do right".
> 
> Any and all thoughts as to how to do better are welcomed.
> 
> We could have a bake sale for cake, to get it mainlined.

Has there been any thought towards monetizing some portion of the bufferbloat project to help pay for it? Here are a couple of ideas:

- Make a network and bloat testing service with a subscription tier or advertising supported free tier. Proceeds could at first fund the server resources needed, and maybe there’d be something left over. I don’t think there’s anything out there that’s more technically oriented and measures one-way delay, or differentiates between upstream and downstream packet loss, or has some of flent’s features like TCP RTT or the myriad of tests it supports, for starters. I really don’t know if anyone would pay a subscription fee for this though, or how much ad revenue would be possible.

- I’m intrigued by the idea of a cooperative or so-called “platform cooperative". In this case, individuals or companies could pay a monthly or annual fee to either just support the effort, or get access to a higher level of support, the bloat testing service, or specific code changes, etc. Any income beyond what’s needed to meet expenses could be distributed to its members somehow. This is a vague idea so far, I know. But I’ve been pretty impressed with how well the cooperative ISP I use works (lbcfree.net), and at its apparent resiliency over time. Though, the service they offer to their customers may be more clearly defined (“become a member, get Internet”).

By the way, what or how much is needed to get Cake mainlined?