Kudos to bun for investing in a promising technology.
Does the Zig Foundation have a policy against corporate sponsors?
Otherwise the lack of sponsoring from the "big players" seems rather shocking. You'd think that zig has a decent chance in helping MS/Meta/Google/etc. somewhere along the way.
Since it's not a 1.0, it seems at face value it's be difficult for a "big player" to use it in production. As far as I understand, breaking changes are expected.
Yeah, makes sense, 1.0 is probably a critical point for a project like this, where from it, "big players" start trusting its business to the lang and therefore having a high interest on funding.
But it's kind of a chicken and egg problem: they need more money to keep doing its great work and thrive to reach 1.0 but good money comes from 1.0 and beyond.
I think the ambition is much larger than what could be accomplished by part-time volunteer work. It was either this or somehow get a bigcorp to dedicate 2, 5, 10 full time salaries to it.
Honestly it's not clear to me that the money they have in income now is enough to accomplish the ambition, but I guess that's why it is a fundraiser in addition to a financial report.
I know literally nothing about business accounting or business taxes. Why does the expenses include both the employee's compensation and also their taxes? Do businesses claim their employees taxes as expenses?
Very cool to see such a detailed report about finances.
The expenses listed here are accounting for 100% of the expenses paid by the organization. If you go fetch the 990 from the IRS and look at the totals, it will match dollar-for-dollar, cent-for-cent. So if I deleted taxes from this report, you would hopefully all be wondering, where did that $13,089.07 go?
Happy to answer any other questions.
Edit: I see the question is about income tax vs payroll tax categorization. As this isn't my area of expertise and it's getting late, I'll wait until tomorrow to check carefully and make any necessary clarifications.
i think the question is more of "is that payroll/employment tax"? the way it's written uses the word "income tax" carefully noting the distinction. you may want to edit it to say "payroll tax", which makes more sense.
I think I understand from the other comments. I never considered that it is technically an expense to withhold the income taxes of employees and then pay it to the IRS.
Is that a US thing only? Because this sounds like double taxation. An employee have to pay Income tax, which is normal and standard across the globe, but employer also have to pay another "income tax" for its employees on top of pensions, medicals and others ?
Been awhile since I employed anyone in America (that whole "we're going to annex you" thing) but if I had to hazard a guess, it's the company's portion of their FICA taxes? The company withholds the employee portion to remit to the IRS, then matches it dollar to dollar. If the company is structured so that Andrew is self-employed, it'd be SECA instead and you can count that portion as a business expense.
At a very high level, revenues enter your bank account and expenses leave your bank account. In this case, you are getting confused about the taxes. There is employee compensation (which the business will withhold taxes on behalf of the individual) and then payroll taxes (which the employee is not responsible for). In essence, "their taxes" is not the correct classification. The business pays the employee (and facilitates the tax collection) and also pays the tax the business owes.
It's kinda sad the state of things where startups with only buzzwords and slop (I'm looking at you horoscope AI app) end up raising more money than actual tech projects that will, actually, improve infrastructure and innovation.
> Wow, paying himself $150k after tax from donations! That's wildly more successful than I would have guessed.
Why? The salary Andrew Kelley would likely attract at a corporate is much higher than that. If you want sustainable open-source infrastructure then someone, somewhere will have to pay for it. It feels crummy to attempt to pressure people into taking super low salaries (and probably results in higher rates of burnout).
> Damn... really? More than $170k/year from Github Sponsors? That's got to be the most successful Github Sponsor income ever right?
Building programming languages is hard? Rust had something like ~10 Mozilla developers working on it for ~10 years (that's something upwards of $20-30mn in investment).
Because most open source projects don't attract anywhere near those levels of donations. The salary he could get in a private company has no effect on that.
> Rust had something like ~10 Mozilla developers working on it for ~10 years (that's something upwards of $20-30mn in investment).
What's even more wild, was reading the complaints and condemnation of competing language creators for having supporters give them donations. It's a much different tune, when one's own pocket is fat with donation money. Wish people could be happy for the success of others and not only themselves.
Keep in mind that payroll taxes aren't going to him, he may only be paying himself something like 120k which is a fraction of what he'd making working for $BigCorp
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Does the Zig Foundation have a policy against corporate sponsors?
Otherwise the lack of sponsoring from the "big players" seems rather shocking. You'd think that zig has a decent chance in helping MS/Meta/Google/etc. somewhere along the way.
Not at all. We would be definitely open & happy to learn that one of the big companies are using Zig and would be interested in supporting us.
(but we don't plan to give up board seats)
But it's kind of a chicken and egg problem: they need more money to keep doing its great work and thrive to reach 1.0 but good money comes from 1.0 and beyond.
The Zig Foundation model of paying contributors is really interesting. I don't think I've seen it done on this scale before, but hope it takes off.
Honestly it's not clear to me that the money they have in income now is enough to accomplish the ambition, but I guess that's why it is a fundraiser in addition to a financial report.
Very cool to see such a detailed report about finances.
The expenses listed here are accounting for 100% of the expenses paid by the organization. If you go fetch the 990 from the IRS and look at the totals, it will match dollar-for-dollar, cent-for-cent. So if I deleted taxes from this report, you would hopefully all be wondering, where did that $13,089.07 go?
Happy to answer any other questions.
Edit: I see the question is about income tax vs payroll tax categorization. As this isn't my area of expertise and it's getting late, I'll wait until tomorrow to check carefully and make any necessary clarifications.
> we need more recurring donations
Damn... really? More than $170k/year from Github Sponsors? That's got to be the most successful Github Sponsor income ever right?
There's an article somewhere on the rationale of Andrew's salary. From the top of my head it was based on an median lead developer salary in the area.
Honestly that seems fair, obviously less than he would have in the private sector, but still high enough to not burn out and have a comfortable life.
Why? The salary Andrew Kelley would likely attract at a corporate is much higher than that. If you want sustainable open-source infrastructure then someone, somewhere will have to pay for it. It feels crummy to attempt to pressure people into taking super low salaries (and probably results in higher rates of burnout).
> Damn... really? More than $170k/year from Github Sponsors? That's got to be the most successful Github Sponsor income ever right?
Building programming languages is hard? Rust had something like ~10 Mozilla developers working on it for ~10 years (that's something upwards of $20-30mn in investment).
Because most open source projects don't attract anywhere near those levels of donations. The salary he could get in a private company has no effect on that.
> Rust had something like ~10 Mozilla developers working on it for ~10 years (that's something upwards of $20-30mn in investment).
Fair point.
checks profile
there it is
I’m sure there are many people that would happily donate more so he can make more for his work. Which I had the budget to donate atm