OpenPrinting News - Sovereign Tech Agency is investing in OpenPrinting

I was working at Canonical for a long time …

Mid-May, on the last Engineering Sprint of Canonical I got the notice that I got laid off by Canonical, after having been with them for near 20 years. The contract ended 4 weeks after that, mid-June and I got 3 months of my monthly payment as indemnity. See also my earlier post.

… looking for a new solution …

I naturally wanted to continue OpenPrinting as my living and not have to take an arbitrary job and continue OpenPrinting as a hobby.

So my first efforts were to make OpenPrinting a full sub-organization of the Linux Foundation so that it can handle money, to be able to get sponsorships, especially also via membership tiers. Our idea here is to get sponsored by the companies who most benefit from OpenPrinting, like major OS distributions, computer manufacturers who make laptops and desktops with Linux, printer manufacturers, cloud groupware/office developers, …

But getting this up and running takes time. We already tried to get a full sub-organization before my lay-off, but the process always got stuck. Now I see the chance that we will complete it due to its urgency. We are working on creating the Technical Charter which is required, and I have also already lined up the needed Technical Steering Committee. The people from the Linux Foundation also want to help me to find the sponsors. Many of the candidates are already Linux Foundation members and they could take up an OpenPrinting membership in addition.

In parallel I tried to make people know about my situation. I posted a thread on Mastodon/the Fediverse and asked for boosting, and the thread (at least its initial post) got boosted 1187 times (Thanks to you all! I have never seen any other post in the Fediverse which got boosted that much)!

I also (finally) filled in my LinkedIn profile and also created a profile for OpenPrinting. I interacted with a lot of people via LinkedIn, invited people who could help to connect with me on LinkedIn and then I asked them for help.

… the Sovereign Tech Agency …

One was Tara Tarakiyee from the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA), an organization of the German government which supports open source developers and organizations whose work goes into development an maintenance of software which is essential for IT and internet infrastructure and therefore of public interest.

I told him about OpenPrinting and my situation and whether the STA would support me. Then he asked me for details of my work and offered me support from the STA. I had to express my (or OpenPrinting’s) needs in work hours and money (the first time I had to do such a thing in my life) and within a few weeks my proposal got accepted and now the Sovereign Tech Fund invests in OpenPrinting to sustain me at the same monthly compensation as I got from Canonical (by average) until end of 2026.

Here is the page about their investment in OpenPrinting and it got also mentioned in their October Newsletter.

… Now I am working at OpenPrinting

Yes, when somebody asks my where I am working, I will say its OpenPrinting, I am now self-employed as its lead. Note that the STA did not hire me as an employee, but they hired me as a freelancing engineer, paying my work hours which I am billing to them.

I am also continuing to pursue establishing OpenPrinting as a full sub-organization of the Linux Foundation, to be open for further funding of the organization and this way to assure its continuation and so printing to just work also in the future.

Thanks

I want to express my thanks for all the help and support I have gotten in this situation, first of all Tara Tarakiyee, Hanno Zulla, Paloma Oliviera, and probably also others from the Sovereign Tech Agency for the quick arrangement of the investment.

I also want to thank Kate Stewart, Todd Benzies, Michael Dolan, Scott Nicholas, and Daniel Scales from the Linux Foundation for the great support to make OpenPrinting a full sub-organization of the Linux Foundation and to help us to get funding.

And big thanks to those who have joined the Technical Steering Committee of OpenPrinting with me: Michael Sweet, Aveek Basu, Zdenek Dohnal, and Thorsten Alteholz.

Special thanks to all the people who have worked and are working with me at OpenPrinting to make OpenPrinting the strong organization which it is now and so make printing just work (I give some names, there are many more): Michael Sweet, Kurt Pfeifle, Grant Taylor, Ira McDonald, Ulrich Wehner, Ian Murdock, Mark Shuttleworth, Aveek Basu, Zdenek Dohnal, Alexander Pevzner, Johannes Meixner, Didier Raboud, Thorsten Alteholz, Deepak Patankar, Sahil Arora, Akarshan Kapoor, Soumyadeep Ghosh, Sanskar Yaduka, …

Thanks a lot to the organizers of the Google Summer of Code, especially Stephanie Taylor, Carol Smith, and Leslie Hawthorn to make this great program running which helped us to get a lot of awesome developers for our community.

Also thanks for all the coverage on the Internet, especially to Heather Ellsworth (Ubuntu Indaba), Monica Ayhens-Madon (Ubuntu Office Hours), Michael Tunnell, Jill Bryant, and Ryan (Destination Linux), Joe Ressington and Graham Morrison (Late Night Linux), Noah Chelliah (Ask Noah), Diogo Constantino (Podcast Ubuntu Portugal), Liam Proven (The Register), …

And as usual: Stay updated on Mastodon: #OpenPrinting and @till@ubuntu.social and on LinkedIn: @OpenPrinting.

Or discuss on our mailing lists:

• Development: printing-architecture AT lists DOT linux DOT dev (Archive)
• Users: printing-users AT lists DOT linux DOT dev (Archive)

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