To give a sense of scale for 9 person-months in the Bay area, here are some numbers that I'm going to make up. I don't know how much Open Robotics pays it's people, but I'm guessing you can't get a good software engineer for less than about $150,000 a year in the Bay Area. My rule of thumb (as someone who hires people and students at a university) is that people cost about twice their salary, once you add in benefits, insurance, and all the other stuff you have to pay for. So, $300,000. I don't know what Open Robotics's overhead rate is (overhead is the money you have to dedicate to keeping the lights on, and stuff like that), but here at OSU, it's 53%. So, if I spend $100, I have to give and additional $53 to the University. This is probably high for a business, but I really have no idea. Call if 50% for easy math. So, your employee costs $450,000 a year. 9 months of this is $337,000. Assume that I'm way off on all my calculations, and cut that in half (I think tha
t this is unrealistically low, but let's do it anyway). That's $160,000 a year, which is a heavy lift on Kickstarter.
Asking Open Robotics to make the "morally best decision" is a passive aggressive way of claiming that they're choosing to do the morally wrong thing. Passive aggressively suggesting that there has been embezzlement at Open Robotics is just an ad hominem attack (at worst) or simply shows an ignorance of how companies operate (at best). Neither helps your argument.
>From my point of view, as someone who has to raise money in a similar way to try to do similar things (albeit at a university in a research context), the explanation @gerkey gave makes sense. It's not the optimal situation, and it sucks, but that's the way it is. Unfortunately, the days of Willow Garage pumping millions of dollars into ROS development from a magical pot of money are gone.
Of course, all this arguing doesn't help solve the problem.
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