Hello Giannis,
On Mon, 05 Dec 2016, Giannis Konstantinidis wrote:
First of all, I understand that not everyone feels comfortable with
paying for their expenses in advance and then awaiting to be reimbursed a
month and a half later. Secondly, Paypal does not work in all countries -
which can be very difficult for some people to receive payments.
while it might be not great to wait for getting reimbursed in general, I
think we really improved a lot. Let me give you an example from somewhen
between 2008 and 2010: I attended an event and the reimbursement happened
about one year after (in cash), when I attended the event the next time.
And this is not meant to blame somebody, but to show a real case from the
past, thus getting reimbursed currently in less than 3 month is something
we IMHO should be simply grateful for; it is a very positive achievement!
I had various kinds of expenses in the past also during my regular dayjob
at different employers...and even they needed something between 7 days and
two months to reimburse me. While some might treat this as not comparable,
I think it is. In the Fedora case, we also have additionally to see, note
and value that somebody is doing the reimburses in her/his free time and
not as part of her/his regular dayjob. That's why I think that it's totally
acceptable (at least for me) that the Fedora reimburse process may take up
to 2 or 3 months; we talk about expenses that are still substantial parts
of my monthly salary; maybe not each, but a flight ticket is still up to a
few hundred EUR.
PayPal is indeed another topic, however there are also US-based constraints
involved (or local banks/politics on the destination side), where I guess
we can not do much; especially for the first part, where Red Hat would have
the same limitations like any US-based company. Working around PayPal could
also get pricey when thinking about that simple SEPA bank transfers within
EEA (EU + EFTA) seem to consume at least 5 EUR for a <100 EUR transfer. And
something like Western Union could be legally quite questionable, it's IMHO
banned for good reasons at different companies; but I don't have a specific
clue about Red Hat here though. But in the very last end, using a bunch of
payment providers for reimbursement adds IMHO much more work to the persons
doing this work currently in their free time. And as often we transfer the
money, as more charges and conversion fees get IMHO applied - while we have
still a credit card as our base provided by Red Hat.
As I said in the beginning, waiting to get reimbursed is never great, but I
also think here, we shouldn't ask for too much, given we are not doing that
as daily job, but in our free time as volunteers (at least most of us).
Regards,
Robert