Maintainer Honorarium

About giving honorarium to Maintainers in a certain amount per month upon their application.

This text establishes a trust-based honorarium mechanism to compensate members of FreeCAD’s Core Maintainer group for code review, release coordination, and similar efforts, while keeping documentation burdens to a minimum. As a rule, only Core Maintainers benefit from the program; maintainers of plugins and dependencies in the FreeCAD ecosystem (“Ecosystem Maintainers”) may also be included under the special provisions below.

Core Maintainers may apply for the Fixed Monthly Honorarium on any day of the year. Once the application reaches and is seen by the FPA, it is deemed accepted automatically without any vote or further approval; participation begins on that date and continues until 31 December of the same calendar year. A participant may withdraw at any time; withdrawal does not affect prior periods. No fixed payments may be claimed for months prior to inclusion. Fixed payments for months after acceptance in which the participant was active may be claimed later in aggregate.

Ecosystem Maintainers may apply, once per calendar year, to be covered by the Fixed Monthly Honorarium; each such application is voted by the FPA on a per-person basis. If accepted, the person benefits until 31 December of that year; acceptance does not carry over and requires a fresh application and vote each year. In addition, all Additional Honorarium Requests by Ecosystem Maintainers—regardless of amount—are subject to FPA voting.

The Fixed Monthly Honorarium is €200 (two hundred) per month. To be payable for a given month, the participant must have had at least one interaction with any FreeCAD repository in that month. If there is no activity in a month, no fixed payment is made for that month, though the participant’s program status continues through year-end.

In exceptional cases where a participant believes their workload in a given month substantially exceeded typical expectations, they may consult with the FPA to request a discretionary extra top-up beyond the fixed honorarium.

The fixed monthly honorarium may be claimed in arrears, in aggregate for months after acceptance in which the participant was active. Payments are made by the FPA via a payment method determined with due regard to the participant’s stated preferences. Explanatory notes or links are not required; however, in the interests of transparency they are encouraged.

The program rests on unconditional trust in the Core Maintainers Group and in each participant; statements are presumed accurate unless and until proven otherwise. An allegation of abuse does not prevent payment, and the FPA does not entertain such allegations; if raised, they must be referred to the Core Maintainers Group for assessment.

To finance the program, the FPA may allocate a dedicated fund. If the fund proves insufficient, the FPA reserves the right to provide additional funding or to discontinue the program. The program operates on a calendar-year basis and is reviewed at year-end with community feedback; amounts, thresholds, and procedures may be adjusted as needed.