Is $900k in the bank a lot of money for as large and important an organization as Debian? That is how much the Mozilla Corporation earns every 18 hours. Even if the staff are volunteers, having rainy day spending seems prudent.
Debian's expenses are hosting, conferences and travel reimbursement -- and not a lot of that.
It's still not really a lot of money, though. As a thought experiment, if Google decided to donate $1 per installed Debian or derivative OS, I think that might double Debian's bank account.
That's a plausible funding slogan -- "A Dollar for Debian".
Debian doesn't pay for hosting for most services, all the ones run by the Debian sysadmin team use donated hosting environments at universities and companies. For a while we also had a partnership with HPE that gave us gratis x86 hardware, but these days we do have to spend money on x86 hardware unfortunately. The non-x86 ports usually run on donated hardware but we only run build servers on those machines so far. Google already donates quite a bit to Debian through conference sponsorship and also a one-time 300K donation last year or the year before.
I see Debian is one of the projects that benefit from Google's Summer of Code student sponsorships, although that is a much smaller contribution compared to those you mentioned.
Do you know if any of the students who particpate in Debian's summer of code end up being regular contributors after the sponsorship period ends?
Definitely both Outreachy and GSoC students participate after their internships, although a lot of them of course don't participate for various reasons.
In particular I know that for years now former GSoC interns are mentoring current GSoC interns on the project to package parts of the Android SDK for Debian. This year it is last year's intern and also two others from prior years.
