Re: Paying Debian contributors (Was Re: Advantages/Disadvantages of Open Source Software)
On 9/15/2022 11:46 AM, Andy Smith wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2022 at 10:04:48PM -0400, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
> > I am not against giving maintainers like Steve just compensation for the
> > work they do fixing bugs, and by compensation I mean money.
>
> It's a very tricky subject to propose to start paying (some?) people
> in what was always a volunteer project, to do the same work that
> others do voluntarily. It has been proposed before, and it did not
> go down well. Search for "dunc tank debian" to read about that.
>
> More recently (since 2014), the Debian LTS effort started paying
> people to upload fixed Debian packages past the end of the normal
> release lifetime. This is organised by private company Freexian who
> accept sponsorship funds and pay developers to do this work for
> Debian, not out of Debian's own funds.
>
> https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
> https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
> https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/FAQ
>
> They do LTS, ELTS and some other limited scope efforts.
>
> If you do use Debian LTS maybe you could consider contributing to
> this? Though I would point out:
>
> - It's not going to give you the right to tell people what to work
> on, how to do it, govern their timescales etc. Sponsors are paying
> for a certain amount of developer time per month, but Freexian and
> those developers decide what to work on and how to do it.
>
> - At the moment the minimum contribution is €255/year.
>
> It could also be interesting to explore individual packaging teams
> within Debian having Patreon and/or ko-fi accounts or similar.
>
> Broadly though, none of these small scale funding ideas are ever
> going to give you the kind of service you apparently seem to want:
> to be able to force the developers to work on what you want them to
> work on, in the way you want them to work on it. I can only ever see
> that happening in situations where you pay much much more for a
> bespoke solution.
So I have to pay someone lots of money to fix a problem I already know how to fix?
I don't think you really understand my use case very well.
Cheers
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