* Manoj Srivastava (srivasta@debian.org) wrote: > Right. Money, in the form of donations, is nothing > new. Money-for-work or money-for-advertizing is. There is a > difference; the former is generouisly donated by people voluntarily > because of the good they thing debian is doing; the latter is because > of business value earned -- and in my opinion this latter is not > desirable, for various reasons I have stated in other emails. And about this I disagree. > > amazes me. Debian gets donations all the time from people and > > companies, sometimes quite sizable ones. The DPL doesn't go nuts > > and start trying to demand more production from us or any such thing > > though, even though, yes, that would probably increase the donations > > coming in. > > > If we have a revenue stream sufficient to keep our operations going > > w/o needing donations of hosting and other services I don't know > > that I'd consider that a bad thing. > > I would. Money only from donations keeps us honest -- and > keeps us to the core of what we started out to be. Turning us into a > business, even a not-for-ptofit business, may taint the decisions > made, and the decisions may be made inthe interest of more revenue > rther than "our users", like the SC lays it out to be. SPI *is* a business, a not-for-profit one, and Debian is by *far* the controller of SPI. I don't think it's money only from donations that keeps us honest, it's the *SC* that keeps us honest, and each other through the SC. I seriously doubt that the number of flamewars we have over if we're following the SC by doing x, y or z would somehow decrease because we're getting money from ads or whatever. Really, if there was even a smell of someone going against the best interests of our users in order to increase revenue the noise from the rest of us would be deafening, just like it is from this *proposal* that we *might* consider other methods of funding. In addition, the money from donations can be abused just as easily as money from anywhere else. Developers could solicite donations from companies if they feel they've got a chance of then being able to pocket that money. Stephen
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