Re: KickStarter for Debian packages - crowdfunding/donations for development
On Fri, 2013-06-14 at 07:20 -0400, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
> Payment systems in general tend to lead to "paybullying", which is
> something I'd really (really) like to avoid. I've always loved how
> un-corporate the Debian community is.
There are two reasons money gets given to people.
a. Money is freely given retroactively as a reward for having done
something. This requires good record keeping about how much work someone
actually did and how much of the reward they should be likely to claim.
The down side is that it reduces enthusiasm. This is 'tipping' in my
vernacular.
b. Money is given pro-actively, for work you are about to, are doing or
have done and not published. This requires good quality checking and
being able to decide if the work was completed as agreed. This requires
a bunch of work to have been done to 'design' the work to be done
strictly. This is 'paying' in my lingo.
I feel much better about paying for work to be done than tipping, it
feels more right. Although it requires larger pools of money and a more
forthright approach deciding where this resource should be plowed in
order to curate the larger design. Debian hasn't been much for curating
anything, since it's more anarchistic than planned. But maybe it'd be
possible to have project goals at the debian level which such money
could be focused.
I think pro-active funding works better at the project level. If
Inkscape wants to spend it's money on sending contributors to
conferences, then that's a valid way to spend money on project goals. If
Blender wants to spend money on funding developers and movie makers to
stretch their software, also valid.
What we can't be is scared to develop the social and administrative
systems that make handling money effective. If we don't try, we won't
learn.
On Sat, 2013-06-15 at 00:50 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> We should just be indifferent about it. And that's what we practice
now as I see it.
We could be indifferent about lots of things in Debian. Licensing for
instance. \"Who cares! as long as we get the software delivered, only
lawyers care about some silly license and besides it could happen
outside of debian!\"
No, we care because it's important. Having meta data that describes the
connection between the user and the developer is an important
responsibility of the distributing platform. It is in fact the power of
the platform to deliver projects in a way that sustains and supplies
(users|attention|money|developers) to the upstream.
I don't think we're doing our job if we are not communicating an
important facet of the life-blood of our upstreams to our users. We are
instead acting to cut them off from each other unintentionally.
Martin Owens
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