On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 04:53:20PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 12:12:02AM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > I also don't think it is a bad thing, in principle, if Debian were to > > pay people to work on Debian. However, it is generally a bad idea if > > some cabal were to select who could get Debian monies and who couldn't; > > I believe that is the main problem that existed with the Dunk-Tank > > story. > > The use of Debian money for Dunc Tank was only present in a first draft that > was discarded in the face of opposition within the project. Does the final > funding solution that was implemented also fall under this "cabal" > description, in your opinion? It was a bit of a gray area. On the one hand, the final funding solution was open, did not in theory limit who could benefit from the set-up, and was not strictly related to Debian. On the other hand, it was a fairly logical continuation of what could be considered as such, and I feel more effort could have been put into engaging with the community to work out bad feelings than has been done. For the record, I did second the original unamended text for 2006_006, the 'Re-affirm support to the Debian Project Leader' vote, which had the phrase 'The Debian Project does not object to the experiment named "Dunc-Tank", lead by Anthony Towns, the current DPL, and Steve McIntyre, the Second in Charge' in it, and I would do so again if the situation were to repeat itself. [...] > If not, how do you reconcile this with the ongoing community > resistance to Dunc Tank even after it was decoupled from Debian money? I believe that many (though certainly not all) people who were still resistant against Dunc Tank after its decoupling from Debian money, would not have rejected the idea had it been proposed the way it was eventually implemented from the start. However, by the time the decoupling had happened, a rather large flamewar was already going on, and many people failed to rationalize by that time what was happening, instead reacting more emotionally. I can of course not speak for the whole community, however; this is just how I perceive that things happened. -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html
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