Re: KickStarter for Debian packages - crowdfunding development
On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 6:05 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
> I'd like to add a feature to apt that enables people to donate money or
> crowdfund a particular project or developer. The inspiration for the
> project comes from [1]Gittip.
The key idea behind Gittip (as far as I understand it from a quick look) is that
it is people-centric: I give a tip to someone else for whatever she/he did.
I am not convinced that this translates very well to package-centric view as
you suddenly have a zillion different persons who each deserve a share.
apt-donate apt '5 goldcoins'
Who is going to get these coins? And who is getting how much?
Past and/or present upstream authors, Debian maintainers, downstream distro
maintainers, translators (upstream/distros), … and how important is each of
these persons to the overall project? Or in other words: Is a 10 year long
contributor getting more/less coins than a first time contributor and does
this change if the first one does his work as part of his regular job while
the other is a complete volunteer? Is the company paying the first one
getting the tip (as it has also the copyright?) and what about those who
can't or don't want to accept donations …
(of course, the people-centric approach isn't bulletproof either, but
that is leading too far I think)
Its kinda regularly discussed as the general idea of empowering the user to
donate a bit of money easily to developers is a lovely one, but it comes with
so many social problems in general that the easy way is chosen to get it at
least for a subset: The big projects with foundations and co behind them as
the problem of splitting is solved by the foundations itself (usually by not
splitting at all, but paying stuff in the general interest).
Either way, deity@lists.debian.org is not the list to solve these issues,
such a discussion really has to happen on debian-project@lists.debian.org.
> We could add these features to a new command in apt that can be executed
> via the command-line:
>
> apt-donate [package] [amount]
Assuming for a moment that we have a plan which works well in theory and just
the technical side is missing:
Support for this should be in the PTS (package tracking system – e.g. [0])
as it is the one-stop entry into the universe of packages. As far as APT is
concert we need support for it in libapt so that all front-ends can generate
URLs to sent the user to. Bonus points if the api is system-agnostic so that
other services can be used (as much as a standard would be nice, its unlikely
to work for anyone, be it own commercial interests, proxies …). How to call
this URL, display it to users and stuff is what front-ends have to deal with,
so our part should be trivial.
But as said, to get this started the APT mailinglist isn't the right place
to have this discussion even though I will be very happy if we get something
working in the end as its much requested [and hence needed]. :)
Best regards
David Kalnischkies
[0] http://packages.qa.debian.org/a/apt.html
P.S.: None of your [?] "links" have an URI attached. Could you please fix this?
P.P.S.: Just reading the subject, I expected a different mail.
Like a "bug bounty", not "general" donations to a project/package.
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