Re: KickStarter for Debian packages - crowdfunding development
On 06/13/2013 04:08 PM, David Kalnischkies wrote:
> 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.
Yes, that's basically it. There's a bit more to it, but that's the
general idea behind Gittip.
> 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.
I'll try to explain why this makes sense and why it does not always need
to be split between a zillion different people. More below.
> apt-donate apt '5 goldcoins'
>
> Who is going to get these coins? And who is getting how much?
Ultimately, it's up to the upstream authors and packaging team to
decide. The Debian project might want to provide general guidance when
it comes to how to split the donation with the upstream developer.
Some options are:
1. For large projects, everyone that has participated splits the
amount equally with the current core team getting 5x as much as
everyone else.
2. For small projects, 30% goes to the packager and 70% goes to the
upstream author.
3. The entire donation amount goes to a charity or open source /
free software foundation.
4. All amounts are negotiated within the project community.
5. Some variation of all of the items above.
Each approach has its downsides, there is no perfect answer because each
project is going to be slightly different. The upside to doing it this
way is that the problem can be solved in a decentralized way; it's up to
the people involved in the project to decide how to split donations. By
default, they may opt to donate some or all of the donated amount
directly to the Debian project.
This may have a negative ramification in that there will ultimately be
disagreements in a few projects and there may need to be a new list
created for that sort of thing. There will, most likely, need to be a
Debian policy on this particular feature.
> 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?
That's left up to the project to decide, and the way that is decided is
going to vary from project to project. If it becomes too complicated to
track, the project may just throw its hands up and give the entirety of
the donation to the Debian project or another open source/free software
foundation.
That said, PaySwarm monetary amounts are accurate up to 10 decimal
places and can support hundreds of payees per payment. So if you need to
split $1 between 250 contributors, it's easily accomplished.
> 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?)
As outlined above, it depends on the project and team. There is no
single answer to this question, but I think you will find that it's
fairly easy for most projects to come up with a rough list of who should
get what.
> and what about those who can't or don't want to accept donations …
There is no obligation to receive the donation. They either don't
collect it from the payment service, or they can place something in the
control file that explicitly states "no donations". However, we've found
that most people prefer to list their favorite non-profit instead of
blanket-rejecting all donations.
> 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).
Without getting too far into the details of PaySwarm, I think that we
now have an open technology to do this and do it well. That doesn't mean
that there won't be social concerns along the way.
The ultimate goal is to try and figure out how we can fund more open
source development by making the financial transaction as frictionless
as possible.
It's a problem worth tackling.
> 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.
Ok, I'll re-direct this thread there, then. Thanks. :)
> 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.
>
Forgive me for not knowing the details. I've been running Debian since
1998, but don't know the internals of PTS. Your link points to APT, is
PTS a subset of the apt project, or is PTS the website/database behind
the link you provided?
> 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.
Exactly which URLs are you talking about?
> 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.
What do you mean by "the API", "other services", and "this URL"?
> 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]. :)
Great, thanks for the questions and the pointer to the correct list. I'm
getting ready to re-post the original e-mail there.
-- manu
--
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
http://blog.meritora.com/launch/
Reply to: