Kevin Mark skrev:(sorry about not responding before, I've been moving my email server as well as busy on other fronts.)
On Sat, Sep 16, 2006 at 09:50:05AM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
All of them. There are people who are very much part of the core team and who make substantial improvements in Ubuntu who are volunteers. One of them being Matthew Garrett.Hmm. I guess i'm confused as to who _is_ being paid and will have to investigate this further. Ubuntu is a FLOSS business and a FLOSS project, IIUC. I'm curious about how they interact, intersect and where they are seperate a la 'venn diagrams'. And of the feelings of paid vs non-paid participants in each. But I guess that is for an Ubuntu list.
If anybody feels this is offtopic here, please do tell me. (Can stuff be offtopic for -curiosa?).
Some developers are paid. Most aren't. Local teams (teams doing translations as well as local advocacy) aren't paid, but the Community Manager is. So most groups have some paid and some volunteers. Ubuntu has half-yearly developer summits where the specifications for the next release are written. Those are attended by both Canonical employees as well as volunteer developers, some of whom have their travel and lodging sponsored by Canonical, some of whom get there on their own and pay for themselves. There have also been visitors from other companies, like rPath and Intel.
So how do they interact? In most cases, who pays for your food never enters the discussion. If you have a great idea and am willing to put work into it, all the more power to you, the only cases where ideas are stopped/changed are if they don't fit into the big picture. In Ubuntu, because you can do something doesn't mean it's a supported configuration. (That's "supported" as in "bugs will not just be rejected", not "Canonical is willing to support that configuration if you give us money".) Employees can naturally be told "you will work on this" even if it's not something that particular person really wants to do; volunteers can't be told to do something in the same way, just like in other companies.
Some people are afraid that Debian, if it funds developers, will change into a place where people are only optimizing for maximum chance of being hired and paid money. We do, to some extent have that in Ubuntu. People who are decent (but often not great) developers who are quite clearly trying to get hired. We have had the opposite too, where really good developers have turned down an offer because they're happy being volunteers and they're happy in their current job (or education).
> Obviously folks have
started to become more interested in keeping tighter controls on what constitutes a <<civil discourse>> which may or may not be because of Ubuntu. I think its a good change as long as it doesn't stifle people from communicating at the expense of people feeling like <<one misspoke word>> and they're being expelled.
While there is the "threat" of expellation in the Ubuntu Code of Conduct I have never seen anybody use that as an argument. People say "please behave, you're acting in an unacceptable fashion" rather than "IF YOU DON'T STOP FLAMING, YOU WILL BE EXPELLED". Social pressure is very, very effective at keeping people within the bounds of acceptable behaviour.
- tfheen