Re: paying people for Debian work (Re: Why do we take so long to realise good ideas (Was: Difficult Packaging Practices))
Hi,
On Mon, 03 Jun 2019, Paul Wise wrote:
> There are a few things that are possibly concerning:
Thanks for sharing those. Let me answer them.
> Freexian is essentially the only available-to-hire provider of
> services for Debian LTS, as the Freeside link doesn't lead anywhere
> useful. This means that Freexian essentially does not have any
> competition in the provision of these services. Individuals or
> companies who don't like Freexian's offering do not have any other
> choices, short of going to the general Debian consultants list, who
> may or may not have the needed skills and would take time to search
> through.
That's correct. But the agreement was always that the relationship
was non-exclusive from the Debian point of view. I.e. someone else
could setup "Debian LTS by XXXX" and Debian would not endorse one more
than the other.
> The funding breakdown for the LTS team appears to be 48% Freexian, 31%
> volunteer/unknown, 21% other companies. I don't have any data on the
> proportion of LTS work done by each of these groups, but I get the
> feeling that the majority of LTS uploads are done by Freexian folks.
That breakdown does not reflect reality at all. Indeed the vast majority
of the work is done by contributors paid by Freexian.
> This means that if Freexian decides to end its provision of services
> for Debian LTS, then the level of work done for LTS would go down
> significantly. Were this to happen, it would either significantly
> damage the image of Debian due to having to end the LTS effort or
> require us to do work which we have had a hard time finding volunteers
> for in the past.
That's correct. However, there's no reason for this to happen. I do care
about Debian and the uninteresting paper work that I have to do to keep
the Freexian service running is paid for.
That said there are multiple ways to avoid this:
- Debian organizes this by itself (it's possible, the criteria I use
to allocate work hours to contributors are relatively transparent)
- Debian defines clear rules for external services leveraging the Debian
name to fund Debian-related work and encourages to have more of those
> There is strong coupling between Debian and Freexian in the language
> on the Debian LTS pages and the Freexian pages. This is free
> advertising for Freexian's LTS services and representing Freexian's
> LTS services as "blessed" by Debian or somehow "official", which could
> be objected to by other companies who might decide to provide security
> support services. It may be prudent to remove or alter the language on
> the Debian LTS pages.
I don't see the need to act pro-actively here. The current description
is a fair representation of the reality. It might not be the ideal
situation that we want for Debian but then again I suggest we work on
defining criteria for all services/companies that would aim to have the
same kind of "Debian blessing".
> LTS. This means that the individuals/organisations doing consulting
> around Debian miss out on the opportunities to work on LTS.
This is not true. Many have joined the set of contributors paid by
Freexian. Some of the contributors are working as individuals
(freelancers) and others as members of an organization that invoices
Freexian (Codethink for Ben Hutchings for example).
You are saying that they don't have an opportunity to work on LTS
outside of Freexian. That's also not true but the easy path is
definitely to go through Freexian who has an established situation
and whose join rules are open-enough to avoid the need to create
a competitor.
> Freexian doesn't fund LTS contributors who are not DDs/DMs: this
> eliminates skilled developers from outside Debian who could contribute
> to LTS via Freexian and eventually work on Debian more generally. This
> seems to have prevented at least one former Debian member who was
> interested in Freexian's offer from contributing. It might also make
> LTS funding seem like a reward for Debian insiders.
Or it creates an incentive to contribute to Debian to be able to join
the set of paid developers.
I'm sorry that you see this as a problem. This job is about contributing
to Debian and we need persons who already know how to do this. Contrary to
GSOC and others, our purpose is not to train outsiders to contribute to
Debian.
> The structure of using existing Debian contributors and funnelling
> most of the funding to them through one company reduces incentives for
> companies wanting security support to direct their employees to work
> on Debian security support. This means that our contributor base stays
> more static and reduces the chance that new folks will join us. An
> alternate model where each of the companies currently sponsoring
> Freexian LTS services instead directed their employees to spend some
> hours on Debian security support seems more likely to lead to new
> people getting involved.
I certainly agree that the efficiency of the contributors paid by Freexian
means that companies that used to allocate time to their employees to
contribute to long term security support has disappeared. There are
exceptions though, for instance credativ with their PostgreSQL support.
That said, the net result is a better service to our users. The model
where each company allocates a few hours per week to a few employees
was not reliable and not reactive enough. They would typically only care
about the packages that they use and would leave huge gap in the support
both in terms of packages covered and in terms of when the updates is made
available to users.
I also don't think that this matter of fact changes anything on chances
to have new folks in Debian. Either you are interested by Debian or not,
the fact that your boss told you to work on something related to Debian
doesn't change much. YMMV.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Support Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
Learn to master Debian: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
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