Re: Why do we take so long to realise good ideas (Was: Difficult Packaging Practices)

[Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org>]

On 5/29/19 11:01 AM, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> On Wed, 29 May 2019, Ansgar wrote:
>> On Wed, 2019-05-29 at 10:38 +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
>>> On Wed, 29 May 2019, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
>>>> One of the popular answers to this and some other problems is "nobody sat
>>>> down and wrote the code". Not sure what can we do about this class of
>>>> reasons.
>>>
>>> Use the $300,000 on our bank accounts?
>>
>> I heard that this didn't work out well the last time ("dunc tank"),
>> though that was before the time I followed Debian development.
> 
> Yes, I was there (and mention it briefly in the questions of the talk I
> gave) but it's been a long time ago. There are things to learn
> from this failed experiment (such as "don't let the DPL decide alone who
> gets paid") but there are also many reasons to believe that we are no
> longer in the same situation. At that time, the number of persons working
> on open source as part of their paid work was rather low and the jealousy
> aspect was likely more problematic than it would be today.

I clearly remember that one heated topic was about the level of salary
for a release manager. Many thought 6K USD was too much and were shocked
about the amount. I probably was at the time. Now, I'm 43, I have
children, higher life cost, and responsibilities. I'm not shocked
anymore, but I can easily understand others would still be.

Let's *not* start this again.

> The topic still needs to be approached carefully

Yes.

> but I believe that we
> should aim to have this discussion and build some framework where we can
> leverage money to complete projects and tasks that we find important
> but that have not gone forward through volunteer work.

I'm not sure if I'm in the favor of Debian slowly transforming itself
into yet another world company.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)