On Sun, Oct 08, 2006 at 11:54:46PM +0000, Bill Allombert wrote: > > This means that someone with a lot of money will be able to decide which > projects will be completed just be funding them. Other projects will not > be completed because people will lack time and incentive even if these > projects would improve Debian more. Developers will tend to propose task > that are likely to be funded. The "sponsors" will have a large decision > power of what is done and rightly since they funding the development. > I don't see how those are entirely bad things. Some people have technical ability but no money and so they volunteer their time. Others, have little technical ability but lots of money and so would rather donate money. Saying, "that is bad because the sponsors will have a large influence" ignores the fact that this is exactly the situation in which we are now. The only difference is that rather than money, it is time which is used to "influence". Either way, the more popular parts of the project will get more attention. Does this mean that some parts which need attention get neglected? Yes. However, the popular parts, which generally affect the most users, will get more attention whether it is people giving their time or their money. For example, there are some changes I would really like to see to svn-buildpackage. However, I know nothing about Perl, except for how to spell it. If I had the money for it (which sadly I do not), I would seriously consider hiring someone to fix that for me. Do you say that such a thing is bad? Becuase I have decided how to dedicate my money? What if I was a Perl hacker extraordinaire and decided to fix it myself? Is that bad because I have decided how to dedicate my time? The point is, time and money are both resources. If someone tried to pressure me into putting my time into something which did not interest me, I would likely refuse. If someone likewise tried to pressure me into donating my money to something which does not interest me, I would likely refuse as well. The strange thing is that while I see lots of discussion about why people should or should not be allowed to fund particular developers to do particular things, I don't see any similar discussion about why people should or should not be allowed to spend their time working on the parts of Debian that interest them most. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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