Re: Using money to fund real Debian work
Bill Allombert <ballombe@master.debian.org> writes:
> 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'm missing how this is in any way different than the way Debian has
worked for years, or for that matter how most open source projects of any
size work. The largest focused leaps in development often come about
when, for one reason or another, someone can work full-time on solving a
particular problem, which generally means that someone with money is
willing to spend that money to solve that problem. Things that don't
attract that sort of attention still get done, but not as quickly.
The only way that the world couldn't work this way is if we banned people
from working on Debian for pay, and I've already posted at length my
opinions on that.
One of the nice things about dunc-tank as it's proposed is that it has the
potential of improveing this situation by providing a pool where people
can invest money in things that may not attract normal commercial
sponsorship, whereas right now the paid work that's done on Debian depends
largely on the employers of Debian developers and quite frequently is on
things of specific interest only to that employer or smaller portions of
the user community.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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