Re: Position Statement to the Dunc-Tanc "experiment"
First I will state my personal position. I think the original intent
and idea of the DPL - to leverage available funds to assist the process
of finishing a stable release - is a great one. Money is a tool to be
used, there's no sense letting it lie around just gathering interest.
The fact that one or two others might happen to be getting paid to do
their Debian work does not in anyway affect my own work, it does not
make me "second class". My reasons for supporting Debian and free
software have nothing to do with money or paid work, and they remain the
same whether or not anyone else is getting paid for it. If anything I
find the idea of someone else getting paid makes me more motivated,
because it makes me think "good, we'll be able to get more done then".
On Thu, 2006-10-26 at 19:46 +0200, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
>
> So, to summarize DTs effects on Debian: It has demotivated a lot of
> people who now either resigned, simply stopped doing (parts of their)
> Debian work or are doing a lot less than they did before DT was
> started. The freeze got delayed and getting the release out on schedule
> has become nearly impossible. We are unable to see any good virtue in
> this "experiment".
>
Now despite my support for the experiment, I agree with this summary of
the results of the experiment.
It seems to me that the result of the experiment is that it has revealed
a profound cultural divide within the Debian project. There are two
groups, and the views of the two groups in regards to the significance
of money are wholly alien and antagonistic to one another.
The first group, the minority, believes that any use of money to
increase the time developers spend on Debian is always intrinsically a
bad idea.
The second group, the majority, sees, like me, that money is a tool
which when available can be used to help things happen more quickly.
They are not threatened by the notion of using money to increase the
concentration of time that people can spend on Debian.
I think the result of the experiment is that the first group has had to
face just how unperturbed the second group is at the idea of using money
to increase developer time, and that the second group has had to face
just how antagonised the first group is over the same idea.
Following from these results, my conclusion from this experiment is
that, as long as the first group still exists within Debian, this kind
of funding idea ought not to be repeated in the future, not in the same
way. I do not believe the project gains any advantage by deliberately
driving out the contributors from the first group. (There was none such
deliberation in this instance, that is why is it was an "experiment", to
reach these conclusions.)
Perhaps it is yet possible to arrive at a different funding model in the
future in consensus with the first group?
Drew
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