On 14-06-13 23:24, Paul Tagliamonte wrote: > Right, but this leads to one of two things: > > - No money is shared with dependencies (leading to people flocking to > awesomewm, gnome, kde, chrome, wine, apache2, etc) > > - Money is shared with dependencies (leading to people flocking to > gcc, linux, libc6) Which is a problem, why? What happens with the money should be decided by the maintainers of the package. Before you'll see "flocking", there will have been such a decision already (otherwise there's no money and thus no "flocking"). Given that, I can see only a few possible outcomes: - The maintainer(s) decide to put all the money in a fund that is used for things like meetings among the package's maintainers. In other words, there is no direct financial benefit to be had, and thus I don't expect people to be interested in joining purely for financial benefit. - The maintainer(s) set up some complex scheme by which financial benefit is equally distributed among contributors based on size of contribution. People may flock to that package, but the net result will be a better package. This is a good thing. If many people try to join the packaging team, eventually all the low-hanging fruit will be gone and people will start looking for other packaging teams to join, because the possible benefit no longer outweighs the investment to be made. - The (main/sole) maintainer decides to egoistically take all the money for themselves. They alienate all other maintainers, and nobody ever wants to work with them anymore. The package suffers, until it is hijacked or taken away by decree of the TC or similar. This is a possible problem in the proposed scheme, but I don't think it could involve any "flocking", since there's no benefit to be had. - The (main/sole) maintainer decides to quit their job and live off donated money instead. Debian gets a more focused developer (and, thus, better packages) as a result. This is essentially similar to the second scheme, except that other people will have a harder time keeping up with the full-time developer. Unless you think money is dirty, I don't see how any of this would involve "flocking" in a problematic manner. Am I missing something? [...] > I'm not sure, but I've seen at least one high-profile F/OSS project > maintainer (with project email, writing from it) saying "I've written a > patch for this bug, it's done, but you need to give me money before I > release it". Putting an official system into place might make this more > common / easier to make look "official". If/when this were to happen in Debian, I think it would be fair to kick said developer out of the project, on the basis of them violating the "do not stand in the way" rule of constitution §2.1.1. -- This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space. If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today. -- http://xkcd.com/1133/
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