On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 10:05:48AM +0100, Lars Wirzenius wrote: > You suggest that package maintainers get to suggest where donations go. > There's two glaring problems there. First, it disregards all the great > things people do to make Debian better that are _not_ about packaging > at all. Yeah, I agree with this concern as well. Everything which tries to pay/tip Debian contributors and stays at the package level only is doomed to fail, and bring with it some of the nasty consequences that have been highlighted. OTOH, I think it would be fine to have something at the package level to pass on donations to our upstreams, as well as to ease donating to the Debian project as a whole. See [1,2], already mentioned by Paul Wise in his initial followup to this thread. [1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2013/05/msg00025.html [2]: http://upstream-metadata.debian.net/table/Donation All the problems that have been highlighted are related to pay/tip Debian contributors and the distorsions that institutionalizing that process might introduce. But we already have at least 2 other kinds of entities that actively seek donations (upstreams and Debian as a project), and we do tolerate that. Making it easier for them to seek donations doesn't seem problematic to me. On the contrary, there is an active debate on how to sustain Free Software development while at the same time keeping it away of companies and the need of turning a profit (see for instance [3]). [3]: https://lwn.net/Articles/511260/ Using Debian as a conduit to *ease* donation flows to FOSS that already exist seems an useful thing to do to me. That is, after all, exactly what [2] was meant for, maybe it can be improved and become more successful adopting some of Manu's ideas. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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