Re: PaySwarm-based Debian donations
Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus@rath.org> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
>> Some of us (myself definitely included) are involved in free software
>> precisely *because* we're strongly anti-capitalist, anti-marketing, and
>> firmly opposed to the economic structures that dominate so much of the
>> rest of life. If your plea is for distributions to act more like Apple
>> in routing customer money to developers, I think you're going to get a
>> quite chilly reception. Avoiding that financial structure based on
>> "customers" and "producers" is the whole *point* for some of us.
> So would you even oppose, say, the inclusion of a package
> "payswarm-donate" that reads a DONATION file from /usr/share/doc/$pkg
> (if it exists) and provides a convenient "payswarm-donate $pkg $MONEY"
> command that uses Payswarm to transfer money to the destinations
> specified in the DONATION file?
No, at least not inherently. Debian isn't involved in that sort of
transaction; that's just a standard metadata format for upstream or
packagers to use plus a client for a web service.
The devil, of course, is in the details: handling of that DONATION file is
something that would need to be done carefully. I can see the potential
for much-increased tension with upstream if it's handled poorly.
Personally, I would just install upstream's file verbatim and otherwise
ignore it. If the packager wanted to add themselves, that could be
tricky.
I don't want to be pushy about my personal anti-capitalist bias. Other
people don't see the world that way, and that's fine, and even good.
Variety is the spice of life and all. I just want to guard my corner
where I *don't* have to participate in capitalist structures while working
on Debian.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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