Re: Proposal #3: Upstream/Debian Project donations (was: PaySwarm-based donations)
On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 09:55:11PM -0400, Manu Sporny wrote:
> This is a highly re-worked proposal for performing upstream donations
> and donations to the Debian project. Major changes include:
>
> * Debian developers are not allowed to receive any direct monetary
> contribution or change the upstream DONATE file in any way.
At this point, there is nothing here that is Debian specific, so I echo
the suggestion that you take this to a cross-distro list, and/or the FSF,
GNOME, and other big upstreams.
I do, however, want to repeat my point that this kind of thing is likely
to be quite divisive even outside one distro. Donations from end-users
are highly likely to go mainly to highly visible projects, such as
Firefox/Iceweasel and LibreOffice. Those projects are of course deserving
the support, but it leaves all the less-visible but crucially important
projects without the support. Which end user is going to realise that,
say, freetype or GNU Make or, say, piuparts, even exists?
I am, of course, biased, but I think piuparts is a nice example here, from
at least two points of view. I wrote it originally, but I am no longer
involved with it. How long should I still get a share of the donations?
Further, piuparts is a testing tool only used by distro developers,
and while it has a big impact on the quality of the distro, it's not
something that will be installed on an end-user system. How will an
end-user realise that they could donate to the piuparts developers as a
thank you for all packages being installable, upgradeable, and removable?
I thus continue to think that this whole approach of systematic,
program-specific donations is misguided, and it'd be best if you
dropped it.
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