Re: Proposal #3: Upstream/Debian Project donations
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>
> More seriously, you really can't understate how much the project felt
> generally burned by the huge Dunc-Tank controversy. I was one of the
> people who thought it was a decent idea at the time, but the outcome was
> far more disruptive than I think it was worth. I think an earlier post
> from you mentioned that you didn't find a lot of good information on-line
> about it. There is an article at:
>
> http://archive09.linux.com/feature/59300
>
> which isn't awful, but which more importantly has links to a variety of
> other articles and might be a good starting point to understand more about
> what happened.
Not awful, but selective to fit its narrative and some links have
succumbed to bitrot. Like it notes that I was hard-line on saying
that the experiment failed, but I wrote elsewhere that there should be
no shame in a experiment that fails to achieve its success criteria -
some say we can learn more from failures than successes. That doesn't
mean politicians should be allowed to redefine failed-with-lessons as
successes, though.
And yes, contrary to that article, a specific date (2006-12-04) was
given. Was it a commitment? Depends if you think an external business
can commit the debian project to anything.
I think it's also worth reading Anthony Towns's last (AFAIK) summary
of it, which I found using the search on http://planet.debian.net :
http://www.erisian.com.au/wordpress/2007/06/17/dunc-tank-report-ideas
That poses the key questions which the project probably needs to address
before some clear, structured funding can happen, but like I noted in
http://lists.debian.org/457fff10.nUzqcMR2IczfVDbR%25mjr@phonecoop.coop
dunc-tank itself refused to collect any data to help answer them. I'm
not sure we're any closer to answers yet.
Hope that helps,
--
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/
Reply to: