Re: Entrepreneurial freedom for the Debian Partners Programme
Hi Martin,
I recognize that you sent this to the soon-to-be DPL but I'll take the
opportunity (on debian-project to leave debian-vote for possible replies from
the DPL candidates) to share my thoughts.
In my experience in recruiting organizations to provide services (hardware,
hosting, DNS, CDN, etc.) to Debian, being able to offer ongoing acknowledgement
(ie, prominent webpage such as /partners) is the single most effective tool in
my toolbox (others being coordinated press releases, blog postings, and member
benefits).
Consequently, I am in favour of a recognition mechanism that values both cash
donations and service donations against the same scale, yielding a
platinum/gold/silver/bronze type ranking that is reassessed annually.
Something like: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors.shtml
I do not find it antithetical to FLOSS principles to acknowledge, publically,
the contributions that organizations provide to Debian, be they academic
institutions such as MIT or corporations such as Bytemark.
With regards to fundraising, I'm in favour of using a service such as
crowdrise.com -- and only one such service -- even if that means paying 3-5%
(plus credit card fees, if applicable). By leveraging such a platform, we can
brand our donations portal, avoid managing multiple payment processor accounts,
conduct campaigns (no, not spam ... more like "earmark your donation for X or
Y"), etc.
In support,
Luca
On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 07:37:23PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
> Dear about-to-be-DPL,
>
> I know discussion period is over but Lucas encouraged me to post
> this now, so blame him.
>
> We've had a discussion over on -project about the revival of the
> Debian Partners Programme, which I hijacked into meta-level.
> tl;dr would be: while I am interested and want to work on this,
> I would only do so with enough "rope", which I call "entrepreneurial
> freedom".
>
> The thread is here:
>
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2015/03/threads.html#00025
>
> and I am particularly interested in how you would respond as DPL to
> my last two messages (Lucas reply included in the middle for
> completeness):
>
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2015/03/msg00031.html
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2015/03/msg00032.html
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2015/03/msg00035.html
>
> PS:
>
> In this context, let me quickly also highlight my response to Paul
> Wise, who doesn't want Debian to turn into an "advertising agency":
>
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2015/03/msg00036.html
>
> I am fully aware that this is a contentious topic and the only way
> the project would succeed is if people can identify with it. There
> must not be any "sell-out" and we must not acquire more money than
> we can reasonably use towards the improvement of Debian.
>
> --
> .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@d.o> @martinkrafft
> : :' : proud Debian developer
> `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck
> `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
>
> "when a gentoo admin tells me that the KISS principle is good for
> 'busy sysadmins', and that it's not an evolutionary step backwards,
> i wonder whether their tape is already running backwards."
--
Luca Filipozzi
http://www.crowdrise.com/SupportDebian
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