Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money
Ximin Luo <infinity0@debian.org> writes:
> A lot of people are already paid full-time to work on Debian. Wouldn't
> it be better to additionally have some other people be paid full-time to
> work on Debian under a democratic mandate (our voting system) rather
> than under corporate orders? At the very least, it would be a good
> social experiment to gain insight from - something like that hasn't not
> been done much in the world before.
In an ideal world, with some sort of cooperative allocation of resources
in the context of a mutually supportive society where fundamental human
needs are met automatically, yes, I would love to work out the details of
such a system.
In the messy, mostly-capitalist world in which nearly all Debian project
collaborators are embedded, in which some of us have considerably more
money and resources than others, where costs of living vary *wildly* by
where you happen to live, and where one person's extra and mostly
unimportant spending money is another person's food and rent, I am afraid
that social experiment has a much higher chance to result in very real
losses to the project. The failure mode here is that we lose contributors
because of hard feelings over who gets paid and who doesn't get paid and
how much they get paid and how they get paid, and the project ends up
weaker and more fragile.
People have strong feelings about money, sometimes even if they don't
think they will. Not all people, not all the time, but it's a maxim
because on average it's true. Money ranks right up there with politics
and religion as likely to cause the most drama, the most hard feelings,
and the most misunderstandings. That's because money is really
complicated: it's not just a way to meet one's physical needs. It's also
affirmation, it's a measure (sometimes competitive) of worth, and there's
a whole lot of social programming and momentum behind the feeling that who
gets paid is a measure of who is the most valuable.
I respect the desire to try social experiments and be bold, but my counter
question is whether Debian as a project has the right training and the
right people to conduct a proper social experiment *here*, on *this*
particular topic. Do we have economists? Psychologists? Do we know what
the nature of the experiment would be?
For example, you say "democratic mandate," but what *specifically* does
that mean? Are we going to vote in a GR on who gets paid and who doesn't?
Wouldn't that risk compensation turning into a popularity contest, or at
least being perceived that way? If we're paying someone under such a
system, is there any accountability if they don't do what we're paying
them for? Is there someone supervising them, and if so, who? Or are we
just giving people $X and saying "do whatever you want with it"? This
stuff is very not easy to figure out.
You rightfully point out that people are getting paid now, and that
payment determines, partly, their priorities in the project. That's true,
but that payment comes from a huge variety of different sources and there
are very strong social norms in the free software community about what
sorts of things people writing those checks get to determine for the
community and what things they don't. And we have a lot of ways of
handling when some contributor no longer is getting paid to do something
they were doing, and a firm understanding that this isn't *because* of our
community, although it may be a problem our community has to find a way to
deal with. These dynamics change a *lot* when the money is coming from
the project itself. That money is special; it's not just one more company
or foundation or whatnot that is providing resources to aid in a general
volunteer project. It becomes a loaded statement about what work the
project considers the most important and, worse, *who* the project
considers important to do that work.
It's a real problem for the project that we don't have a better way of
allocating resources, and it hampers us in some ways compared to, say,
Ubuntu or Red Hat, where there is a single, stable funding stream to
maintain the distribution and set firm priorities. There are some things
we don't do as well as those distributions because of it. But, for
instance, while I know a lot of people volunteer work for Ubuntu, I
personally have very little desire to do anything with Ubuntu because
people get paid to do that. Particularly now that my free time is rarer
and more precious to me, doing unpaid work for an organization that also
has paid staff is hugely demotivating. It's entirely plausible that
paying for resources would mean that Debian would end up with *less*
resources than we have now, if other volunteers feel the same way.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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