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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money



Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org> writes:
> On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 04:07:54PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> I could well be entirely wrong, but the part that I would expect to be
>> the most controversial is that, once Debian starts spending project
>> money to pay people to do work that other people in the project are
>> doing for free, the project is doing a form of picking winners and
>> losers.

> Perhaps I am wrong on that, but I am associating the term "picking
> winners and losers" as an ideological statement used by US Republicans
> and Libertarians. For most people outside the US the underlying
> "government is bad" philosophy doesn't make any sense.

*heh*.  Er, no, not even remotely.  I'm about the farthest thing you can
get from a US libertarian or someone who thinks government is bad.  I'm
sorry to have used a confusing term and muddled my point!

What I'm trying to get across here is that one of the rather fundamental
things about Debian is that everyone works on the things they care about,
and the project is mostly neutral about which of those things are the most
important.  What's the most important is decided in a very practical,
democratic way: it's what people are willing to work on.

This is isn't an unmitigated good by any stretch of the imagination.
Sometimes we really do want to decide that something specific is important
even if no one wants to do it.  And those are probably good places to look
at spending money, so I'm probably being too negative about the idea.  If
we can find other things like LTS where everyone thinks it would be great
if it somehow happened but people are generally not willing to do it for
free, I think those would be compelling places to spend money if we can
sort out the supervision issues.

I'm just quite nervous about breaking down that deep structure of Debian
where we vote with our own time and energy.  It's not perfect and it has
flaws, but we understand it well and it "feels" fair (at least to those of
us who have been in that world for a long time).  I know no one is
proposing this, but a shift towards a model where people pick priorities
for the project and then direct effort to work on those things and not
other things would, for me, start feeling a lot more like a job, and would
hurt my motivation a lot.  I'm not all that productive at the moment, so
that doesn't matter a ton for me personally, but I'd be worried others
would feel the same way.

But what I'm hearing in the thread is that this is probably an avoidable
problem if we're careful to pick and choose the right types of projects.
Janitorial work, as you mention.

(Also, the point is well-taken that "voting with time and energy" is not
particularly "pure" in Debian already, since various corporations vote
with their money to fund people to do various things they care about.  So
this is already complicated and is not a pure volunteer endeavor, to be
sure.  That said, my impression -- on the basis of no actual research, so
maybe it's wrong -- is that Debian is driven much less by corporate
priorities than a lot of large free software projects.  Certainly less
than the Linux kernel, to take an obvious example.)

> My personal experience with real-life self-organizing projects is that
> the hardest part is usually finding volunteers who clean the toilets
> daily.

> There are areas like DSA or security support that are essential, but not
> the "package the cool latest software" kind of work where volunteers are
> easy to find.

Yeah, this is a very good point.

> But this direction of higher-level discussion only makes sense if there
> is a realistic prospect of a reliable long-term money source generating
> at least US$ 1m per year - there are completely different discussions
> depending on whether the additional money available to be spent each
> year would be US$ 0.1m, US$ 1m or US$ 10m.

I very much doubt that our current donation-driven model would generate US
$1M per year on a sustained basis, particularly if you subtract DebConf
out of the mix (which I think we should, because that money is essentially
earmarked for a specific purpose and has a whole sponsorship and
advertising component that works great for the conference but that I doubt
we would be comfortable with in Debian proper).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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