Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money
Russ Allbery:
> [..] 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. [..]
>
> 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? [..]
>
> 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. [..]
> [..] 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. [..]
Nobody is suggesting that it won't be a hard problem to get right, but progress isn't made by worrying about all the things that could possibly go wrong. Figuring out a blueprint for organising large-scale work using more directly-democratic principles would have lots of benefits far beyond this project.
Some of the things you talk about are already issues everywhere. For example, "people having strong feelings about money" is already used as justification for companies to keep salary negotiations a secret, even though economists generally have acknowledged that workers get a better deal if salaries are transparent.
Then some of the other things you mentioned are not necessarily downsides. Making a loaded statement about what work the project considers the most important isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if it stands against the loaded statements that Big Tech already puts out worldwide, that give engineers (including open source engineers) a bad name in front of people that don't know there are less monopolistic ways of creating and using technology.
Injecting a bit of risk into a 25-year old project isn't such a bad thing. We've been at 1k developers for about 10 years now, if I remember my numbers right.
X
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