Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money
Ximin Luo <infinity0@debian.org> writes:
> 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.
Yup, this is fair, and I admit that I tend to see the problems more
readily than the opportunities.
My core point is that I personally don't believe this is the right
experiment for us. I don't think Debian is the right organization to try
this. I don't think we have the expertise and the muscle in the right
places to be the project to lead in this specific area.
However, this is just my opinion, and I don't want to try to persaude you
too strongly, because if you're right and I'm wrong and we can make this
work, it would be a very neat positive development. Funding free software
development is an enormous problem right now that desperately needs
options other than controlling sponsorship by for-profit companies with
all the baggage that carries.
> 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.
I think I'm coming from a place where I feel like our community is still
rather fragile, and I'm worried about putting more stress on it by making
those sorts of loaded statements. But yes, it's entirely possible that
I'm being too cautious.
I will say this: we only have the energy to make a small number of big
bets like this. If we work on funding development, we're *not* going to
work on most, if not all, of the other big bet ideas that the project
could work on.
Now, that's possibly better than not working on *any* big bets, and we do
have a tendency to default into not changing anything, and that isn't
going to serve us well in the long run. I'm in favor of picking something
big and going for it. But I think we should pick one or two big things,
no more, and try those things until they reach some agreed-upon conclusion
before adding more on.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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