Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Eldon Koyle <ekoyle@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 5:08 PM Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org> writes:
>
> > My biggest high level concern is the income side, since this is the most
> > difficult part and will likely also be the most controversial one.
>
> 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.  We're deciding
> as a project that some people's work is valuable enough to pay for and (by
> omission if nothing else) other people's work is not, and for all the good
> intentions that we have going in, there are so many ways for this to go
> poorly.

I think this is a very real concern.  What if payment was structured as task
bounties rather than hiring full-time employees? Then the payment becomes
an acknowledgement that a task is undesirable or time consuming, rather
than a status symbol.

-- 
Eldon Koyle