| Again I would suggest looking at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4071 as a start to learn from the experience of others.
It’s a change in paradigm, but somehow I feel that this is needed if we want to keep up to par with other parties in the same field.
P.S.: At no point of time I am speaking about packaging work paid by Debian, but there are other functions that would benefit from having staff on full time dedicated to that function and being accountable to the Debian project and not to their employers. Cheers, Ondrej 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 morereadily than the opportunities.My core point is that I personally don't believe this is the rightexperiment for us. I don't think Debian is the right organization to trythis. I don't think we have the expertise and the muscle in the rightplaces 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 youtoo strongly, because if you're right and I'm wrong and we can make thiswork, it would be a very neat positive development. Funding free softwaredevelopment is an enormous problem right now that desperately needsoptions other than controlling sponsorship by for-profit companies withall 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 stillrather fragile, and I'm worried about putting more stress on it by makingthose sorts of loaded statements. But yes, it's entirely possible thatI'm being too cautious.I will say this: we only have the energy to make a small number of bigbets like this. If we work on funding development, we're *not* going towork on most, if not all, of the other big bet ideas that the projectcould work on.Now, that's possibly better than not working on *any* big bets, and we dohave a tendency to default into not changing anything, and that isn'tgoing to serve us well in the long run. I'm in favor of picking somethingbig 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 conclusionbefore adding more on.-- Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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