Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

]] Russ Allbery 

> 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.

This is a hugely important point: we're already seeing conflicts where
people conflate the paid-for LTS effort with other team's priorities.
If we move that funding closer to Debian, we're effectively saying that
«this funded effort is important and all relevant teams, volunteer or
not should support it», rather than trusting teams to act in the
currently more creative anarchic way.  Adding more tension internally in
the project, which I think spending money in this way will do, is a bad
idea.

> Particularly now that my free time is rarer and more precious to me,
> doing unpaid work for an organization that also has paid staff is
> hugely demotivating.  It's entirely plausible that paying for
> resources would mean that Debian would end up with *less* resources
> than we have now, if other volunteers feel the same way.

Well said, and I feel the same way.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are