Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money
On Sat, Jun 01, 2019 at 12:29:04PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
>]] 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.
That's definitely my concern, too. I don't want to have to consider
funding when working on stuff for fun, and I also don't really want to
reorganise how things are done to accommodate others who do.
>> 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.
+1
Having said both of these, I think there *are* reasonable places to
spend money that shouldn't affect us so much. The areas in question
are those where we struggle to find any/sufficient volunteer effort to
do what we need - bureaucracy etc. Volunteer book-keepers are few and
far between, IME.
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
"When C++ is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb." -- Steven M. Haflich
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