Hi. I've received a media query on this topic I am about to respond to. I figure the project would not take it well to find out what we're going to do from a news story. And obviously I don't know what we're going to do, but I do think I know where we ended up here and what I'd be open to helping with as DPL. There is insufficient support at this time to entertain paying salaried positions from Debian money. Some of the objections include the following. We don't have sufficient recurring funds. Managing people and handling performance issues is a skill set we do not select for. Doing that could create significant power imbalances. If we're going to start somewhere we'll start smaller. I think there are significant challenges and concerns paying for core functions related to our operating system from Debian money. It creates complex and potentially concerning feedback loops in terms of prioritization. Today, if you have (or pay for) the time, you gain significant influence. That has its own problems, but changing that would give power structures within Debian control over what Debian is in some strange and hard to understand ways. That makes a lot of us uncomfortable. So I don't see supporting using Debian money to pay the DPL, TC, packaging, release team, security, archive functions of ftpmaster or the like. However, encouraging others to pay Debian developers for Debian work seems to have general support. There are some concerns about how LTS is working, but overall we seem relatively happy. Expanding that model to help connect money with qualified Debian community members seems worth pursuing. Similarly, I'd be open to the idea of pursuing grants or contracts to fund projects not related directly to our operating system. There are a lot of things we do that everyone has to do: run IT infrastructure, keep our accounts, run a website, run conferences. Many of those we do our own special way. That's great, and so long as we have volunteers to do the work and those volunteers are happy and have the resources we need, we should keep right on being excellent. However, if our volunteers need help and contracting for effort to help them would make Debian better, we can consider that. Similarly, if we cannot find volunteers to do work but we could find volunteers too coordinate, then contracting may help. In areas not related directly to our operating system I'd be open to experimenting with using Debian money. As I've said, I won't drive that effort: it's simply not my focus as DPL. I'm happy to working with the right person to put together a proposal to experiment with a couple of grants. If you're interested and have the time to drive such an effort, approach me at Debconf or write to me after Debconf settles. I currently expect that I'd want to take such an experiment to a project wide vote before allocating funds. --Sam
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