On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 08:35:35AM -0800, briand@zipcon.net wrote: > > Debian fans, > > I have the following modest proposal : > > Debian should start charging for high-speed apt-get/dselect/whatever > downloads from it's sites. 56k is free, anything faster you pay for. > Then we can pay people to work on the not fun stuff that needs doing. > > And people who download ISO's to sell should be paying a LOT. > > And this is not a troll. That may be up to the reader ... > Debian is worth it, although there has been a lot of grumbling about > it lately (some of it deserved). I personally would pay (more). > > I would like to see more effort directed at the "not fun" stuff in > development, like error handling, documentation, testing, correctness > of packaging. People working in their spare time don't like to do > these sorts of tasks and I don't blame them. > > I honestly think that more money could make Debian an even better > distribution. Debian can't charge for downloads even if they want to, for the simple reason that debian doesn't _own_ much of the equipment and bandwidth which has been made available to the debian project. Companies and other organizations like universities donate server space and bandwidth. Take a look at where the http.us.debian.org servers are sometime, to say nothing of all the international mirrors. Tracking who owes what would be a logistical nightmare and would soon relegate debian to the dustheap of obscurity. While I understand your motives, this idea sucks :) A former maintainer of a server in the http.us.debian.org rotation, -- Nathan Norman - Staff Engineer | A good plan today is better Micromuse Ltd. | than a perfect plan tomorrow. mailto:nnorman@micromuse.com | -- Patton
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