Re: Will Debian grow and stay?
On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 08:08:57PM -0800, ken keanon wrote:
> 1. The volunteers decided that there should be some financial reward for their work. They could accept an offer by a well established enterprise to 'buy' over their work or they could collectively decide to form a corporation.
I am not a Debian developer, but it appears from my user perspective
that a good portion of the work is taking upstream packages (software
maintained by non-Debian people) and passing bug reports along,
submitting patches, and repackaging the source files for the Debian
distribution. I'm guessing there's a fair number of Debian developers
who also spend time on KDE, Gnome, Apache, SAMBA, etc, but I would be
guessing that most of them don't.
Therefore, "buying their work" would be buying their services as a
repackager, bug manager, and patch manager, coordinating patches and
bugs with the upstream developers.
Once a package has been released and distributed under the GPL, I do not
believe that the license can be changed. Or atleast not without the
consent of every single developer who contributed some portion of the
source code. That might take awhile with some packages. =)
> 2. Volunteers dwindle to an ineffective few, preferring to spend their time on work with more reward and recognition.
This is more realistic. But I think this would be a catastrophic case
somewhere down the road.
The Work-Needing and Prospective Packages page gives you an example of
packages that need adopting:
http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/work_needing
http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
Regarding support, Debian has backing from several big names in
technology, including Sun, HP/Compaq, VA Software, and Progeny:
http://www.debian.org/misc/equipment_donations
http://www.debian.org/partners
Jeremy
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