Re: Question for DPL Candidates: Debian $$$
Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 12:43:06PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > paying grants to other charities to evaluate debian,
>
> What does this mean? Paying someone to "evaluate" debian? I don't get
> this ...
As I understand it, charities currently pick their operating system by
either doing an independent evaluation (an old guide of that sort of
style from when I last worked for a non-profit is at
http://www.volresource.org.uk/swit/select.htm ) or by buying from an
approved list like http://www.ctxchange.org/directory/30
Use of debian seems to be limited because it isn't on any approved
lists and charties can't get funding for an independent evaluation at
the moment. Would you support using donations to fund one or both of
those?
> > to adapt it to meet their needs and deploy it,
>
> Who will be payed to do the development and deployment? [...]
Whoever the charities would select. I think it's not up to me because
I have a conflict of interest.
> > or to hold meetings to do that?
>
> That, on the contrary, is perfectly reasonable and I will be all for
> that.
How would you like that to work?
> > I was at a meeting for local voluntary and community infrastructure
> > organisations and the most-mentioned reason for not considering
> > debian seemed to be a lack of resources. Meanwhile, the debian
> > project seems to have surplus resources. This seems a bit of a daft
> > situation.
>
> Please expand this argument. Who was looking for resources and which
> kind of resources where they looking for?
Some attendees at the recent NAVCA.org.uk event http://bit.ly/EGL5
seemed to be saying that they didn't consider free and open source
software because of a lack of resources to get the decision-makers to
meet/work on such things. They weren't looking for resources, but they
didn't know that people donated money to organisations for the general
promotion of debian. I think that lack of awareness among non-profits
is something that debian's money could help to address, if there's
enough for the forseeable in-project needs.
I'm undecided about the most effective kind of resources, but there
only seems point investigating further if a general aim of targetted
debian promotion to NPOs would be funded.
Does that explain it and do the candidates think surplus donations
could be used to help NPOs to consider debian in some way?
Regards,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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