Re: Question to all candidates: financing of development
Le Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 08:18:00AM +0100, Raphael Hertzog a écrit :
>
> Imagine a DD contacts you, she wants to setup an infrastructure to finance
> Debian related projects (i.e. paying people to enable them to work on the
> projects that they'd like to do for Debian) but she wants to avoid the
> main mistakes made during Dunc-Tank; in her project:
> - everybody can propose projects to be financed
> - the projects to be financed are selected by the Debian developers and
> by the donors
> - eligible projects can only concern new developements and not recurring
> tasks
Hi Raphaël,
I see two separate processes in the infrastructure that you describe above:
- A meeting point where project proposers can find potential sponsors.
- An endorsment system where the Debian project supports project that
meet some criteria.
I wonder if there are already existing platforms where projects can be proposed
for funding. The Google Summer of Code is a very special example, but there may
be more generalist ones. Why not simply use them instead of setting up a new
infrastructure? Then for the endorsement, I would propose to nominate delegates
after discussion on debian-project, if we find volunteers to deal with the
requests for official blessings.
What I like in your proposal is that the projects will need a donor, as opposed
to directly use Debian money. I think that showing the capacity of finding a
donor is an important filter before engaging a contractual relationship with
people to deliver software developments. Also it is important to decide the
person and the price at the same time as proposing the project, and leave to
the donor the decision whether the price is reasonable. For an global project
like Debian, it is a very difficult problem to solve, as one hour of
development has radically different costs around the world…
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
Reply to: