Hi Raphael, On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 08:18:00AM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > Hello, > > this is a question to all DPL candidates. > > 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 > > What advice would you give her? A very good question; thank you for giving me the chance to reply to it. Let me first say that I do not think it is a bad thing that some people get paid to work on Debian while some others don't. That's a perfectly normal thing; some people like Debian so much that they don't want to do anything else, others see Debian just as a hobby, which they'd lose if they'd get a job that involves Debian. I also don't think it is a bad thing, in principle, if Debian were to pay people to work on Debian. However, it is generally a bad idea if some cabal were to select who could get Debian monies and who couldn't; I believe that is the main problem that existed with the Dunk-Tank story. > What other pitfalls from Dunc-Tank must she pay attention to? Not sure. > Do you have concrete suggestions for her on how it should be working? I know that the FreeBSD community has experimented with paid development for FreeBSD in the past; the first such attempt was done by Poul-Henning Kamp[1]. AIUI, the model they have used goes something like this: - Some FreeBSD developer decides to do sponsored development. This developer announces that fact, states the areas that the sponsored development will be about, an amount of money that would be required for the plan to go through, and asks for sponsorship pledges. - People with an interest in the things this developer intends work on pledge monies. There have been people who pledged as little as one euro, and companies who pledged several tens of thousands. - If the amount of community pledges seem reasonable enough and, in the judgement of the people in charge of the FreeBSD foundation (which holds monies in trust for FreeBSD), the cause is worth it, then monies may be pledged to the cause by the foundation as well. > Would you encourage her to go forward or would you try to convince her to > forget this idea? I believe the FreeBSD model keeps a good balance between spending money on causes that benefit the project on the one hand, and not being too cabalistic on the other, and would encourage anyone who wants to attempt something similar in Debian. I do not plan to actively pursue this myself, however. I don't think having some "infrastructure" for sponsored development within Debian is a good idea. [1] http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/funding.html -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html
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