Re: Debian's relationship with money and the economy
On 2013-03-12 14:06, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
The Debian ecosystem includes many economical actors, be it companies
or individuals, but we tend to hide those aspects as if they didn't
exist.
I don't think that's quite the case. Perhaps Debian's commercial
partnership/sponsorship/supporter activities should be more active, but
they are not intentionally hidden.
For example:
http://www.debian.org/partners/
http://debconf13.debconf.org/become-sponsor.xhtml
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-sponsors-discuss
https://lists.debian.org/debian-companies/
As with many areas of Debian, we would benefit from having more
volunteers to work on these.
Despite Debian's non-profit status, IMHO Debian's growth and success
relies on the capacity of those "actors" to have some "economical
success". And there are many ways to help those actors, without
involving
any direct flow of money from Debian to them, in particular at the
press/publicity level.
Indeed, this is fairly uncontroversial. We already make press releases
about, and otherwise publicise Debian's partners/sponsors/supporters.
When a project ultimately benefits to the Debian project, we should
not fear to promote it even if that promotion helps the project
initiator to make money (and IMO even more so when the project
initiator
is a Debian member).
Do you agree with this analysis and statement? If not, why?
Yes, I am happy for Debian to promote things that it would otherwise
promote, irrespective of whether they make someone money, but instead
based on our own priorities of our users and free software.
I don't think that we should promote something through Debian media
purely because the project initiator is a Debian member. But I
recognise that in borderline cases something may be more interesting to
people around Debian because it involves a Debian member.
For full disclosure, I'm speaking of experience here since I tried to
get
some Debian press coverage of the fundraising for the liberation of
the Debian Administrator's Handbook. See
https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2011/10/threads.html#00001
for the discussion that happened.
It's not clear to me that this is closely related to the questions you
asked above. In fact, if we want to keep good relationships with
partners/sponsors/official supporters etc. we should probably restrict
how much we allow the commercial activities of individual Debian members
to be advertised through Debian media in an uncoordinated way, outside
our formal programs.
Since you say it's just an example, I won't comment more on the
specific case.
--
Moray
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