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Re: Usage of Debian's Money



Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:

> Since both of you want examples of possible uses of money, here you have
> some that I quickly came up with:
>
> 1/ Grant some amount of money to the release team to offer as bounties on
> release blocker issues that are not going forward.

While such one-off bounties would help the release further along, would
it be worth it? As far as I see, our releases are slow, because we're
terrible at dealing with RC bugs, we have tons of packages lingering
in a sorry state, and there's no bounty that'd fix any of these.

It's a bit of an exaggeration perhaps, but bounties for release blocker
issues sounds like pulling a tooth. It makes the pain go away, but if
you don't wash your teeth, it doesn't help much in the long run.

> 2/ Have the ftpmasters write up a spec of what needs to be done to finally
> have "ddeb support" (or "PPA" or ...) and use Debian's money to contract
> with someone (unaffiliated to Debian?) to actually implement the spec under the
> supervision of ftpmasters. Copyright of the code written would fall under
> Debian/SPI.

The problem with this approach is that writing the spec and supervising
the person or people implementing it is no small task, either. I dare
say it is actually harder than writing the code itself. Therefore, I
would find it unfair to spend money this way, unless ftpmasters are
getting paid for their part too.

I find the GSoC model reasonably acceptable for these kinds of things,
however.

> 3/ Buy advertising space on various media to recruit new contributors and
> lead them into our (improved) mentoring infrastructure. Offer goodies as
> rewards to new contributors who successfully played some game which
> tricked them into contributing to Debian.

This, on the other hand, does sound like a reasonable idea. However, I
think that our primary goal should not be the recruitment of new
contributors (not directly, anyway), but to increase our visibility, and
to show the wider world, that we're more than a group of geeks who do a
distribution.

I won't go into details right now (too many other questions to answer,
sorry!), but feel free to prod me, if you want me to explain
further. (Although, I probably touched the subject partially elsewhere -
but not quite in this context, so.. if you want me to explain, let me
know, and I'll happily do so.)

-- 
|8]


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