Let me start by saying that I think it would be valuable to find ways to get more people paid to work on Debian; I was excited to see that in your platform. I'm nervous because of our past experience in this area. I'm really hoping you have answers though because I agree with you that lack of funding is something that slows down our project and I'd like to find a way to get more people funded, but I think it's important for us to do so in a manner that people are comfortable with. In a recent mail you said >Yes, external grants and external paid work. None of that is >controversial. by which I think you're saying that the idea of helping Debian Developers get external grants to work on Debian would not be controversial. In that same mail you talked about potentially turning the DPL into a paid position, acknowledging that would be controversial. In the past Debian did try to pay developers for working on Debian; the project I'm most familiar with was the dunc-tanc experiment [1]. That ended up being rather controversial. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/10/msg00026.html It seems like having the Debian Project and DPL working to get more paid developers might run into some of the same issues. In particular there might be a perception that there would be two classes of developers and that volunteers would be frustrated/disappointed they were not getting paid. How would you address the concerns in the position statement I linked above? --Sam
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