On Wed, 29 May 2019, Ansgar wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-05-29 at 10:38 +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> > On Wed, 29 May 2019, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
> > > One of the popular answers to this and some other problems is "nobody sat
> > > down and wrote the code". Not sure what can we do about this class of
> > > reasons.
> >
> > Use the $300,000 on our bank accounts?
>
> I heard that this didn't work out well the last time ("dunc tank"),
> though that was before the time I followed Debian development.
Yes, I was there (and mention it briefly in the questions of the talk I
gave) but it's been a long time ago. There are things to learn
from this failed experiment (such as "don't let the DPL decide alone who
gets paid") but there are also many reasons to believe that we are no
longer in the same situation. At that time, the number of persons working
on open source as part of their paid work was rather low and the jealousy
aspect was likely more problematic than it would be today. We have been
getting used to have Debian contributors being paid (such as on LTS) and
we know that with appropriate rules, the social impact of the use of money
is acceptable.
The topic still needs to be approached carefully but I believe that we
should aim to have this discussion and build some framework where we can
leverage money to complete projects and tasks that we find important
but that have not gone forward through volunteer work.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Support Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
Learn to master Debian: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
