On 07/04/07, MJ Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
3) [...] If I donate a million pounds to the Debian cause, what > happens to this investment? Money decisions have mostly been left to the projec A 10-million dollar donation question was posed in the recent project leader debates. See around lines 645 and 753-869 of http://people.debian.org/~mjr/irc/dpl-debate-2007/dpl-debate-botless.html Anthony Towns is uncertain whether we could handle it; Wouter Verhelst would refuse it; Aigars Mahinovs would give it to Ubuntu; Steve McIntyre would spend it on conferences; the others didn't really answer AFAICS. There might be other things in the platforms on http://www.uk.debian.org/vote/ and we should know who's elected in a few days.
Lets say if I was a investor, why would I invest into the debain project, what incentives are in place? Where is the inestment going or would people just waste even more time fighting on how the investment is allocated?. Or do we just not accept any type of investment, if we dont accept any type of investment who pays for the conferences, servers and legal expenses. If the project is going to grow then some type of frame work (if any) needs to be in place. Am I correct in saying there was some type of dispute few months ago?
[...] > - The investment is placed into a Escrow type account. > - If the project is completed on the time the allocated investment is > passed to the project leader. > - The would be the projects leaders responsibility to share the > contribution accordingly. > - The project is only completed so long its agreed upon by the > investor and the project leader. I dislike that this leaves developers without payment while they're doing the work, which is a bit vulnerable, not sustainable. Some portion should be paid at start and for each milestone. I know this gambles some of the money, but it does give better feedback and management than this all-or-nothing payment plan. It's quite normal, that if I'm working for someone new, I insist on some guarantee if it's more work than I'm willing to gamble. I think most of the debian-related projects which people would fund are going to be more work than a developer would usually gamble.
Simple, give the investor the option to place the investment into a escrow or as a initial investment. It would then be up to the project leader to encourage the investor to make the payment as an initial investment. Thanks. John
