Frans Pop <elen...@planet.nl>: > IMO it is not up to us to decide to pass on money donated to us to other > projects. If sponsors and donors feel Gnash is worth sponsoring, they > will do so themselves. Money donated to Debian should be spent on Debian.
I'm not a DD but I already helped runnning debian booths in vienna. We did collect donations there. My experience is, that some donors do ask what we will do with the money but actually most of them don't. They are giving money to debian, because it's the site where they got their software from and because they trust us enough to assume that something useful will be done with the money. Some donors even lack the technical insight to understand the difference between debian and upstream ... Well, after the dunc-tank desaster I started to recommend to people not to donate any money to debian at all but to upstreams instead, because "debian has more money than it needs and giving more money to debian only will cause DDs to start arguing about it and effectively distracting them from working on the distro." - I would be happy if debian manages to fix this. Anyway, the feedback I got after recommending donations to upstreams was mostly that people generally don't know which upstreams need them and actually would do something useful with it. Also people don't want to only support the really big upstreams that have there on booth (OOo comes to mind) but are simply lost in the massive amount of useful software in debian. >From this POV supporting some selected upstreams with money actually seems something very valid to do. Especially if the money is spent in a way that fits well with the social contract. I agree that we should consider the fact that debian is not a commercial distribution. Perhaps this means that just employing somebody to do some task is not a good idea. (I believe this is one of the things that dunc-tank got wrong.) But there sure are other options and perhaps debian even can experiment with new ways to use money. Harald -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
