On 06/13/2013 10:33 PM, Paul Wise wrote: > We already have means of donating to Debian. Making that more > accessible is on the todo and probably your work could help out > here. > > http://www.debian.org/donations > http://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2013/05/msg00025.html
Great, would love to help out in some way. Who should I chat with about that? > We have a mechanism for maintainers to point folks at upstream > donation pages, it is only used by two packages so far though: > > http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata > http://upstream-metadata.debian.net/table/Donation Yes, that's one of the problems we had identified. If the donation mechanism is more complicated than 'apt-donate apache2 $5', then the likelihood that it will be used goes down dramatically. > Tying donations to one payment processor doesn't sound like a good > idea to me. I agree. PaySwarm is designed to be an open payment standard. Once the standard is finalized you'll be able to port your financial account from one PaySwarm payment processor to another just as easily as people can port their cellphones today. The specs are designed to prevent vendor lock-in. There is only one payment processor today (Meritora), but once other PaySwarm payment processors pop up, if you don't like Meritora for whatever reason, you can switch (while preserving all of your financial account data). If you'd like to learn more about PaySwarm, there are a set of blog posts that we did for Mozilla Hacks here: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/04/web-payments-with-payswarm-identity-part-1-of-3/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/04/payswarm-part-2/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/04/web-payments-with-payswarm-purchasing-part-3-of-3/ > I am very concerned about motivations of Debian project volunteers > being distorted by money so I would suggest only allowing donations > to Debian as a whole or directly to individual upstream projects. We could certainly do the former, although the upstream software authors may not like that because it could be construed as the overall Debian project overreaching into what should be a conversation between the package maintainer and the upstream authors. We could also do the latter, but I'd like there to be a possibility of a package maintainer getting a reward of some kind for past work performed. The Debian Security team does an excellent job, and have saved us on numerous occasions. I'd love to have some way of sending them something in appreciation. What if we did the following: 1. If information exists in the package to distribute the donation automatically (these 35 people should get exactly these percentages), then we do that. 2. If the package lists the upstream project donation account, then we do that. 3. If there is no such information, then we send the money to the Debian project. Does that sound reasonable? > I am also concerned about the distortions that monetisation has had > on the web and worry about the consequences of embedding this into > browsers. Both the modern web and modern web browsers are very > concerning in general though. I agree, although we may differ on what the root of the problem is. I don't think it's money or monetization, as that is a neutral thing, just like technology (and Debian). It's not inherently evil or good. We tend to think of it more from a systems perspective. Certain systems result in certain behaviors. The Web's monetization has happened mainly based on advertising dollars (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, etc.). The system of advertising results in an attempt to please the advertisers, since they're the customers. Citizens are consumers, and tend to be viewed as 2nd class citizens to the advertisers. We think that there are better models for the Web, but that the core infrastructure for those models doesn't exist yet. The fundamental thing that we're trying to do with PaySwarm is to democratize finance. That means that we're trying to put the tools that are only available to large corporations and Wall street into the hands of most people. It's analogous to how the Web democratized publishing... pretty easy to put something out there these days that can reach hundreds of millions of people. We want to do that to our global financial infrastructure. I think software developers are going to play a major role in building this new Web-based financial infrastructure. I also agree with you that we have to be careful and methodical about how we build this system. The hope is that by doing it right, we can bring more money into the ecosystem (in a good way) and tackle some long-standing problems (under-staffing, interface design, testing, infrastructure, etc.). I've been using Debian since the late 1990s. I love this project. I'm primarily interested in trying to build the core donations infrastructure in a way that is going to truly help the Debian community. -- manu -- Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny) Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc. blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch http://blog.meritora.com/launch/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/51bb804e.5030...@digitalbazaar.com
