On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 11:20:47PM -0400, Manu Sporny wrote: > Thanks to everyone that has participated in the discussion thus far. :) > I think there have been a number of solid concerns and issues raised, > which I'm going to try and wrap into a proposal below. > > I think it might help simplify the donations goal by framing it in the > following way: > > Ultimately, where to send a donation is the decision of the person or > organization doing the donation (the benefactor). > > Package maintainers, software developers, and project organizations can > lobby for where they'd like to see the money go, but it's the benefactor > that decides where they'd like to send the money in the end. Given that > premise, all a package maintainer, software developer, or organization > can do is make suggestions to the benefactor.
I am afraid I find this whole approach not just questionable, but likely to distort, and damage, the free software development processes in general, and Debian development in particular. I suggest we, the Debian project, approach this very carefully. While the reality is slightly more complex, we are currently in a state where we make technical decisions mostly based on what is the right thing to do. We sometimes disagree on what the right thing is, but the disagreements are based on our interpretations of shared goals and values, and different evaluations of the various solutions, and different emphasis on various technical virtues. The more we introduce money into the development process, the higher the risk is that we get away from making decisions based on what the technically right thing is for us and for our users, and the more we will decide things based on how we can maximise our income. Be careful what you reward, because you will get more of it. Even if you don't actually want more of it. You suggest that package maintainers get to suggest where donations go. There's two glaring problems there. First, it disregards all the great things people do to make Debian better that are _not_ about packaging at all. We have translators, documentation writers, wiki gardeners, bug triagers, people who answer questions on the debian-user mailing lists in various languages, people who help staff Debian booths at various conferences, people who run user groups. And so on, and so forth. None of this work is highly visible, and it's really hard to target them with donations, yet it's often more work than maintaining packages. Second, even considering package maintainers only, targeted donations would unfairly favour those maintaining the most visible packages. If maintaining, say, Iceweasel or GNOME or Emacs results in getting money, that will certainly lessen the interest in maintaining, say, Make, coreutils, or Grub. If having your name on four hundred packages gives you ten times more money than maintaining one package well, what happens to average package quality? These are not unsolveable problems, I'm sure. However, I don't think your attitude to solving them will result in a good solution, and you may wreck things on the way. You push for a particular payment solution, and dismiss the experiences and concerns of your critics. I fear this is not a recipe for success. (Disclaimer: I used to have a consulting contract to "improve the technical quality of Debian", which gave me a livelihood for about 1.5 years. The lasting result of that was piuparts.) -- http://www.cafepress.com/trunktees -- geeky funny T-shirts http://gtdfh.branchable.com/ -- GTD for hackers -- 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/20130616090548.GD31164@havelock
