DPL Campaign Questions 002
Imagine a DD contacts you, she wants to setup an infrastructure to finance Debian related projects (i.e. paying people to enable them to work on the projects that they'd like to do for Debian) but she wants to avoid the main mistakes made during Dunc-Tank; in her project: - everybody can propose projects to be financed - the projects to be financed are selected by the Debian developers and by the donors - eligible projects can only concern new developements and not recurring tasks
I am imagining that this contact took place in public. I see very few legitimate and good reasons to approach the DPL privately, and as DPL I would encourage people to to work toward transparency unless there were very good reasons to do otherwise.
I would begin by telling her about the beauty of Debian as a gift economy community, and point out how great it is that I do not need to pay people to respond to my bug reports, apply my patches, release new versions, or develop any code not funded by corporate sponsors.
I would recount my recent experience with a different free software community, where there was much talk of the motivational power of money, and how best to link PayPal to bug tracking systems and write a boilerplate email response template suggesting a “donation” of $5,000 to help facilitate the development of any feature requests. I would confess my suspicion that if this trend continues, any goodness in that community will be driven elsewhere, and the gift economy, which I believe to be a very important basis for free software, will be severely undermined.
When I have completed my feeble attempt at political persuasion, if she is still firm and stubborn in her desire to proceed (and when monetary greed is involved, I expect this kind of stubbornness), I would suggest the following points:
- Keep it as far away from Debian as possible: if these projects can be accomplished upstream or externally, it is better for Debian if done that way.
- Ensure that the people saying that the work is necessary are not the same as the people who are the only ones with access to do the work and thus the only people getting paid, because when those decisions are arbitrary it reeks of corruption.
- There should be as little subjectivity as possible. It should be utterly clear when someone has completed the work and earned the monetary prize. There should be no discretion on the part of persons with privileged positions in Debian, especially if friendships or other personal relationships are involved.
Then I would ask her once again not to do anything like this.
Please finish "In ten years I'd like Debian...."
In ten years I'd like Debian to still be my favorite operating system. In ten years I'd like Debian to be egalitarian and cooperative. In ten years I'd like Debian to be completely free software, without a non-free section.