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How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

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  How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> - 2021-03-18 18:50 +0100
    Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Jonathan Carter <jcc@debian.org> - 2021-03-18 20:40 +0100
      Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org> - 2021-03-19 11:40 +0100
        Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Christian Kastner <ckk@debian.org> - 2021-03-19 13:30 +0100
        Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Ulrike Uhlig <ulrike@debian.org> - 2021-03-19 14:00 +0100
          Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> - 2021-03-19 15:50 +0100
            Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> - 2021-03-19 18:00 +0100
        Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Sruthi Chandran <srud@disroot.org> - 2021-03-19 21:00 +0100
      Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> - 2021-03-19 13:10 +0100
        Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Louis-Philippe Véronneau <pollo@debian.org> - 2021-03-19 18:00 +0100
          Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Didier 'OdyX' Raboud <odyx@debian.org> - 2021-03-22 21:50 +0100
            Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Louis-Philippe Véronneau <pollo@debian.org> - 2021-03-23 16:10 +0100
              Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Gard Spreemann <gspr@nonempty.org> - 2021-03-23 16:20 +0100
                Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Jonas Smedegaard <jonas@jones.dk> - 2021-03-23 16:40 +0100
                  Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Gard Spreemann <gspr@nonempty.org> - 2021-03-23 16:50 +0100
                    Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Jonas Smedegaard <jonas@jones.dk> - 2021-03-23 17:30 +0100
                      Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Christian Kastner <ckk@debian.org> - 2021-03-25 10:00 +0100
                        Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> - 2021-03-25 10:50 +0100
                    Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2021-03-24 10:30 +0100
                    Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Christian Kastner <ckk@debian.org> - 2021-03-25 09:40 +0100
              Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Christian Kastner <ckk@debian.org> - 2021-03-25 09:40 +0100
                Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Louis-Philippe Véronneau <pollo@debian.org> - 2021-03-25 18:40 +0100
      Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@debian.org> - 2021-03-22 19:40 +0100
        Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> - 2021-03-22 20:10 +0100
        Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2021-03-22 20:20 +0100
          Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> - 2021-03-22 20:40 +0100
            Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2021-03-22 21:00 +0100
    Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> - 2021-03-18 21:00 +0100
      Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Jonathan Carter <jcc@debian.org> - 2021-03-18 21:30 +0100
      Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Sruthi Chandran <srud@disroot.org> - 2021-03-19 20:10 +0100
      Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> - 2021-03-21 12:40 +0100
      Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org> - 2021-03-22 21:20 +0100
    Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects Sruthi Chandran <srud@disroot.org> - 2021-03-19 18:30 +0100

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#1977

On 23.03.21 16:04, Louis-Philippe Véronneau wrote:
> On 2021-03-22 16 h 43, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
>> Le vendredi, 19 mars 2021, 17.49:54 h CET Louis-Philippe Véronneau a écrit :
>>> I for one would be less motivated to help with videoteam tasks if I knew
>>> someone was paid to organise a miniconf.
>>
>> Would your motivation also be affected if an individual was paid only for a 
>> specific task that noone in the team found particularily interesting to do?
> 
> I'm not opposed to paid labor per-say. I think the previous examples of
> Debian paying TOs to do accounting is a good one.
> 
> So to answer your question, I wouldn't be opposed if we contracted an
> enterprise to handle our gear for us.
> 
> I don't think it's something particularly fun to do and I see that more
> as an administrative task, akin to accounting.
> 
> "Organising a miniconf" isn't though.

Why would someone get paid to organize one, though?

I've never organized one, but it was my impression from others that this
was always done voluntarily and from own initiative.

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#1996

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On 2021-03-25 04 h 18, Christian Kastner wrote:
> Why would someone get paid to organize one, though?
> 
> I've never organized one, but it was my impression from others that this
> was always done voluntarily and from own initiative.
> 

Jonathan said he didn't have time to organise one, Raphael replied it
would have been possible to hire someone using Debian money for that.

It's all in the thread :)

-- 
  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  Louis-Philippe Véronneau
  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋   pollo@debian.org / veronneau.org
  ⠈⠳⣄

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#1900

Jonathan Carter dijo [Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 09:16:15PM +0200]:
> On 2021/03/18 19:46, Raphael Hertzog wrote:> I announced this on
> debian-project[1] and on Planet Debian[2] a while ago.
> > But at this point, we have only funded a single project[3], leaving us
> > with more than 25 KEUR available for further projects.
> > 
> > I did not expect this lack of interest... if I were not running Freexian,
> > I would have proposed projects out of the long list of distro-tracker
> > wishlist bugs...  I enjoy working on this project and I wish I had more
> > time for it.
> > 
> > 1/ How do you explain this lack of interest?
> 
> I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think
> that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying
> to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well.
> For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently
> working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median
> Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well.

I might be too biased by my own reality, and that of some of my peers
with whom I have most contact, but I completely agree with Jonathan's
assessment of this point.

Debian is very large and diverse, and I know that any generalization
will underrepresent people. Maybe this would mostly apply to
long-standing DDs, or whatever. That said, I feel many areas of Debian
consist of people quite similar to myself -- Fully employed
professionals who can _spare some cycles_ for the aspects they can
contribute to the project.

In my case, fortunately my livelihood is guaranteed, and depending on
many things, I will have more or less time available for the projects
in Debian I most care about... Adding money offers to the mix won't
change the results.

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#1902

>>>>> "Gunnar" == Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@debian.org> writes:


    Gunnar> In my case, fortunately my livelihood is guaranteed, and
    Gunnar> depending on many things, I will have more or less time
    Gunnar> available for the projects in Debian I most care
    Gunnar> about... Adding money offers to the mix won't change the
    Gunnar> results.

For me that's true up until the point where I can make most of what I'm
making from my day job on Debian or other FOS activities.
Which is to say there's a boundary condition.  On one side of that
boundary, money doesn't motivate someone who is professionally employed.
on the other side, enough money allows someone to consider a career
change.
I think some of us would jump at that if we could.

--Sam

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#1903

Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@debian.org> writes:

> Debian is very large and diverse, and I know that any generalization
> will underrepresent people. Maybe this would mostly apply to
> long-standing DDs, or whatever. That said, I feel many areas of Debian
> consist of people quite similar to myself -- Fully employed
> professionals who can _spare some cycles_ for the aspects they can
> contribute to the project.

> In my case, fortunately my livelihood is guaranteed, and depending on
> many things, I will have more or less time available for the projects in
> Debian I most care about... Adding money offers to the mix won't change
> the results.

The unpleasant realization that I came to a while back is that the free
software world has fundamentally changed in large part due to our success,
but in a way that is quite challenging for volunteer projects.

Free software won, in the sense that many (all?) of the largest
corporations in the world are now based heavily on free software.  Many
well-funded corporations have embraced this fact and started investing in
free software development.  As a result, the pace of change in the free
software world has increased dramatically, both in terms of rate of change
in specific pieces of software and in terms of the quantity of new useful
software that is being generated.

Debian has invested a lot of effort into improving our infrastructure and
tooling so that we can scale sublinearly with the amount of software that
we package and the amount of churn in the software that we do package.  We
have been largely successful!  But sublinear does not mean zero, and I'm
not sure the slope of increased effort over increased churn is that much
less than 1.  As a result, this dramatic increase in the pace of software
development requires a similarly (if slightly lesser) increase in the pace
of Debian development.

However, this is where we encounter the fundamental economic problem: the
pace of change in free software in general has occurred because of a
dramatic increase in the number of people who are paid to develop free
software as a substantial portion of their job.  This unlocked significant
additional resources in the form of paid work hours for free software.
This is great for free software as a whole (overall; it causes problems as
well, but I won't get into that here).  But Debian is not structured (nor
do I think we want it to be structured) in such a way as to get a similar
significant infusion of resources.

Some project members have always been able to work on Debian during paid
work time, and that hasn't changed, and possibly has increased slightly as
a second-order effect from the growing commerical acceptance of free
software, but the change is nowhere near as dramatic as the acceleration
of development from, e.g., Facebook, Google, and Intel paying significant
number of engineers to do full-time free software devleopment.

This is a deep structural problem that we're going to struggle to solve
with modest changes such as increased efficiency to try to make our
scaling more sublinear, or increased recruitment (of still primarily
unpaid volunteers).  There is more happening than before, and we're
struggling to keep up, let alone get out in front and lead.  This is due,
fundamentally, to a lack of resources, and it's hard for me to see how we
can close that resource gap while still being a volunteer project (nor do
I want us to stop being a volunteer project).  For example, one obvious
way to get a similar scaling of resources would be to change from being a
volunteer project to being an industry consortium with paid staff so that
we can be the recipient of that increased corporate spending.  But I
highly doubt most Debian Developers (myself included) have any appetite
for that.

The obvious alternative is to scale back our aspirations and find a
narrower niche in which we can find the resources to scale to keep up with
that niche.  It's unsatisfying, but to some extent it's already happening;
for example, despite heroic efforts packaging individual applications,
it's not really feasible to do Node development purely using software
packaged in Debian the way that is to do Python or Perl development.  And
this is not new; doing Java development using only software packaged by
Debian has been similarly iffy for a while.  We just don't have the raw
resources required to keep up with packaging the entirety of complex and
extremely fast-moving ecosystems, and to some extent have acknowledged
that and put our attention elsewhere.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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#1904

>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:


    Russ> This is a deep structural problem that we're going to struggle
    Russ> to solve with modest changes such as increased efficiency to
    Russ> try to make our scaling more sublinear, or increased
    Russ> recruitment (of still primarily unpaid volunteers).  There is
    Russ> more happening than before, and we're struggling to keep up,
    Russ> let alone get out in front and lead.  This is due,
    Russ> fundamentally, to a lack of resources, and it's hard for me to
    Russ> see how we can close that resource gap while still being a
    Russ> volunteer project (nor do I want us to stop being a volunteer
    Russ> project).  For example, one obvious way to get a similar
    Russ> scaling of resources would be to change from being a volunteer
    Russ> project to being an industry consortium with paid staff so
    Russ> that we can be the recipient of that increased corporate
    Russ> spending.  But I highly doubt most Debian Developers (myself
    Russ> included) have any appetite for that.
I'm engaging because you seem to have ignored an option that is obvious
    Russ> at least to me given the discussion this all came out of.

I'm wondering if you have any interesting thoughts so I'm asking.
    I'm not trying to be confrontational or to disagree with anything
    Russ> you've said, just wondering if there are things we all can
 learn from considering more.
    
I'd like to ask you to look at the elephant in the room.
This conversation came up specifically because we were talking about an
organization loosely associated with Debian paying some Debian
developers.

Yet, you didn't consider any of the middle options in your
analysis--only the option of staying effectively all volunteer or going
all industrial consortium.

do you have any thoughts on the middle options like having industrial
consortiums that we work with so that Debian developers who are
comfortable in that model can pursue that?

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#1905

Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> writes:

> I'd like to ask you to look at the elephant in the room.  This
> conversation came up specifically because we were talking about an
> organization loosely associated with Debian paying some Debian
> developers.

> Yet, you didn't consider any of the middle options in your
> analysis--only the option of staying effectively all volunteer or going
> all industrial consortium.

Yes, this is a very good point and I didn't address that.

> do you have any thoughts on the middle options like having industrial
> consortiums that we work with so that Debian developers who are
> comfortable in that model can pursue that?

Personally, I'm pessimistic that this would be stable in practice, but
it's possible that I'm borrowing trouble where none need exist.

The specific outcome that I would expect from that sort of hybrid model is
that the folks with the stable funding stream and full-time engagement in
Debian would come to dominate the project, not out of any malice or
nefarious intent, but simply because they have more resources and
engagement and Debian is effectively their job.  In other words, were the
consortium to be successful at the level required to close the resourcing
gap, I would expect the rest of Debian to effectively collapse into it,
leaving an industry consortium core surrounded by a halo of volunteers.

The incentives that I can see would seem to push in that direction.  For
example, it's difficult to do project management when some folks on the
project can put steady and predictable effort into it and other folks on
the project are volunteers and by the nature of volunteer work are often
not going to be able to promise timelines or level of effort for large
projects [1].  The natural tendency is to shift the most critical work
onto the most reliable people.

This is a perfectly fine model for an effective non-profit, but it doesn't
look very much like Debian does today.

Note that I wouldn't expect this to happen with more modest engagements
with increased funding, such as what Raphael is proposing.  It would
require very significant increased funding and corresponding staff.  But
neither would I expect more modest efforts to have much long-term effect
on the overall resourcing gap, unless we coupled that with decreasing
Debian's aspirational scope.

That said, maybe I'm completely wrong.  I am certainly not an expert in
non-profits, and if someone has experience or research on volunteer-run
non-profits with paid staff that have avoided this outcome, I'd be curious
to read it.

[1] I want to acknowledge that some volunteers do promise timelines and
    level of effort and fulfill those promises.  Indeed we ask this of the
    DPL candidates every year.  But I think this is unusual for work that
    requires more advance scheduling than the sort of shift sign-ups that
    you'd see at, say, volunteer food banks.  Most volunteers will not be
    able to do this for the length of a major Debian project, hence the
    regular questions to DPL candidates about the viability of the time
    committment.  I also have personal qualms about whether asking for
    reliable commitment without compensation from people who live in an
    otherwise capitalist society is entirely ethical.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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#1867

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Hi Raphael,

I'm not running for DPL, but since you asked...

Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:

> 1/ How do you explain this lack of interest?
>
> I have read recently from other Debian members that they have a feeling
> that Debian is stagnating, and I share that feeling to some degree. If we
> had plans and motivated people, surely some of those would have stepped up
> to implement them in exchange of some remuneration. Do you share that
> feeling too?

Could it be that people are being protective of their motivation?

I'd guess that many people know about studies showing that one can turn
a pleasurable hobby into a tiresome chore simply by being paid to do it.

I think one might be able to avoid that to some extent if it's clear
that the work is something that has attracted no volunteers so far,
despite being a good idea that's been around for a while -- that should
allow people to draw a line between those things they were happy to do
unpaid, and the thing that they're being paid to do, such that they
don't stop doing both when the payments stop.

> 2/ I really want this initiative to be successful so I'm now looking into
> ways to make it work. I'm considering paying someone to identify useful
> projects. That person could talk to various teams, make proposals based on
> their own experience, and even run a poll among Debian developers. The
> idea is that we want to find high-impact projects that can help Debian get
> out of this "stagnation".
>
> What do you think of this idea?
>
> I'm considering past DPLs for this role as they have a broad knowledge of
> the project and usually also some vision for the future. But I'm open to
> anyone than can convince me they would do a good job for this. :-)

I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
your own criteria of course).

That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since
people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that
have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding
would almost certainly sort out once and for all.

You'd probably want to have some sort of oversight (e.g. some ex-DPLs)
just to ensure that the madder ideas get filtered out, but if you ask
people to only suggest ideas that they'd want to spend their own money
on if they had it to spare, that should ensure that most people don't
get too silly.

Also, one could say that the people suggesting the project should not be
the beneficiary, and should write some sort of report indicating how
well it went before they would get any new budget allocated.  People
that had thought of funding things that turned out to be successful
could then be given larger budgets to play with in future.

Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would
hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/    http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,    GERMANY

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#1868

On 2021/03/18 21:44, Philip Hands wrote:
> I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
> money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
> which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
> funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
> restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
> your own criteria of course).
> 
> That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since
> people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that
> have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding
> would almost certainly sort out once and for all.
> 
> You'd probably want to have some sort of oversight (e.g. some ex-DPLs)
> just to ensure that the madder ideas get filtered out, but if you ask
> people to only suggest ideas that they'd want to spend their own money
> on if they had it to spare, that should ensure that most people don't
> get too silly.
> 
> Also, one could say that the people suggesting the project should not be
> the beneficiary, and should write some sort of report indicating how
> well it went before they would get any new budget allocated.  People
> that had thought of funding things that turned out to be successful
> could then be given larger budgets to play with in future.
> 
> Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would
> hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work.

I think as things stand now, every DD pretty much already has the entire
Debian budget available at their disposal if they can think of a way to
spend it that benefits the project.

Something like the budget-per-DD idea might be good to encourage people
to actually use Debian money if they can, this is also why I brought an
expenditure policy into my platform, because I think people will feel
more comfortable spending Debian money if it's really explicit that it
really is ok to do so.

-Jonathan

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#1885

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On 19/03/21 1:14 am, Philip Hands wrote:
> ...
> Could it be that people are being protective of their motivation?
I agree with this point. Not all want money as their motivation.
> ...
> I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
> money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
> which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
> funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
> restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
> your own criteria of course).
>
> That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since
> people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that
> have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding
> would almost certainly sort out once and for all.
>
> You'd probably want to have some sort of oversight (e.g. some ex-DPLs)
> just to ensure that the madder ideas get filtered out, but if you ask
> people to only suggest ideas that they'd want to spend their own money
> on if they had it to spare, that should ensure that most people don't
> get too silly.
>
> Also, one could say that the people suggesting the project should not be
> the beneficiary, and should write some sort of report indicating how
> well it went before they would get any new budget allocated.  People
> that had thought of funding things that turned out to be successful
> could then be given larger budgets to play with in future.
>
> Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would
> hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work.
>
> Cheers, Phil.
This sounds like a good plan to me. We should have serious discussion on
this.

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#1897

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Hi Phil,

On Thu, 18 Mar 2021, Philip Hands wrote:
> I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
> money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
> which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
> funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
> restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
> your own criteria of course).
> 
> That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since
> people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that
> have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding
> would almost certainly sort out once and for all.

I really like your idea! I wonder if there would be some infrastructure
that would make it easy to describe projects and track how much money
has been allocated by the various DD.

I stumbled recently on opencollective.org which provides some nice tools
to maintain budgets in a transparent manner while working with a fiscal
sponsor to handle the administrative side.

But AFAIK it has nothing to help decide how to spend the money.

But if we find something usable, we could have a volunteer in charge of
entering the "votes" of the DD by adjusting a Debian pledge in a open
system (and have some associated ledger where the DD allocations are
tracked). 

It could be even be open to external donors to help reach the monetary
goal on a specific project.

> Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would
> hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work.

+1

Cheers,
-- 
  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀   Raphaël Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>
  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁
  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋    The Debian Handbook: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
  ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀   Debian Long Term Support: https://deb.li/LTS

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#1906

Hi,

On 18/03/21 at 20:44 +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
> I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
> money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
> which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
> funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
> restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
> your own criteria of course).

I think that it's important to remember that Debian's money comes from
donations (from individuals and various kinds of organizations). It's
important that we can face those donors and explain how we used their
money to improve Debian, and convince them that we made good use of it,
so that they will donate in the future.

I have doubts that this will be possible with such a plan.

I think that we are already in a state where it has been widely
communicated that Debian has money and can help developers pay for
whatever they need that benefits Debian. The number of declined requests
is probably close to zero. Also, we do not currently require a report
from people getting funded, so there's close to zero administrative
burden.

So I'm not sure there's a problem to solve here. Maybe it's just that
developing Debian does not require that much money.


Hijacking the thread a bit, if I may suggest, one area where we could
maybe spend more money is DebConf, with more travel sponsorship, and
higher-standard accomodation.  On the latter, some of us (me included)
are getting old, and I must admit that the prospect of sharing a room
with others, especially during such an intense event, has not been
particularly motivating. Anyway that's probably a question for when
DebConf can happen non-virtually again.

Lucas

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#1880

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On 18/03/21 11:16 pm, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Dear DPL candidates,
>
> when I was younger, I dreamed to be paid to do Debian work. But that was
> not possible, and that's the reason why I started my own company Freexian
> 16 years ago. Through those years I always kept this goal in mind (it's
> part of my personal mission statement for Freexian).
Some of my Debian work is sponsored by Gitlab and I am happy that I can
dedicate my whole time to Debian without having to worry about earning a
living. So I can understand your thought process.
> Now thanks to the success of the Debian LTS sponsorship and of the
> numerous companies that understand the importance of giving back to
> Debian, Freexian is in the position to pay some people to do useful Debian
> work. We formalized this with a mechanism to propose projects to be
> funded:
> https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/project-funding/
>     
> I announced this on debian-project[1] and on Planet Debian[2] a while ago.
> But at this point, we have only funded a single project[3], leaving us
> with more than 25 KEUR available for further projects.
This sounds like a good idea from which both our community and Debian as
a project can benefit.
>
> I did not expect this lack of interest... if I were not running Freexian,
> I would have proposed projects out of the long list of distro-tracker
> wishlist bugs...  I enjoy working on this project and I wish I had more
> time for it.
>
> 1/ How do you explain this lack of interest?
>
> I have read recently from other Debian members that they have a feeling
> that Debian is stagnating, and I share that feeling to some degree. If we
> had plans and motivated people, surely some of those would have stepped up
> to implement them in exchange of some remuneration. Do you share that
> feeling too?

I am not sure this is lack of interest. As mentioned by some of the
replies already, not all who contribute to Debian are looking for
monetary benefit. But yes, there are people who would be happy to
receive some monetary compensation to balance out their work. A bit more
publicity might help here. As Jonathan mentioned, mentioning in miniDCs
etc would help reach out to wider audience, mostly new comers (who might
need the monetary benefit the most).

> 2/ I really want this initiative to be successful so I'm now looking into
> ways to make it work. I'm considering paying someone to identify useful
> projects. That person could talk to various teams, make proposals based on
> their own experience, and even run a poll among Debian developers. The
> idea is that we want to find high-impact projects that can help Debian get
> out of this "stagnation".
>
> What do you think of this idea?
>
> I'm considering past DPLs for this role as they have a broad knowledge of
> the project and usually also some vision for the future. But I'm open to
> anyone than can convince me they would do a good job for this. :-)
This is a good initiative that I also believe should succeed. One person
working on identifying high impact projects sounds good, but being said
that, I do not think we can find a perfect way to work out things during
this election discussion. We can either have further discussions on this
topic (may be at -devel or -project) or you can go ahead with the
experiment and see where it goes.
> 3/ While the DPL can't spend Debian's money to pay people, the funds
> available in Freexian's reserve have been clearly earmarked in this
> direction by the LTS sponsors.
>
> Do you think the DPL should be able to propose projects that would be
> funded through this initiative, so that DPLs can have a bit more impact in
> areas where they want to improve the current situation?
I do not think this will be a good idea. DPL suggesting projects or
people to be paid will not go well. While I strongly believe that there
should be options for people to earn living by contributing to Debian,
Debian and DPL should not be involved directly with those activities.
> Sorry for the hard questions and thanks for the time you spend for
> Debian. :-)
>
> The election is always a period where we look back a bit and think of
> bigger changes, so even if those questions are meant for the prospective
> DPL, I welcome feedback from everybody really.
>
> Cheers,
>
> [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2020/11/msg00002.html
> [2] https://raphaelhertzog.com/2020/12/14/funding-debian-development-projects-with-freexian-first-project-received/
> [3] https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/project-funding/-/issues/4

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