Dear Marc and fellow Debian friends, Thanks for this cogent and clear summary of the problem as you see it. It reminds me a bit of the problem of scientific peer-review; for-pay journals often ask people to donate their limitted time reviewing other people's work. Although the journal profits, the reviewer does not directly benefit from reviewing, usually. This has always struck me as backwards-incentives. In my opinion, the for-profit journals should compensate skilled and rare scientists for their time when reviewing papers. Everybody knows reviewing other people's papers for the first time is the most boring work. And nobody has enough time yet it's a bottleneck in the whole process. So why not pay for it? So long as the reviewer is respected enough to make a good judgment, it shouldn't be impossible to coordinate some direct compensation to ease the pain if the task is commonly-agreed to be painful. People pay a fee to take most certifying exams for example.
I wonder if the same could be applied to Debian? (note I am not a NM/DD yet) I think Debian has really taken off as a new nexus for open source and would expect if it were possible to make a money contribution to speed up the NM queue many would be up for it. After all, many of us have been using Debian for years and we all depend heavily on bug-free and recent software. I think Debian has served as one of the great successes in open-source quality assurance process (along with the Linux and BSD kernels) but there is clearly a problem of too much boring work leading to bottlenecks repeatedly. What if we make an AM salary-pool (open for donations all the time) and pay out once a month say 10% of the total pool in proportion to the number of people "checked"? Then more donations mean bigger incentives for any of the qualified AM's to grab some cash. Maybe there can be a very small number (1-3) of AM-managers that ensure AM checking quality doesn't go downhill or become corrupted as a result and ensures proper credits are given that lead to proportional compensation for those willing to put in the extra hours for AM checking in a major way? We certainly wouldn't want to get a new crop of for-money-only AM's, but this doesn't mean (to me) that we shouldn't consider helping our very rare, necessary and current skillful AM's devote more time to the cause without so much personal sacrifice. We would all benefit from getting the rare good developers sooner into the project I think. I remember a similar system has been used quite successfully for a long time in the RSA factoring challenge [1] to encourage integer factoring research; I myself was one of many people who tried (and failed!) to get a piece of the pie even though it was a relatively small amount of money being offered each quarter. It was simply divided according to a point-based system that made new longer-number breakthroughs worth more. Even though I never got paid I thought it was a fun and effective way of pushing my interest in a possibly dry field. Here is one of the unexpected humor breakthroughs that RSA encouraged.[2] I wonder what kind of knock-on effects we could expect if Debian had a similar system going. Best regards, Rudi 1. http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2094 2. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++/browse_frm/thread/a7cc5e74e12fca4d/6bedcbfa8c15b994?lnk=st&q=factoring+rudi&rnum=1&hl=en#6bedcbfa8c15b994