Bill Allombert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > This means that someone with a lot of money will be able to decide which > projects will be completed just be funding them. Other projects will not > be completed because people will lack time and incentive even if these > projects would improve Debian more. Developers will tend to propose task > that are likely to be funded. The "sponsors" will have a large decision > power of what is done and rightly since they funding the development.
I'm missing how this is in any way different than the way Debian has worked for years, or for that matter how most open source projects of any size work. The largest focused leaps in development often come about when, for one reason or another, someone can work full-time on solving a particular problem, which generally means that someone with money is willing to spend that money to solve that problem. Things that don't attract that sort of attention still get done, but not as quickly. The only way that the world couldn't work this way is if we banned people from working on Debian for pay, and I've already posted at length my opinions on that. One of the nice things about dunc-tank as it's proposed is that it has the potential of improveing this situation by providing a pool where people can invest money in things that may not attract normal commercial sponsorship, whereas right now the paid work that's done on Debian depends largely on the employers of Debian developers and quite frequently is on things of specific interest only to that employer or smaller portions of the user community. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]