On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 04:07:54PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Adrian Bunk <b...@debian.org> writes: > > > My biggest high level concern is the income side, since this is the most > > difficult part and will likely also be the most controversial one. > > I could well be entirely wrong, but the part that I would expect to be the > most controversial is that, once Debian starts spending project money to > pay people to do work that other people in the project are doing for free, > the project is doing a form of picking winners and losers.
Perhaps I am wrong on that, but I am associating the term "picking winners and losers" as an ideological statement used by US Republicans and Libertarians. For most people outside the US the underlying "government is bad" philosophy doesn't make any sense. > We're deciding > as a project that some people's work is valuable enough to pay for and (by > omission if nothing else) other people's work is not, and for all the good > intentions that we have going in, there are so many ways for this to go > poorly. I would say "work most people would never do unpaid". My personal experience with real-life self-organizing projects is that the hardest part is usually finding volunteers who clean the toilets daily. There are areas like DSA or security support that are essential, but not the "package the cool latest software" kind of work where volunteers are easy to find. >... > I assume the above is the sort of thing that Sam is referring to when he > says that we need to have a higher-level discussion if we're going to > pursue this idea. One higher level topic is the point from my first email that the overall handling of money in the project should be balanced and many of the problems are mitigated if additional money is not spent only on salaries. "Debian pays much for A but they want me to pay for B out of my own pocket" can be a problem - I wouldn't pay travel costs for Debian events out of my own pocket as long as Debian is spending money for the salaries of Outreachy interns since it would feel as if I were financing these salaries by paying for the travel costs myself. If being a DD automatically comes with the benefit of travel costs to a DebConf or MiniDebConf always being paid by Debian, then there would likely be a higher acceptance for salaries being paid. If salaries are being paid, then there should also be a proper budget reserved for people organizing events like a MiniDebConf so that they don't have to spend much time finding sponsors. But this direction of higher-level discussion only makes sense if there is a realistic prospect of a reliable long-term money source generating at least US$ 1m per year - there are completely different discussions depending on whether the additional money available to be spent each year would be US$ 0.1m, US$ 1m or US$ 10m. cu Adrian -- "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days. "Only a promise," Lao Er said. Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed