On Sat, Jun 01, 2019 at 12:29:04PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: >]] Russ Allbery > >> These dynamics change a *lot* when the money is coming from >> the project itself. That money is special; it's not just one more company >> or foundation or whatnot that is providing resources to aid in a general >> volunteer project. It becomes a loaded statement about what work the >> project considers the most important and, worse, *who* the project >> considers important to do that work. > >This is a hugely important point: we're already seeing conflicts where >people conflate the paid-for LTS effort with other team's priorities. >If we move that funding closer to Debian, we're effectively saying that >«this funded effort is important and all relevant teams, volunteer or >not should support it», rather than trusting teams to act in the >currently more creative anarchic way. Adding more tension internally in >the project, which I think spending money in this way will do, is a bad >idea.
That's definitely my concern, too. I don't want to have to consider funding when working on stuff for fun, and I also don't really want to reorganise how things are done to accommodate others who do. >> Particularly now that my free time is rarer and more precious to me, >> doing unpaid work for an organization that also has paid staff is >> hugely demotivating. It's entirely plausible that paying for >> resources would mean that Debian would end up with *less* resources >> than we have now, if other volunteers feel the same way. > >Well said, and I feel the same way. +1 Having said both of these, I think there *are* reasonable places to spend money that shouldn't affect us so much. The areas in question are those where we struggle to find any/sufficient volunteer effort to do what we need - bureaucracy etc. Volunteer book-keepers are few and far between, IME. -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com "When C++ is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb." -- Steven M. Haflich
