Re: Outreachy favouritism and wasted Debian money

[Aron Xu]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 3:51 AM Ken Starr  wrote:
>
> We fully support spending money on diversity but not with results like these. 
>  Sever ties with outreachy and find another way to spend the outreachy money 
> in 2020.
>

I'm not quite sure about other parts of this email, but I understand
that outreachy for Debian itself might have already served its
original purpose as an experiment of attracting more diversity.

Because people's interests are always changing, it appears that Debian
people are less motivated to work on organizing and mentoring paid new
comers nowadays than a decade before, this includes GSoC which does
not cost Debian money. So it would be a good thing to evaluate whether
we consider a longer term commitment to outreachy is profitable and
desirable, or we find the gap between expectation and reality suggests
something else.


Best regards,
Aron

Outreachy favouritism and wasted Debian money

[Ken Starr]

People tried to hush up the outreachy issue but it is now time before Debian 
wastes more money in another foolish round.

We have a woman in Outreachy who already did a lot for Debian, doing the Debian 
booth at FOSDEM 2018, organising a miniDebConf in Tirana 2018 and organizing 
Balkans biggest event, OSCAL, five years in a row.  The woman is a founder of 
the group behind OSCAL, Open Labs.

We were told Outreachy money is being spent to attract women to free software 
but here we have a woman who was already heavily involved for years.  She came 
to DebConf19 in Brazil and immediately after she is awarded an Outreachy.  
Other women wonder if there is favouritism, so they should.

What a scandal, a woman with this level of commitment is relegated to the 
sub-standard employment terms of an outreachy contract and nobody gave her a 
real job.

How many outreachy women continue to do stuff as volunteers, the Debian way, 
after Outreachy? None.

How many ever made a package?

How many support their work after outreachy?

We fully support spending money on diversity but not with results like these.  
Sever ties with outreachy and find another way to spend the outreachy money in 
2020.

Long live diversity!



Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Thomas Goirand]

On 6/2/19 3:39 PM, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Fri, 2019-05-31 at 21:04 +, Luca Filipozzi wrote:
> [...]
>> However, without an HPE donation or discount, we are much more likely to
>> follow a less expensive approach: pairs of 2U servers with local
>> storage, etc. Still not cheap but not multiples of 100k.
>>
>> If a hardware vendor happens to offer a discounts, then we can stretch
>> the dollars further.
> [...]
> 
> As I understand it, list prices for "enterprise" hardware are set with
> the assumption that customers will negotiate a 50% or higher discount.
> If that's right, we should expect and ask for discounts, regardless of
> whether the vendor is interested in being a sponsor.
> 
> Ben.
> 

Oh, Ben... You don't know how much that's truth.

We got had a vendor (that I will not name) to lower his quote some N
amount of network cards from 13k to 5k, just because we told him we
would buy more and that we felt it was too expensive (sorry, I don't
think my employer would be happy if I was disclosing more details of who
and what...).

So very much, when purchasing hardware, negotiating is mandatory. Asking
2 vendors at once, comparing, let them know one has quoted for less, is
also super important. This is secret to no-one doing hardware purchase.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Sam Hartman]

It was pointed out to me that my mail could have been misread in a
number of ways.  nothing in my message is meant to alter the delegations
currently in place. Rather, my desire is to further empower our
delegated teams.

If there are going to be any grants to fund work for some of our teams,
the teams need to eagerly support the idea and have appropriate
involvement in the process.  The obvious and simplest way is for the
team wanting to issue a grant to be the one running the experiment.

There are other options that may make sense.  For example if someone who
had experience with grants or contracting wanted to put together the
experiment that could be fine.  But it would need to be as a resource
for the teams that the teams saw as such, not antagonistic to our great
volunteers.

--Sam


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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Sam Hartman]

Hi.
I've received a media query on this topic I am about to respond to.

I figure the project would not take it well to find out what we're going
to do from a news story.  And obviously I don't know what we're going to
do, but I do think I know where we ended up here and what I'd be open to
helping with as DPL.

There is insufficient support at this time to entertain paying salaried
positions from Debian money.  Some of the objections include the
following.  We don't have sufficient recurring funds.  Managing people
and handling performance issues is a skill set we do not select for.
Doing that could create significant power imbalances.  If we're going to
start somewhere we'll start smaller.

I think there are significant challenges and concerns paying for core
functions related to our operating system from Debian money.  It creates
complex and potentially concerning feedback loops in terms of
prioritization.  Today, if you have (or pay for) the time, you gain
significant influence.  That has its own problems, but changing that
would give power structures within Debian  control over what Debian is
in some strange and hard to understand ways.  That makes a lot of us
uncomfortable.  So I don't see supporting using Debian money to pay the
DPL, TC, packaging, release team, security, archive functions of
ftpmaster or the like.

However, encouraging others to pay Debian developers for Debian work
seems to have general support.  There are some concerns about how LTS is
working, but overall we seem relatively happy.  Expanding that model to
help connect money with qualified Debian community members seems worth
pursuing.

Similarly, I'd be open to the idea of pursuing grants or contracts to
fund projects not related directly to our operating system.  There are a
lot of things we do that everyone has to do: run IT infrastructure, keep
our accounts, run a website, run conferences.  Many of those we do our
own special way.  That's great, and so long as we have volunteers to do
the work and those volunteers are happy and have the resources we need,
we should keep right on being excellent.  However, if our volunteers
need help and contracting for effort to help them would make Debian
better, we can consider that.  Similarly, if we cannot find volunteers
to do work but we could find volunteers too coordinate, then contracting
may help.  In areas not related directly to our operating system I'd be
open to  experimenting with using Debian money.

As I've said, I won't drive that effort: it's simply not my focus as
DPL.  I'm happy to working with the right person to put together a
proposal to experiment with a couple of grants.  If you're interested
and have the time to drive such an effort, approach me at Debconf or
write to me after Debconf settles.  I currently expect that I'd want to
take such an experiment to a project wide vote before allocating funds.

--Sam


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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Adrian Bunk]

On Tue, Jun 04, 2019 at 09:24:59AM -0500, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> Philip Hands dijo [Tue, Jun 04, 2019 at 10:51:10AM +0200]:
> > It occurs to me that we could establish some sort of hardship fund to
> > make sure that someone who's current situation falls below some minimum
> > that we could define, they would be able to apply for funding.
> > 
> > For example, I recently bought some refurbished Lenovo X230 laptops for
> > GBP 85.00 each, mostly because that seemed cheap enough that I'd be
> > annoyed if my own X230 breaks and I'd not taken advantage of that deal.
> > Also, my daughters clearly need laptops.
> > 
> > If there's any DD/DM who's current hardware is more ancient than that,
> > then if they'd like to upgrade, but cannot afford to, it seems to me
> > that for a small outlay from Debian they might well be enabled to be
> > much more productive.
> 
> That's something I would clearly agree to. And it's a very different
> issue from paying to perform a given task - It's reaching out and
> helping those that can better contribute with the project. Besides, in
> the example you present, they would be quite smaller expenses for the
> project than what I would expect for a finish-a-hard-task gig.

In general this is a reasonable approach, but it might turn out to be 
hard to define what is actually needed and by whom.

> > We've also occasionally had people who've been part of the project fall
> > on hard times, and I think that having the ability to quickly provide
> > benevolent funding to someone who's e.g. been rendered homeless somehow,
> > would also be something that we should try to make possible.
> > 
> > Obviously, this might well bump into rules about what non-profit
> > organisations can do, so the details would need to be carefully worked
> > out.
> 
> This could also work, provided it's done on an equitative basis and
> not based on current/recent performance - having it as a
> kind-of-safety-net. With some care so that's not a mechanism that can
> be abused. And, yes, making sure it's a legal way to spend our money
> (but I don't see why wouldn't it).

IMHO this would be a very bad idea.

There are many DDs in the US, a country that has a combination of very 
high healthcare costs and not universal healthcare coverage.

What if a DD needs a life-saving procedure that costs a 6 digit amount
not covered by any insurance?

What if the child of a DD needs a life-saving procedure that costs
a 6 digit amount not covered by any insurance?

Or what if a DD lives in a country where a military conflict starts?
E.g. the situation in Venezuela could quickly detoriate to something 
several orders of magnitude worse than being homeless in a first world 
country.

Debian cannot be a safety net for everything that might go wrong
in real life (but individual members of Debian might be willing
to help).

And legally it would likely also be problematic to spend money on 
healthcare bills or flying a family out of a country.

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

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Gunnar Wolf]

Philip Hands dijo [Tue, Jun 04, 2019 at 10:51:10AM +0200]:
> It occurs to me that we could establish some sort of hardship fund to
> make sure that someone who's current situation falls below some minimum
> that we could define, they would be able to apply for funding.
> 
> For example, I recently bought some refurbished Lenovo X230 laptops for
> GBP 85.00 each, mostly because that seemed cheap enough that I'd be
> annoyed if my own X230 breaks and I'd not taken advantage of that deal.
> Also, my daughters clearly need laptops.
> 
> If there's any DD/DM who's current hardware is more ancient than that,
> then if they'd like to upgrade, but cannot afford to, it seems to me
> that for a small outlay from Debian they might well be enabled to be
> much more productive.

That's something I would clearly agree to. And it's a very different
issue from paying to perform a given task - It's reaching out and
helping those that can better contribute with the project. Besides, in
the example you present, they would be quite smaller expenses for the
project than what I would expect for a finish-a-hard-task gig.

> We've also occasionally had people who've been part of the project fall
> on hard times, and I think that having the ability to quickly provide
> benevolent funding to someone who's e.g. been rendered homeless somehow,
> would also be something that we should try to make possible.
> 
> Obviously, this might well bump into rules about what non-profit
> organisations can do, so the details would need to be carefully worked
> out.

This could also work, provided it's done on an equitative basis and
not based on current/recent performance - having it as a
kind-of-safety-net. With some care so that's not a mechanism that can
be abused. And, yes, making sure it's a legal way to spend our money
(but I don't see why wouldn't it).


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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Antonio Terceiro]

On Mon, Jun 03, 2019 at 08:42:02PM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> > "Gunnar" == Gunnar Wolf  writes:
> 
> Gunnar> I am aware your example is just an example - But don't you
> Gunnar> think that following through with this would have a sad
> Gunnar> effect on the www team: It would be equivalent to tell them,
> Gunnar> "thanks for your work for so many years, but we have decided
> Gunnar> it's a weak spot in the project, and we'd be much better off
> Gunnar> if somebody else were to do it".
> 
> If that were there reaction  we shouldn't do it.
> 
> I was imagining that if we went to www, treasurer, or a couple of other
> teams and said things like
> "Hey, from your last couple of reports you don't seem to be able to get
> all the things done you want to dget done.  We don't seem to get you
> volunteers, but would you find it useful to have some money to contract
> for some of those items?  Because this is new, we'll help you out if you
> don't have experience managing a contract well."
> 
> I'd be really surprised if their reaction was to feel their work was not
> valued if presented like that.
> And if so, we apologize and move on.

To me, a model that could work is a model of grants, like the Perl
Foundations does.

https://www.perlfoundation.org/grants-committee1.html
https://www.perlfoundation.org/grant-ideas.html
https://www.perlfoundation.org/how-to-write-a-proposal.html

So people would be paid for fixed, delimited period, to achieve a
specific goal.

On the other hand, they would would have to report on their progress
periodically, and would be held accountable with regards to what they
proposed to work on, and they could be told what to work on or how to do
the work. If they didn't reasonably achieve the goals they set
themselves, that would be taken into consideration when evaluating
future grant proposals from them.

This makes that work a bit different from the volunteer work we all do
in Debian, where our only obligation -- if it goes that far -- is to not
block others from doing their own volunteer work.

Coming back to the www team example, one way of mitigating, or maybe
even elimitating, such negative reactions would be to encode in the
evulation criteria for grant proposals that any proposal that is tightly
linked to the work of an existing Debian team should be signed-off by
that team, or require some member of the team to volunteer to act as
"manager" for that grant before it is approved, or give that team veto
power over the acceptance of the grant. i.e. such grant would only be
accepted if the "affected" Debian team is happy with it.


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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Sam Hartman]

> "Gunnar" == Gunnar Wolf  writes:

Gunnar> I am aware your example is just an example - But don't you
Gunnar> think that following through with this would have a sad
Gunnar> effect on the www team: It would be equivalent to tell them,
Gunnar> "thanks for your work for so many years, but we have decided
Gunnar> it's a weak spot in the project, and we'd be much better off
Gunnar> if somebody else were to do it".

If that were there reaction  we shouldn't do it.

I was imagining that if we went to www, treasurer, or a couple of other
teams and said things like
"Hey, from your last couple of reports you don't seem to be able to get
all the things done you want to dget done.  We don't seem to get you
volunteers, but would you find it useful to have some money to contract
for some of those items?  Because this is new, we'll help you out if you
don't have experience managing a contract well."

I'd be really surprised if their reaction was to feel their work was not
valued if presented like that.
And if so, we apologize and move on.

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Gunnar Wolf]

Sam Hartman dijo [Sat, Jun 01, 2019 at 09:02:54AM -0400]:
> (...)
> 
> With regard to Russ's concerns,
> I think that making short-term grants to work on specific projects might
> be much more achievable for us than salaries.  It reduces the factors
> he's worried about.
> I think there would still be significant risk, but not nearly as much as
> if we were actually paying salaries on an ongoing basis.
> (...)
> I actually think that Debian could possibly hire  people to do our website on 
> a
> contract without it being a huge problem.  We'd explicitly want  the www
> team (or hopefully no one in our community) not to bid.  We'd want the
> www team to be guiding the process and for the contract to be about
> doing the things they don't want to or never get around to doing.
> We'd want it to be something we'd be willing to do again in similar
> circumstances, so that if it did actually change what people were
> willing to work on that would be OK.
> In that model, the www team would be more about deciding overall
> structure, making the decisions than actually going and implementing
> them.

Reading this discussion, my main thought was following the line of
finding _what_ to fund as a first point. And, of course, you and
others have touched the points. It should be about funding stuff that
would otherwise not be carried out well enough.

I am aware your example is just an example - But don't you think that
following through with this would have a sad effect on the www team:
It would be equivalent to tell them, "thanks for your work for so many
years, but we have decided it's a weak spot in the project, and we'd
be much better off if somebody else were to do it".

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Ben Hutchings]

On Fri, 2019-05-31 at 21:04 +, Luca Filipozzi wrote:
[...]
> However, without an HPE donation or discount, we are much more likely to
> follow a less expensive approach: pairs of 2U servers with local
> storage, etc. Still not cheap but not multiples of 100k.
> 
> If a hardware vendor happens to offer a discounts, then we can stretch
> the dollars further.
[...]

As I understand it, list prices for "enterprise" hardware are set with
the assumption that customers will negotiate a 50% or higher discount.
If that's right, we should expect and ask for discounts, regardless of
whether the vendor is interested in being a sponsor.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Unix is many things to many people,
but it's never been everything to anybody.




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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Tollef Fog Heen]

]] Steve McIntyre 

> On Sat, Jun 01, 2019 at 12:29:04PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
>
> >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.

At the same time as what's written above, I think we have to realise we
are in an incredibly privileged position to be able to contribute to
Debian because it's fun.  I'd like that to be the case for more people,
and funding will be a part of that, as it is with Outreachy and to some
extent GSoC.  However, what we're looking at here is not expanding our
outreach, it's almost the opposite: people have suggested improving core
services and improve underfunded, but important areas like bookeeping.

In addition, it's not clear that the funding and political work has to
come from Debian.  I think it's a lot wider and hooks into the debate
about socioeconomic inequalities and universal basic income, areas which
I don't think we'll agree on at all inside of Debian.

> 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.

We do have a treasurer team, I would be interested in hearing what their
feelings on this would be if we decided to bring in paid labour to help
them out.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Russ Allbery]

"G. Branden Robinson"  writes:

> My two cents[4] is that DSA should make its purchasing and hardware
> solicitation decisions with the architectural security issue fairly far
> down the priority list.  It saddens me to say that, but this new class
> of exploits, what van Schaik et al. call "microarchitectural data
> sampling" (MDS), is a playground for security researchers right now; a
> big rock has been turned over and bugs are erupting from the soil in a
> squamous frenzy.  It will take months or years for the situation to
> settle down.

> To acquire hardware based on what is known today is to risk buyer's
> remorse.  Plan on inescapable remorse later; every chip vendor will let
> us down until corporate managers learn to treat confidentiality and
> integrity as feature rather than cost centers.  (And count on them to
> forget what they've learned after a few quarters pass without
> embarassing headlines.)

+1 to this.  So far as I can tell, about the only thing that seems to
correlate with being less likely to have side-channel attacks is less
sophisticated scheduling pipelines and processor architecture (read:
simpler, slower processors).  And this area of security research is
changing very rapidly.  I would expect several more novel attacks to
surface.

Processors that don't have a bunch of non-free, unauditable bullshit as a
proprietary control plane would obviously be better, but you'd be paying a
prohibitive performance price (not to mention other issues).  There just
aren't any good options right now.  Buy (or accept donations of) whatever
makes sense for other reasons, and expect there to be mandatory microcode
updates, kernel and virtualization workarounds, and security bugs.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2019-06-01T09:04:39+0200, Philipp Kern wrote:
> Are we then looking more closely at AMD-based machines given that
> those had less problems around speculative attacks?

To borrow a phrase from Christopher Hitchens, this comment gives a
hostage to fortune.

My team at work closely follows (and part of it contributes to) the
research in microarchitectural timing-channel attacks; we just covered
the white paper on one of the three new attacks (RIDL)[1] on Friday.

I'll say this now because I don't know of anything embargoed that could
get me into trouble: don't count on AMD's good smell just this second to
last.  Remember that the previous round of embarrassments
(Spectre/Meltdown) didn't entirely spare AMD and ARM, and we haven't yet
seen any ground-up reimplementations of CPU cores with publically
auditable, formally-verified proofs of immunity to microarchitectural
timing channel attacks.

I see no reason to reward AMD with purchases based on what may be an
accidental and temporary lack of egg on the face.  This is the same firm
that followed Intel into the land of unauditable system management
firmware[2] and acquired ATI and shut down the information channels
enabling good free video drivers to be developed[3].

My two cents[4] is that DSA should make its purchasing and hardware
solicitation decisions with the architectural security issue fairly far
down the priority list.  It saddens me to say that, but this new class
of exploits, what van Schaik et al. call "microarchitectural data
sampling" (MDS), is a playground for security researchers right now; a
big rock has been turned over and bugs are erupting from the soil in a
squamous frenzy.  It will take months or years for the situation to
settle down.

To acquire hardware based on what is known today is to risk buyer's
remorse.  Plan on inescapable remorse later; every chip vendor will let
us down until corporate managers learn to treat confidentiality and
integrity as feature rather than cost centers.  (And count on them to
forget what they've learned after a few quarters pass without
embarassing headlines.)

Some day, perhaps, if the universe is less than maximally cruel, we'll
have the option of server-class RISC-V systems with fully-documented,
formally-verified designs.  But that day is not yet here.

In the meantime, always keep a fork with some cooked crow on it ready to
hand, so that the next time you run into one of the many "pragmatic"
people in our community who puffed and blew about how we didn't "really
need" open hardware, you can invite them to eat the stuff and so be
silent.

One wonders how pragmatic they'll feel when it's _their_ private data
being exfiltrated.

[1] https://mdsattacks.com/files/ridl.pdf
[2] https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd
[3] I don't have a good cite handy for this, but Michel Dänzer can
doubtless tell the story with more accuracy and precision than I
can.
[4] ...further discounted reflecting my rather low level of project
activity.


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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Russ Allbery]

Jonathan Carter  writes:
> On 2019/06/01 19:55, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> I very much doubt that our current donation-driven model would generate
>> US $1M per year on a sustained basis, particularly if you subtract
>> DebConf out of the mix (which I think we should, because that money is
>> essentially

> DebConf tends to bring in money for Debian, so not sure why you would
> want to subtract it.

You cut the part where I explained why.  :)  That said, I'm not deeply
familiar with how much of the money that is donated during DebConf
fundraising goes to general project funds instead of to putting on DebConf
itself; perhaps the money is not as earmarked as I thought.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Jonathan Carter]

On 2019/06/01 19:55, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I very much doubt that our current donation-driven model would generate US
> $1M per year on a sustained basis, particularly if you subtract DebConf
> out of the mix (which I think we should, because that money is essentially

DebConf tends to bring in money for Debian, so not sure why you would
want to subtract it.

-Jonathan

-- 
  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀  Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) 
  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋   https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
  ⠈⠳⣄  Be Bold. Be brave. Debian has got your back.

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Russ Allbery]

Adrian Bunk  writes:
> On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 04:07:54PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> 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.

*heh*.  Er, no, not even remotely.  I'm about the farthest thing you can
get from a US libertarian or someone who thinks government is bad.  I'm
sorry to have used a confusing term and muddled my point!

What I'm trying to get across here is that one of the rather fundamental
things about Debian is that everyone works on the things they care about,
and the project is mostly neutral about which of those things are the most
important.  What's the most important is decided in a very practical,
democratic way: it's what people are willing to work on.

This is isn't an unmitigated good by any stretch of the imagination.
Sometimes we really do want to decide that something specific is important
even if no one wants to do it.  And those are probably good places to look
at spending money, so I'm probably being too negative about the idea.  If
we can find other things like LTS where everyone thinks it would be great
if it somehow happened but people are generally not willing to do it for
free, I think those would be compelling places to spend money if we can
sort out the supervision issues.

I'm just quite nervous about breaking down that deep structure of Debian
where we vote with our own time and energy.  It's not perfect and it has
flaws, but we understand it well and it "feels" fair (at least to those of
us who have been in that world for a long time).  I know no one is
proposing this, but a shift towards a model where people pick priorities
for the project and then direct effort to work on those things and not
other things would, for me, start feeling a lot more like a job, and would
hurt my motivation a lot.  I'm not all that productive at the moment, so
that doesn't matter a ton for me personally, but I'd be worried others
would feel the same way.

But what I'm hearing in the thread is that this is probably an avoidable
problem if we're careful to pick and choose the right types of projects.
Janitorial work, as you mention.

(Also, the point is well-taken that "voting with time and energy" is not
particularly "pure" in Debian already, since various corporations vote
with their money to fund people to do various things they care about.  So
this is already complicated and is not a pure volunteer endeavor, to be
sure.  That said, my impression -- on the basis of no actual research, so
maybe it's wrong -- is that Debian is driven much less by corporate
priorities than a lot of large free software projects.  Certainly less
than the Linux kernel, to take an obvious example.)

> 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.

Yeah, this is a very good point.

> 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.

I very much doubt that our current donation-driven model would generate US
$1M per year on a sustained basis, particularly if you subtract DebConf
out of the mix (which I think we should, because that money is essentially
earmarked for a specific purpose and has a whole sponsorship and
advertising component that works great for the conference but that I doubt
we would be comfortable with in Debian proper).

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Steve McIntyre]

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

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Luca Filipozzi]

On Sat, Jun 01, 2019 at 12:29:04PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> ]] Russ Allbery 
> > 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.

Same same.

-- 
Luca Filipozzi

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Adrian Bunk]

On Sat, Jun 01, 2019 at 09:09:26AM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> > "Adrian" == Adrian Bunk  writes:
> 
> >> 
> >> Talking about the issues involved in paying people to do work.
> >> What the options are, collecting people's concerns etc.
> >> 
> >> I actually think the first round of that can be done without
> >> significant access to numbers.
> >> 
> >> That said, I'd sure like that anual report (actually I'd love it
> >> quarterly) you speak of above.  I'm not volunteering.  Are you?
> 
> Adrian> My biggest high level concern is the income side, since this
> Adrian> is the most difficult part and will likely also be the most
> Adrian> controversial one.
> 
> 
> Ah, I was actually asking if you wanted to volunteer to work on the
> reports since you seemed to value them.  I was only one quarter serious:
> if you did want to do that work, I'd be thrilled, but I didn't really
> expect it.

Ah, seems I misunderstood that.

Yes, I could work on the reports if you tell me how to get access
to the data from the trusted organizations.

>From SPI I get the reports, but for the other I have no clue.

> I think it's actually impossible for a non-profit to reduce income from
> expenses.
> 
> It's a lot easier to do fund raising when you can explain why you want
> the money.
> I think it's no accident that when people learned our sysadmin team no
> longer had hardware donors and  was considering how expensive continuing
> their current strategy was, we got two very large donations, one of them
> intended to make that possible.
> 
> Yeah, unless you want debt (which we almost certainly do not), income
> needs to lead expenses.
> But when people see you spending their money for purposes they believe
> in, it's easier for them to give you more.  When they understand your
> needs they give more.
>...

This works well for one-time investments,
but less so for ongoing expenses like salaries.

It reminds me of NGOs that get drowned in more money than they can spend 
earmarked for a catastrophe that is in the news, but struggle to get 
enough money for running their headquarter.

> --Sam

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

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Sam Hartman]

> "Adrian" == Adrian Bunk  writes:

>> 
>> Talking about the issues involved in paying people to do work.
>> What the options are, collecting people's concerns etc.
>> 
>> I actually think the first round of that can be done without
>> significant access to numbers.
>> 
>> That said, I'd sure like that anual report (actually I'd love it
>> quarterly) you speak of above.  I'm not volunteering.  Are you?

Adrian> My biggest high level concern is the income side, since this
Adrian> is the most difficult part and will likely also be the most
Adrian> controversial one.


Ah, I was actually asking if you wanted to volunteer to work on the
reports since you seemed to value them.  I was only one quarter serious:
if you did want to do that work, I'd be thrilled, but I didn't really
expect it.


I think it's actually impossible for a non-profit to reduce income from
expenses.

It's a lot easier to do fund raising when you can explain why you want
the money.
I think it's no accident that when people learned our sysadmin team no
longer had hardware donors and  was considering how expensive continuing
their current strategy was, we got two very large donations, one of them
intended to make that possible.

Yeah, unless you want debt (which we almost certainly do not), income
needs to lead expenses.
But when people see you spending their money for purposes they believe
in, it's easier for them to give you more.  When they understand your
needs they give more.

I don't donate to Debian.  (I do sort of donate to SPI, but I'm
considering stopping).  In both cases I value the organizations a lot,
but I don't actually think they need my money.  Both organizations seem
to have funds adequate to meet their own expenses.  So why should I give
them my money?

--Sam

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Sam Hartman]

> "Ondřej" == Ondřej Surý  writes:

Ondřej>It might be worth looking on how other organizations in
Ondřej> our ballpark are doing stuff.  f.e. IETF/ISOC is in similar
Ondřej> situation to Debian/SPI.

I'm no longer really involved in the IETF, but I was involved in the
IETF for a number of years and was involved in a leadership role when
the previous structure was set up.  (They are going through a transition
to replace the IASA with the IETF LLC right now, and I don't even
understand why they think that's a good idea; haven't even read the RFCs
involved)

ISOC was careful not to fund any standards work.  So under that model
mapped to us, DPL, RT, all the decisions of ftpmaster, TC, NM, DAM, 
debian-legal, Debconf
content team, and all the
packaging effort would be unfunded.

There was an administrative director who worked on contracts, RFPs, and
who managed relationships.  Then a lot of tasks were contracted.  There
were some fairly long-term contracts for rfc-editor and for the
secretariat (who did debconf local/global team stuff, who ran the
non-RFC parts of the archive (id repository) (other than content
decisions), and helped with administration for bi-weekly document calls
etc).


Then there were contracts for things like tools development.  So things
like DSA, dak development, development of release team scripts would be
contracted out for big projects.  Smaller things and ongoing maintenance
would be handled by volunteers.  Deciding what was wanted, writing
requirements specs, etc, etc would be done by volunteers.


With regard to Russ's concerns,
I think that making short-term grants to work on specific projects might
be much more achievable for us than salaries.  It reduces the factors
he's worried about.
I think there would still be significant risk, but not nearly as much as
if we were actually paying salaries on an ongoing basis.


Factoring in past performance would be easier for new grants than trying
to fire someone.

But I think even given that the concerns would be very real.

That said, even in the IETF community there is very much an in croud for
the administrative stuff.  The same people seem to often be getting the
contracts.  If you actually cared about the business it seems like it
would be very easy to get feelings hurt.

Also, basically all the tasks the IETF pays for are very far from the
actual work of the IETF.

I actually think that Debian could possibly hire  people to do our website on a
contract without it being a huge problem.  We'd explicitly want  the www
team (or hopefully no one in our community) not to bid.  We'd want the
www team to be guiding the process and for the contract to be about
doing the things they don't want to or never get around to doing.
We'd want it to be something we'd be willing to do again in similar
circumstances, so that if it did actually change what people were
willing to work on that would be OK.
In that model, the www team would be more about deciding overall
structure, making the decisions than actually going and implementing
them.


But for a lot of what we do, it's close enough to our core that the mix
of money and power would be problematic.
As an example, even having people work on the dak software seems like it
would run into trouble as they could influence which features got
implemented etc.

When you start funding positions that actually have power to make
project-level decisions, I think you run into a lot of challenges.

--Sam

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Tollef Fog Heen]

]] 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.

> 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.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Judit Foglszinger]

> But yes, it's entirely possible that I'm being too cautious.

I'd say, being cautious in this case is very warranted.

One of the things, that are good about Debian is, that it's _not_ cooperate.
"You will not work for free for a company.  Debian is not a company."

Throwing in money has a high risk of changing culture in a bad way -
work is no longer volunteer work, one has an obligation to do it,
no matter, if one can do it well or even is interested in it any longer.
One got paid and one has to fulfill.

Even too high requirements for bursaries can be destructive -
prove that you are worth this money, promise things
and show that you didn't waste that "money spent on your trip/your 
accommodation".

> 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.

> ... continuous tasks to keep the project 
> runnning, like DPL or system administration.

Money seems to be regarded far to much as the ultimate all problem solver.

Not finding volunteers for certain tasks might also be a sign,
that something is screwed up about that task that should be changed.

Long ago, someone suggested to pay AMs, because it was so hard to find such.
From todays prespective it reads quite amusing ;)

> ...  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?
> ...
> 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"?

https://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2006/04/msg00168.html

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Adrian Bunk]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 11:46:02PM -0600, Eldon Koyle wrote:
> On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 5:08 PM Russ Allbery  wrote:
> >
> > Adrian Bunk  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.  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 think this is a very real concern.  What if payment was structured as task
> bounties rather than hiring full-time employees? Then the payment becomes
> an acknowledgement that a task is undesirable or time consuming, rather
> than a status symbol.

Bounties can be useful for developing features.

Bounties are not really useful for continuous tasks to keep the project 
runnning, like DPL or system administration.

> Eldon Koyle

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

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Adrian Bunk]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 04:07:54PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Adrian Bunk  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

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Ondřej Surý]

Again I would suggest looking at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4071 as a start 
to learn from the experience of others.

It’s a change in paradigm, but somehow I feel that this is needed if we want to 
keep up to par with other parties in the same field.

P.S.: At no point of time I am speaking about packaging work paid by Debian, 
but there are other functions that would benefit from having staff on full time 
dedicated to that function and being accountable to the Debian project and not 
to their employers.

Cheers,
Ondrej
--
Ondřej Surý 

> On 1 Jun 2019, at 06:12, Russ Allbery  wrote:
> 
> Ximin Luo  writes:
> 
>> Nobody is suggesting that it won't be a hard problem to get right, but
>> progress isn't made by worrying about all the things that could possibly
>> go wrong.  Figuring out a blueprint for organising large-scale work
>> using more directly-democratic principles would have lots of benefits
>> far beyond this project.
> 
> Yup, this is fair, and I admit that I tend to see the problems more
> readily than the opportunities.
> 
> My core point is that I personally don't believe this is the right
> experiment for us.  I don't think Debian is the right organization to try
> this.  I don't think we have the expertise and the muscle in the right
> places to be the project to lead in this specific area.
> 
> However, this is just my opinion, and I don't want to try to persaude you
> too strongly, because if you're right and I'm wrong and we can make this
> work, it would be a very neat positive development.  Funding free software
> development is an enormous problem right now that desperately needs
> options other than controlling sponsorship by for-profit companies with
> all the baggage that carries.
> 
>> Then some of the other things you mentioned are not necessarily
>> downsides. Making a loaded statement about what work the project
>> considers the most important isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially
>> if it stands against the loaded statements that Big Tech already puts
>> out worldwide, that give engineers (including open source engineers) a
>> bad name in front of people that don't know there are less monopolistic
>> ways of creating and using technology.
> 
> I think I'm coming from a place where I feel like our community is still
> rather fragile, and I'm worried about putting more stress on it by making
> those sorts of loaded statements.  But yes, it's entirely possible that
> I'm being too cautious.
> 
> I will say this: we only have the energy to make a small number of big
> bets like this.  If we work on funding development, we're *not* going to
> work on most, if not all, of the other big bet ideas that the project
> could work on.
> 
> Now, that's possibly better than not working on *any* big bets, and we do
> have a tendency to default into not changing anything, and that isn't
> going to serve us well in the long run.  I'm in favor of picking something
> big and going for it.  But I think we should pick one or two big things,
> no more, and try those things until they reach some agreed-upon conclusion
> before adding more on.
> 
> -- 
> Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   
> 

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Philipp Kern]

On 5/31/2019 11:04 PM, Luca Filipozzi wrote:
> Before you ask: an insecure hypervisor is an insecure buildd.

Are we then looking more closely at AMD-based machines given that those
had less problems around speculative attacks?

Kind regards
Philipp Kern

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Ondřej Surý]

It might be worth looking on how other organizations in our ballpark are doing 
stuff.

f.e. IETF/ISOC is in similar situation to Debian/SPI. I am not directly 
involved in looking into IETF financials, but they have contracts for certain 
functions (Ops, RFC Editor to name few, for full list see 
https://iaoc.ietf.org/contracts.html).

I agree that crunching the numbers must be a first step, then next step might 
be identifying roles within the project that can have clear job descriptions, 
that might also include roles that we currently don’t have because it can’t be 
filled by volunteers work. Then this must also include balancing whether we can 
improve the function if the function is contracted and there are “hard” 
requirements.

Personally, I don’t have any problem with paying people with Debian money if 
the competition for the function is transparent (thus done by third party in 
our case), time-limited and clearly specified so we can end the contract if the 
conditions are not fulfilled by the other party.

Ondrej
--
Ondřej Surý 

> On 1 Jun 2019, at 01:07, Russ Allbery  wrote:
> 
> Adrian Bunk  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.  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.
> 
> If we're only hiring people from *outside* the project, not each other,
> maybe that avoids the worst of the problems, but it's still an odd
> dynamic.  For example, it creates a perverse incentive for someone to
> resign from the project so that they can be paid for the work they're
> currently doing as a volunteer.
> 
> I'm particularly concerned what will happen if something goes wrong: we
> pay someone to do additional work and that work isn't up to the quality
> standards that we need.  Now what?  If that person is also a Debian
> Developer, we have now introduced an aspect of job performance feedback
> into a volunteer community.  While doubtless there are Debian Developers
> who are also managers in their day jobs, that's not something anyone is
> currently doing *in Debian*.  Managing feedback and consequences for poor
> performance is a skill that we are not currently exercising and that is
> not trivial to learn.
> 
> These problems generally go away with externally-funded initiatives such
> as LTS.  In that case, even when Debian Developers are involved, it's
> clear that the person with the money is making contract and hiring
> decisions, is the person who can decide to fire someone from that contract
> if they don't like the work being done, and any decisions made there are
> entirely separate from one's ongoing Debian work as a volunteer.  People
> still have to decide what they're willing to do for free and what they
> want to be paid for, but it helps a lot that LTS is scoped to one specific
> problem and has resources such that, if everyone else decides they're not
> willing to do LTS support for free, the initiative still survives.  It
> also helps considerably that LTS was something we as a project had decided
> not to do with pure volunteer resources, so it's a pure incremental on top
> of project work.
> 
> Maybe we can find more things like LTS that are pure incrementals over
> what the project is currently doing, but I'm pretty worried about the
> social dynamic of paying people to do core project work that others are
> currently doing for free.
> 
> 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.
> 
> -- 
> Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
> 

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Eldon Koyle]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 5:08 PM Russ Allbery  wrote:
>
> Adrian Bunk  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.  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 think this is a very real concern.  What if payment was structured as task
bounties rather than hiring full-time employees? Then the payment becomes
an acknowledgement that a task is undesirable or time consuming, rather
than a status symbol.

-- 
Eldon Koyle

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Russ Allbery]

Ximin Luo  writes:

> Nobody is suggesting that it won't be a hard problem to get right, but
> progress isn't made by worrying about all the things that could possibly
> go wrong.  Figuring out a blueprint for organising large-scale work
> using more directly-democratic principles would have lots of benefits
> far beyond this project.

Yup, this is fair, and I admit that I tend to see the problems more
readily than the opportunities.

My core point is that I personally don't believe this is the right
experiment for us.  I don't think Debian is the right organization to try
this.  I don't think we have the expertise and the muscle in the right
places to be the project to lead in this specific area.

However, this is just my opinion, and I don't want to try to persaude you
too strongly, because if you're right and I'm wrong and we can make this
work, it would be a very neat positive development.  Funding free software
development is an enormous problem right now that desperately needs
options other than controlling sponsorship by for-profit companies with
all the baggage that carries.

> Then some of the other things you mentioned are not necessarily
> downsides. Making a loaded statement about what work the project
> considers the most important isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially
> if it stands against the loaded statements that Big Tech already puts
> out worldwide, that give engineers (including open source engineers) a
> bad name in front of people that don't know there are less monopolistic
> ways of creating and using technology.

I think I'm coming from a place where I feel like our community is still
rather fragile, and I'm worried about putting more stress on it by making
those sorts of loaded statements.  But yes, it's entirely possible that
I'm being too cautious.

I will say this: we only have the energy to make a small number of big
bets like this.  If we work on funding development, we're *not* going to
work on most, if not all, of the other big bet ideas that the project
could work on.

Now, that's possibly better than not working on *any* big bets, and we do
have a tendency to default into not changing anything, and that isn't
going to serve us well in the long run.  I'm in favor of picking something
big and going for it.  But I think we should pick one or two big things,
no more, and try those things until they reach some agreed-upon conclusion
before adding more on.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Ximin Luo]

Russ Allbery:
> [..]
> I respect the desire to try social experiments and be bold, but my counter
> question is whether Debian as a project has the right training and the
> right people to conduct a proper social experiment *here*, on *this*
> particular topic.  Do we have economists?  Psychologists?  Do we know what
> the nature of the experiment would be?
> 

How many of us have PhDs that are writing free software being deployed on many 
thousands of AWS clusters around the world? Then there are also many of us that 
started by tinkering with our own computers at home and slowly got experience 
along the way.

> For example, you say "democratic mandate," but what *specifically* does
> that mean?  Are we going to vote in a GR on who gets paid and who doesn't?
> Wouldn't that risk compensation turning into a popularity contest, or at
> least being perceived that way?  If we're paying someone under such a
> system, is there any accountability if they don't do what we're paying
> them for?  Is there someone supervising them, and if so, who?  Or are we
> just giving people $X and saying "do whatever you want with it"?  This
> stuff is very not easy to figure out.
> [..]

Straw man initial proposal:

1. GR for whether this is even a good idea, then
2. GR for high-level budget allocation, then
3. GR to approve/disapprove specific project proposals on spending the budget 
allocation.

Or, delegate some/parts of this to a team.

X

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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Ximin Luo]

Russ Allbery:
> [..] The failure mode here is that we lose contributors
> because of hard feelings over who gets paid and who doesn't get paid and
> how much they get paid and how they get paid, and the project ends up
> weaker and more fragile. [..]
> 
> For example, you say "democratic mandate," but what *specifically* does
> that mean?  Are we going to vote in a GR on who gets paid and who doesn't?
> Wouldn't that risk compensation turning into a popularity contest, or at
> least being perceived that way? [..]
> 
> You rightfully point out that people are getting paid now, and that
> payment determines, partly, their priorities in the project.  That's true,
> but that payment comes from a huge variety of different sources and there
> are very strong social norms in the free software community about what
> sorts of things people writing those checks get to determine for the
> community and what things they don't.  [..]
> [..]  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. [..]

Nobody is suggesting that it won't be a hard problem to get right, but progress 
isn't made by worrying about all the things that could possibly go wrong. 
Figuring out a blueprint for organising large-scale work using more 
directly-democratic principles would have lots of benefits far beyond this 
project.

Some of the things you talk about are already issues everywhere. For example, 
"people having strong feelings about money" is already used as justification 
for companies to keep salary negotiations a secret, even though economists 
generally have acknowledged that workers get a better deal if salaries are 
transparent.

Then some of the other things you mentioned are not necessarily downsides. 
Making a loaded statement about what work the project considers the most 
important isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if it stands against the 
loaded statements that Big Tech already puts out worldwide, that give engineers 
(including open source engineers) a bad name in front of people that don't know 
there are less monopolistic ways of creating and using technology.

Injecting a bit of risk into a 25-year old project isn't such a bad thing. 
We've been at 1k developers for about 10 years now, if I remember my numbers 
right.

X

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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Russ Allbery]

Ximin Luo  writes:

> A lot of people are already paid full-time to work on Debian. Wouldn't
> it be better to additionally have some other people be paid full-time to
> work on Debian under a democratic mandate (our voting system) rather
> than under corporate orders? At the very least, it would be a good
> social experiment to gain insight from - something like that hasn't not
> been done much in the world before.

In an ideal world, with some sort of cooperative allocation of resources
in the context of a mutually supportive society where fundamental human
needs are met automatically, yes, I would love to work out the details of
such a system.

In the messy, mostly-capitalist world in which nearly all Debian project
collaborators are embedded, in which some of us have considerably more
money and resources than others, where costs of living vary *wildly* by
where you happen to live, and where one person's extra and mostly
unimportant spending money is another person's food and rent, I am afraid
that social experiment has a much higher chance to result in very real
losses to the project.  The failure mode here is that we lose contributors
because of hard feelings over who gets paid and who doesn't get paid and
how much they get paid and how they get paid, and the project ends up
weaker and more fragile.

People have strong feelings about money, sometimes even if they don't
think they will.  Not all people, not all the time, but it's a maxim
because on average it's true.  Money ranks right up there with politics
and religion as likely to cause the most drama, the most hard feelings,
and the most misunderstandings.  That's because money is really
complicated: it's not just a way to meet one's physical needs.  It's also
affirmation, it's a measure (sometimes competitive) of worth, and there's
a whole lot of social programming and momentum behind the feeling that who
gets paid is a measure of who is the most valuable.

I respect the desire to try social experiments and be bold, but my counter
question is whether Debian as a project has the right training and the
right people to conduct a proper social experiment *here*, on *this*
particular topic.  Do we have economists?  Psychologists?  Do we know what
the nature of the experiment would be?

For example, you say "democratic mandate," but what *specifically* does
that mean?  Are we going to vote in a GR on who gets paid and who doesn't?
Wouldn't that risk compensation turning into a popularity contest, or at
least being perceived that way?  If we're paying someone under such a
system, is there any accountability if they don't do what we're paying
them for?  Is there someone supervising them, and if so, who?  Or are we
just giving people $X and saying "do whatever you want with it"?  This
stuff is very not easy to figure out.

You rightfully point out that people are getting paid now, and that
payment determines, partly, their priorities in the project.  That's true,
but that payment comes from a huge variety of different sources and there
are very strong social norms in the free software community about what
sorts of things people writing those checks get to determine for the
community and what things they don't.  And we have a lot of ways of
handling when some contributor no longer is getting paid to do something
they were doing, and a firm understanding that this isn't *because* of our
community, although it may be a problem our community has to find a way to
deal with.  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.

It's a real problem for the project that we don't have a better way of
allocating resources, and it hampers us in some ways compared to, say,
Ubuntu or Red Hat, where there is a single, stable funding stream to
maintain the distribution and set firm priorities.  There are some things
we don't do as well as those distributions because of it.  But, for
instance, while I know a lot of people volunteer work for Ubuntu, I
personally have very little desire to do anything with Ubuntu because
people get paid to do that.  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.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Ximin Luo]

Russ Allbery:
> Adrian Bunk  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.  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.
> 

A lot of people are already paid full-time to work on Debian. Wouldn't it be 
better to additionally have some other people be paid full-time to work on 
Debian under a democratic mandate (our voting system) rather than under 
corporate orders? At the very least, it would be a good social experiment to 
gain insight from - something like that hasn't not been done much in the world 
before.

X

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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Holger Levsen]

dear Russ,

once again, many thanks for expressing nicely what I couldnt express
that well. My thoughts exactly.


-- 
tschau,
Holger, who first wanted to send this in private to Russ and
then decided against.

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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Russ Allbery]

Adrian Bunk  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.  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.

If we're only hiring people from *outside* the project, not each other,
maybe that avoids the worst of the problems, but it's still an odd
dynamic.  For example, it creates a perverse incentive for someone to
resign from the project so that they can be paid for the work they're
currently doing as a volunteer.

I'm particularly concerned what will happen if something goes wrong: we
pay someone to do additional work and that work isn't up to the quality
standards that we need.  Now what?  If that person is also a Debian
Developer, we have now introduced an aspect of job performance feedback
into a volunteer community.  While doubtless there are Debian Developers
who are also managers in their day jobs, that's not something anyone is
currently doing *in Debian*.  Managing feedback and consequences for poor
performance is a skill that we are not currently exercising and that is
not trivial to learn.

These problems generally go away with externally-funded initiatives such
as LTS.  In that case, even when Debian Developers are involved, it's
clear that the person with the money is making contract and hiring
decisions, is the person who can decide to fire someone from that contract
if they don't like the work being done, and any decisions made there are
entirely separate from one's ongoing Debian work as a volunteer.  People
still have to decide what they're willing to do for free and what they
want to be paid for, but it helps a lot that LTS is scoped to one specific
problem and has resources such that, if everyone else decides they're not
willing to do LTS support for free, the initiative still survives.  It
also helps considerably that LTS was something we as a project had decided
not to do with pure volunteer resources, so it's a pure incremental on top
of project work.

Maybe we can find more things like LTS that are pure incrementals over
what the project is currently doing, but I'm pretty worried about the
social dynamic of paying people to do core project work that others are
currently doing for free.

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.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Luca Filipozzi]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 10:57:51PM +, Holger Levsen wrote:
> On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 10:56:16PM +, Luca Filipozzi wrote:
> > > For me this implies that Debian should aim at having at least US$500k 
> > > reserves, to be prepared if there is no large donation coming for a 
> > > future refresh.
> > Plus another $300k in reserves for DebConf in case those donations don't
> > come through.
> 
> we never had that.

we do have reserves at SPI; it's why SPI feels comfortable signing hotel
and venue contracts against "commited donations"

> how did we manage to survive those last >25y?

because, thankfully, the donations do come through for DebConf

and because, historically, HPE and Bytemark have donated a lot of
hardware (thanks HPE and Bdale!), no ... but this is no longer the case

-- 
Luca Filipozzi

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Holger Levsen]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 10:56:16PM +, Luca Filipozzi wrote:
> > For me this implies that Debian should aim at having at least US$500k 
> > reserves, to be prepared if there is no large donation coming for a 
> > future refresh.
> Plus another $300k in reserves for DebConf in case those donations don't
> come through.

we never had that. how did we manage to survive those last >25y?


-- 
tschau,
Holger

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Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Luca Filipozzi]

On Sat, Jun 01, 2019 at 01:50:25AM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 09:04:24PM +, Luca Filipozzi wrote:
> >...
> > When we last crunched the numbers, maintaining a 5y refresh (to stay in
> > warranty, etc.) would require $75k-100k/yr. We've avoided that level of
> > annual expenditure because we are keeping hardware longer than 5y and
> > we've had amazing hardware [donations][1].
> >...
> 
> For me this implies that Debian should aim at having at least US$500k 
> reserves, to be prepared if there is no large donation coming for a 
> future refresh.

Plus another $300k in reserves for DebConf in case those donations don't
come through.

-- 
Luca Filipozzi

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Adrian Bunk]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 09:04:24PM +, Luca Filipozzi wrote:
>...
> When we last crunched the numbers, maintaining a 5y refresh (to stay in
> warranty, etc.) would require $75k-100k/yr. We've avoided that level of
> annual expenditure because we are keeping hardware longer than 5y and
> we've had amazing hardware [donations][1].
>...

For me this implies that Debian should aim at having at least US$500k 
reserves, to be prepared if there is no large donation coming for a 
future refresh.

> Luca Filipozzi

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

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Adrian Bunk]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 05:29:42PM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> > "Adrian" == Adrian Bunk  writes:
> 
> I agree that's missing.
> 
> I don't think that is the important information needed to drive the
> discussions I'm hoping someone will drive.
> 
> Instead I'm more interested in seeing discussions at a high level.
> 
> Talking about the issues involved in paying people to do work.
> What the options are, collecting people's concerns etc.
> 
> I actually think the first round of that can be done without significant
> access to numbers.
> 
> That said, I'd sure like that anual report (actually I'd love it
> quarterly) you speak of above.
> I'm not volunteering.  Are you?

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.

If I am driving this discussion the first round will be about the 
income side only, to get the numbers what is actually realistic at
the expense side.

Many divisive discussions at the expense side might then not even be 
necessary since they could anyways not get financed.

> --Sam

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

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Sam Hartman]

> "Adrian" == Adrian Bunk  writes:

I agree that's missing.

I don't think that is the important information needed to drive the
discussions I'm hoping someone will drive.

Instead I'm more interested in seeing discussions at a high level.

Talking about the issues involved in paying people to do work.
What the options are, collecting people's concerns etc.

I actually think the first round of that can be done without significant
access to numbers.

That said, I'd sure like that anual report (actually I'd love it
quarterly) you speak of above.
I'm not volunteering.  Are you?

--Sam

Re: Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Adrian Bunk]

On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 07:49:25AM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> 
> [moving a discussion from -devel to -project where it belongs]
> 
> > "Mo" == Mo Zhou  writes:
> 
> Mo> Hi,
> Mo> On 2019-05-29 08:38, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> >> Use the $300,000 on our bank accounts?
> 
> So, there were two $300k donations in the last year.
> One of these was earmarked for a DSA equipment upgrade.
> DSA has a couple of options to pursue, but it's possible they may
> actually spend $400k on an equipment refresh.
> 
> $200k doesn't really go that far in terms of big infrastructure projects
> like bikeshed or similar.
> 
> I'm looking for someone who would be willing to guide a discussion of
> the Money issues Martin brought up in his campaign.  I don't have time
> to guide that effor myself.  Real thought needs to be put into it; it
> will be at least as much work as the discussions I'm leading on
> packaging practices and git if done correctly.
> 
> However it could be very valuable for the project.

The information required for an informed discussion on this topic
is missing.

What is really missing in Debian is an annual report from the
treasurer team covering all trusted organizations, listing the
accounts of all income and expenses as well as the reserves.

Some people are suggesting to spend 6 digit US$ amounts on whatever they 
consider important, while other people are spending their precious 
Debian time on getting mere 4 or 5 digit amounts of sponsorship for
a DebConf or MiniDebConf.

I don't see how these could both make sense at the same time.

Just from looking at the SPI part I would say that Debian has some 
reserves that could be used if needed, but new substantial recurring
commitments would not be reasonable since the long-term situation
is that there are usually < US$ 100k per year in both regular income
and expenses (excluding Debconf earmarks).

Other trusted organizations might show a similar or a completely 
different picture - it is impossible to start the budgetary
discussion you are asking for without the status quo of the
Debian finances as a basis.

> --Sam

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

Realizing Good Ideas with Debian Money

[Sam Hartman]

[moving a discussion from -devel to -project where it belongs]

> "Mo" == Mo Zhou  writes:

Mo> Hi,
Mo> On 2019-05-29 08:38, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
>> Use the $300,000 on our bank accounts?

So, there were two $300k donations in the last year.
One of these was earmarked for a DSA equipment upgrade.
DSA has a couple of options to pursue, but it's possible they may
actually spend $400k on an equipment refresh.

$200k doesn't really go that far in terms of big infrastructure projects
like bikeshed or similar.

I'm looking for someone who would be willing to guide a discussion of
the Money issues Martin brought up in his campaign.  I don't have time
to guide that effor myself.  Real thought needs to be put into it; it
will be at least as much work as the discussions I'm leading on
packaging practices and git if done correctly.

However it could be very valuable for the project.

--Sam

Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hi Mason,

Sorry for the delayed answer.

On 16/12/13 at 22:33 -0500, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:
 On Sun, Oct 20, 2013, Lucas Nussbaum lea...@debian.org wrote:
 
  I received a few requests for hardware purchases, that I think are worth
  discussing with the project as a whole in order to progress towards having
  clear guidelines for what is acceptable and what isn't in terms of spending
  Debian money.
  
  Please provide feedback on the proposed decisions -- they are not final
  yet.
 
 Hello, and apologies for being so late in responding. I only noted this
 discussion after a DPL report, and it's taken me some time to subscribe and
 reply.

Thanks for your feedback, even if the decisions are final now.
Those decisions were hard to make, and I don't think that we can draw
general rules from them yet.

Some comments inlined below.

 I'd like to generally note that I'm not in favour of buying hardware for
 individual developers. Hardware for Debian infrastructure is obviously
 distinct from this, and I'd suggest that even hardware purchased for a
 particular role and maintained within the Debian infrastructure would be
 reasonable.

Right

 Going down the list:
 
  A. Memory expansion cards for m68k buildds (expected cost: 500 EUR)
 
 Infrastructure investment - reasonable.
 
 
  B. Powerful machine for d-i development (expected cost: 1.5k-2k EUR?)
 
 Unreasonable. The developer should be using his own hardware. If the Project
 is to supply hardware, it should live within the Project's infrastructure.
 The developer is specifically noting that the machine will be running virtual
 guests for the actual development work, and as such I can't imagine why this
 cannot live inside the Debian infrastructure, thus making it more available
 to the community as a resource when this develop doesn't need it for active
 work.
 
 The developer argues against a remote machine, saying, I do realize having
 some nice hardware racked up in some datacenter would be nice for testing
 purposes, but until automated regression testing is implemented, one needs to
 rely on clicking and typing into a VM, so as to debug/develop some framework
 to perform automated testing. This can readily be accomplished with VNC. The
 developer also notes that prepairing an upload requires a local machine,
 which, again, suggests that a machine managed within the Debian
 infrastructure doesn't present the requisite level of trust... This request
 simply bothers me. It is, I believe, too much to ask of the Project.

Some points that contributed to making this decision are:
- debian-installer is a central part of Debian, where we have
  historically had problems attracting contributors (despite trying)
- the developer in question is the main contributor to d-i, and has been
  for some time
- developing debian-installer efficiently requires fast hardware, faster
  than what can be found in a medium-range laptop
- testing debian-installer often requires running the installer
  interactively. This could be done over VNC, but this is really far
  from being comfortable. Typically, you want to be able skip very fast
  to the point that you are working on (without reading all the
  questions :-) ), and latency and low bandwidth makes this very hard.
- the machine would be only used for Debian work (my original mail said
  primarly -- the developer clarified in private)
- if the developer were to stop his involvement in d-i, the machine
  could be returned to the project

So, I really saw this purchase as purchasing Debian infrastructure hosted
at a Developer's rather than in a datacenter.

  C. Laptop for developer (expected cost: 1k-1.5k EUR?)
 
 Again, individual developers should supply their own hardware.

(that request was not approved in the end)

 My perspective: I donate a small sum to SPI, earmarked expressly for Debian,
 monthly. I imagine there are many other people who do the same thing. Seeing
 these requests for gifts from the Project makes me mentally add up how many
 months of my contributions are going to satisfy a developer's desire for
 something that he'd really ought to be providing for himself.
 
 I believe in the election process and I have no illusion that I'm in a
 position to try to micro-manage how the Project uses its available resources,
 but it really won't take seeing this sort of thing more than once or twice
 before I redirect this particular portion of my charitable giving elsewhere.
 I would personally be far too embarassed to ask a non-profit group to which I
 volunteered development time to give me equipment for the purpose, rather
 than simply asking for the use of Project-managed resources if my own
 resources seemed somehow insufficient.

I agree with you that using the project's resources to provide gifts to
developer is not acceptable.

On the other hand, many Debian contributors make life choices that
result, for example, in jobs where they can spend time on Debian during
work hours, in exchange of a lower

Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Mason Loring Bliss]

On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 07:00:10PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:

 So, I really saw this purchase as purchasing Debian infrastructure hosted
 at a Developer's rather than in a datacenter.

Alright, that's well-reasoned. Something I'd throw in as a possible addition
to this would be a formal agreement for the use of such hardware, including
such elements as a goal for the work driving the purchase, a notion of
milestones to be accomplished, and an idea of at what point the hardware
should be delivered back to the project or, alternately, a notion of when the
hardware will be considered to have achieved its purpose and can be
henceforth considered owned by the developer.

Put simply, your reasoning seems valid; I'd ideally like to see some
agreement in place to try to ensure that the investment pays for itself. I
don't suspect this sort of thing will be a frequent event, and it's entirely
possible that the developers in question are well-enough known to project
management that there's a defacto character reference at work as well, which
would be reasonable.

Just food for thought.

-- 
Mason Loring Bliss  ((   If I have not seen as far as others, it is because
 ma...@blisses.org   ))   giants were standing on my shoulders. - Hal Abelson


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Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Mason Loring Bliss]

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013, Lucas Nussbaum lea...@debian.org wrote:

 I received a few requests for hardware purchases, that I think are worth
 discussing with the project as a whole in order to progress towards having
 clear guidelines for what is acceptable and what isn't in terms of spending
 Debian money.
 
 Please provide feedback on the proposed decisions -- they are not final
 yet.

Hello, and apologies for being so late in responding. I only noted this
discussion after a DPL report, and it's taken me some time to subscribe and
reply.

I'd like to generally note that I'm not in favour of buying hardware for
individual developers. Hardware for Debian infrastructure is obviously
distinct from this, and I'd suggest that even hardware purchased for a
particular role and maintained within the Debian infrastructure would be
reasonable.


Going down the list:

 A. Memory expansion cards for m68k buildds (expected cost: 500 EUR)

Infrastructure investment - reasonable.


 B. Powerful machine for d-i development (expected cost: 1.5k-2k EUR?)

Unreasonable. The developer should be using his own hardware. If the Project
is to supply hardware, it should live within the Project's infrastructure.
The developer is specifically noting that the machine will be running virtual
guests for the actual development work, and as such I can't imagine why this
cannot live inside the Debian infrastructure, thus making it more available
to the community as a resource when this develop doesn't need it for active
work.

The developer argues against a remote machine, saying, I do realize having
some nice hardware racked up in some datacenter would be nice for testing
purposes, but until automated regression testing is implemented, one needs to
rely on clicking and typing into a VM, so as to debug/develop some framework
to perform automated testing. This can readily be accomplished with VNC. The
developer also notes that prepairing an upload requires a local machine,
which, again, suggests that a machine managed within the Debian
infrastructure doesn't present the requisite level of trust... This request
simply bothers me. It is, I believe, too much to ask of the Project.


 C. Laptop for developer (expected cost: 1k-1.5k EUR?)

Again, individual developers should supply their own hardware.


My perspective: I donate a small sum to SPI, earmarked expressly for Debian,
monthly. I imagine there are many other people who do the same thing. Seeing
these requests for gifts from the Project makes me mentally add up how many
months of my contributions are going to satisfy a developer's desire for
something that he'd really ought to be providing for himself.

I believe in the election process and I have no illusion that I'm in a
position to try to micro-manage how the Project uses its available resources,
but it really won't take seeing this sort of thing more than once or twice
before I redirect this particular portion of my charitable giving elsewhere.
I would personally be far too embarassed to ask a non-profit group to which I
volunteered development time to give me equipment for the purpose, rather
than simply asking for the use of Project-managed resources if my own
resources seemed somehow insufficient.

-- 
Mason Loring Bliss  ((   If I have not seen as far as others, it is because
 ma...@blisses.org   ))   giants were standing on my shoulders. - Hal Abelson


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Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Brian Gupta]

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Lucas Nussbaum lea...@debian.org wrote:
 Hi,

 I received a few requests for hardware purchases, that I think are worth
 discussing with the project as a whole in order to progress towards
 having clear guidelines for what is acceptable and what isn't in terms
 of spending Debian money.

 Please provide feedback on the proposed decisions -- they are not final
 yet.


 A. Memory expansion cards for m68k buildds (expected cost: 500 EUR)
 ===

 Widely quoting from a private mail:
 | Debian has an unofficial m68k (Amiga) port. It became unofficial
 | mainly because build daemons were not fast enough to keep up with
 | security updates in a timely manner. The port has an active developers
 | community (see https://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/). Debian is the only
 | Linux distribution with a working m68k port, and m68k is still popular
 | among fans of retro computers. It takes little financial effort to keep
 | the port running; what is needed is money for small hardware upgrades.

 I'm inclined to APPROVE the request, for the following reasons:
 - even if the port is unofficial, and is very unlikely to become an
   official port again in the future, it benefits from an active
   developers community composed of several DDs.
 - experience has shown that porting work on one architecture often
   benefits other architectures (since similar problems show up
   across different architectures).
 - the amount of requested money is relatively low.

 Obviously, the following conditions would apply:
 1) the hardware bought would have to go to buildds used through
 debian-ports.org, and/or to porter boxes that are widely open to the
 Debian community.
 2) if the machine stops being used for Debian-related work, the
 hardware must be transferred to another DD.


 B. Powerful machine for d-i development (expected cost: 1.5k-2k EUR?)
 =

 A debian-installer developer writes:
 up to now, I've always used my own hardware for Debian work, but I'd
 like that to change slightly due to my work on d-i. I intend to work on
 at least the following topics:
  1. performing more frequent d-i uploads:
   http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2013/10/msg00194.html
  2. implementing some kind of official images with backported linux
 kernels (and possibly other needed bits from the right suite);
  3. implementing automated regression testing, so that we can work
 properly on 1., 2., and also on stable uploads; dailies would also
 benefit from that; people from -cd@ (Steve, mostly) would probably
 appreciate it as well.

 Some desktop machine with fast disc(s), a bunch of RAM and some CPU
 power would be nice, so that I could play with a bunch of VMs (most
 likely, primary targets will be amd64 and i386, but virtually anything
 qemu can deal with). Some disc space to hold a local (possibly partial)
 mirror would be a plus, since there's plenty of deb/udeb fetching during
 d-i builds and when testing installation.

 Do you think something can be arranged on Debian funds to that effect?
 If that looks reasonable, any specific site/vendor I should be looking
 into to come up with some specs that would be nice to have, so that you
 ACK/NACK it? In which case, any upper bound? Or any other ideas? Of
 course the HW can be shipped over to the next person wanting to work
 that much on d-i in case/when I start burning out. (FWIW I don't plan on
 leaving the d-i RM position before jessie is released. ;))

 [ Also, I do realize having some nice hardware racked up in some
 datacenter would be nice for testing purposes, but until automated
 regression testing is implemented, one needs to rely on clicking and
 typing into a VM, so as to debug/develop some framework to perform
 automated testing. A datacenter-hosted machine would also not help with
 the “preparing an upload” side, which still needs some trusted, local
 machine IMVHO. ]

 I'm inclined to APPROVE the request, for the following reasons:
 - the machine would be primarly (only?) used for working on Debian
 - the specifics of the tasks justify hardware hosted locally (VNC to
   a remote machine is possible of course, but latency makes it quite
   inefficient to do testing that way)

 Of course, as quoted in the original mail, if the DD were to stop their
 involvement in d-i development before the machine reaches its end-of-life,
 the machine would have to be shipped to someone else.


 C. Laptop for developer (expected cost: 1k-1.5k EUR?)
 =

 A DD is asking for help to buy a new laptop. He maintains or participates in
 the maintenance of a few medium-to-large packages. His only mobile computer is
 an Atom-based netbook with a rather small screen, which is not powerful enough
 to do packaging work (he also has a desktop computer). He describes himself

Aw: Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Steffen Möller]

Hello,

 On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Lucas Nussbaum lea...@debian.org wrote:
  Hi,
 
  I received a few requests for hardware purchases, that I think are worth
  discussing with the project as a whole in order to progress towards
  having clear guidelines for what is acceptable and what isn't in terms
  of spending Debian money.
 
  Please provide feedback on the proposed decisions -- they are not final
  yet.
 
 
  A. Memory expansion cards for m68k buildds (expected cost: 500 EUR)
  ===
...
  B. Powerful machine for d-i development (expected cost: 1.5k-2k EUR?)
  =
...
  C. Laptop for developer (expected cost: 1k-1.5k EUR?)
  =

Brian:
 That said, it does seem that the situation with C is suboptimal, and
 perhaps he could try to see if any DDs have a spare laptop that they
 could lend/give, as even a 5-6 year old laptop seems that it would be
 better than what he has now?

+1 

The community spirit among ourselves should be supported this way and
maybe we find more ways towards it. How about the DPL first deciding
if something is sufficiently close to our key project ideas to receive
direct funding from the Debian money, and if not, if the Debian project
should ask for the explicit funding for a project through its communication
channels from the community, much like what kickstarter or indiegogo do.
For the ABC above, it could go like

B : direct funding for the installer team

A : request to the community a large to donate money for the M68K project
to update their memory. I volunteer to donate 20 €/$ whatever.

C : reject, or change to a request to forward a used machine matching
some specification for a student  ... 

I find the request C a bit strange or I do not get it right. For
every DD there are machines to log in to for building packages. Right?
Hence, even only with a Raspberry at hand, there are tons of useful bits
to contribute to our distribution and so much every student can afford.

Steffen


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Buying hardware with Debian money

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hi,

I received a few requests for hardware purchases, that I think are worth
discussing with the project as a whole in order to progress towards
having clear guidelines for what is acceptable and what isn't in terms
of spending Debian money.

Please provide feedback on the proposed decisions -- they are not final
yet.


A. Memory expansion cards for m68k buildds (expected cost: 500 EUR)
===

Widely quoting from a private mail:
| Debian has an unofficial m68k (Amiga) port. It became unofficial
| mainly because build daemons were not fast enough to keep up with
| security updates in a timely manner. The port has an active developers
| community (see https://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/). Debian is the only
| Linux distribution with a working m68k port, and m68k is still popular
| among fans of retro computers. It takes little financial effort to keep
| the port running; what is needed is money for small hardware upgrades.

I'm inclined to APPROVE the request, for the following reasons:
- even if the port is unofficial, and is very unlikely to become an
  official port again in the future, it benefits from an active
  developers community composed of several DDs.
- experience has shown that porting work on one architecture often
  benefits other architectures (since similar problems show up
  across different architectures).
- the amount of requested money is relatively low.

Obviously, the following conditions would apply:
1) the hardware bought would have to go to buildds used through
debian-ports.org, and/or to porter boxes that are widely open to the
Debian community.
2) if the machine stops being used for Debian-related work, the
hardware must be transferred to another DD.


B. Powerful machine for d-i development (expected cost: 1.5k-2k EUR?)
=

A debian-installer developer writes:
 up to now, I've always used my own hardware for Debian work, but I'd
 like that to change slightly due to my work on d-i. I intend to work on
 at least the following topics:
  1. performing more frequent d-i uploads:
   http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2013/10/msg00194.html
  2. implementing some kind of official images with backported linux
 kernels (and possibly other needed bits from the right suite);
  3. implementing automated regression testing, so that we can work
 properly on 1., 2., and also on stable uploads; dailies would also
 benefit from that; people from -cd@ (Steve, mostly) would probably
 appreciate it as well.
 
 Some desktop machine with fast disc(s), a bunch of RAM and some CPU
 power would be nice, so that I could play with a bunch of VMs (most
 likely, primary targets will be amd64 and i386, but virtually anything
 qemu can deal with). Some disc space to hold a local (possibly partial)
 mirror would be a plus, since there's plenty of deb/udeb fetching during
 d-i builds and when testing installation.
 
 Do you think something can be arranged on Debian funds to that effect?
 If that looks reasonable, any specific site/vendor I should be looking
 into to come up with some specs that would be nice to have, so that you
 ACK/NACK it? In which case, any upper bound? Or any other ideas? Of
 course the HW can be shipped over to the next person wanting to work
 that much on d-i in case/when I start burning out. (FWIW I don't plan on
 leaving the d-i RM position before jessie is released. ;))
 
 [ Also, I do realize having some nice hardware racked up in some
 datacenter would be nice for testing purposes, but until automated
 regression testing is implemented, one needs to rely on clicking and
 typing into a VM, so as to debug/develop some framework to perform
 automated testing. A datacenter-hosted machine would also not help with
 the “preparing an upload” side, which still needs some trusted, local
 machine IMVHO. ]

I'm inclined to APPROVE the request, for the following reasons:
- the machine would be primarly (only?) used for working on Debian
- the specifics of the tasks justify hardware hosted locally (VNC to
  a remote machine is possible of course, but latency makes it quite
  inefficient to do testing that way)

Of course, as quoted in the original mail, if the DD were to stop their
involvement in d-i development before the machine reaches its end-of-life,
the machine would have to be shipped to someone else.


C. Laptop for developer (expected cost: 1k-1.5k EUR?)
=

A DD is asking for help to buy a new laptop. He maintains or participates in
the maintenance of a few medium-to-large packages. His only mobile computer is
an Atom-based netbook with a rather small screen, which is not powerful enough
to do packaging work (he also has a desktop computer). He describes himself as
a first world middle class person, is currently a student, and cannot afford
to spend money on hardware.

I'm not sure

Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Russ Allbery]

Lucas Nussbaum lea...@debian.org writes:

 C. Laptop for developer (expected cost: 1k-1.5k EUR?)
 =

I have no particular comment on the merits of this specific request, but
that cost jumped out at me.  I don't know if systems are more expensive in
Euros, but a System76 laptop that's more than adequate for Debian
packaging (the Gazelle Professional, on which I'm writing this mail
message and on which I do a bunch of my development) is only 750 USD.  You
could probably get the cost down further with some more effort, although
the System76 laptops are nice in that they'll work properly with Debian
without any significant mucking about.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/


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Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Sune Vuorela]

On 2013-10-20, Lucas Nussbaum lea...@debian.org wrote:
 A. Memory expansion cards for m68k buildds (expected cost: 500 EUR)

 B. Powerful machine for d-i development (expected cost: 1.5k-2k EUR?)
 
 C. Laptop for developer (expected cost: 1k-1.5k EUR?)

As such, I think all of it sounds reasonable. Developer time is our most
scarce resource, so if we can do something to make it more efficient, we
should do it.

Including the amount mentioned in C. I tried taking the suggested laptop
suggested by Russ and adapt it to be 'good enough' for what I would use
for my debian work and ended up in the 1k-1.5k eur range.


One could though in case both B and C consider suggesting a 10-50% own
payment depending on dialogue between the DPL and the developer in
question.


 I'm not sure of what to do:
 - Debian cannot afford to buy hardware for every DD
 - But many DDs don't need Debian to buy hardware for them
 - This machine is more general-purpose, not specific to Debian work than in=
  (B)

 So far, I answered with the following question:
 How much do you honestly think that this purchase will increase your
 Debian productivity?

Back when I was a generic first world student, something like that could
have made my productivity increased enough to definately make it worth
it.

/Sune


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Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Romain Francoise]

Lucas Nussbaum lea...@debian.org writes:

 But I would welcome other ideas of criterias to apply here.

I think we should spend donation money only on things that benefit
everybody. Sponsoring hardware to help maintain core packages like d-i,
glibc, the kernel, etc would be okay. But buying someone a laptop so
that they can build stalin (or whatever large but leaf package) on it
would make me feel uncomfortable.

-- 
Romain Francoise rfranco...@debian.org
http://people.debian.org/~rfrancoise/


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Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Bastian Blank]

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 05:41:39PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
 B. Powerful machine for d-i development (expected cost: 1.5k-2k EUR?)
 =

The estimation is a bit too large for a decent desktop machine.

   1. performing more frequent d-i uploads:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2013/10/msg00194.html
   2. implementing some kind of official images with backported linux
  kernels (and possibly other needed bits from the right suite);

Aren't this tasks better done on Debian server hardware instead of
developer hardware?  Did the developer talk to DSA?

   3. implementing automated regression testing, so that we can work
  properly on 1., 2., and also on stable uploads; dailies would also
  benefit from that; people from -cd@ (Steve, mostly) would probably
  appreciate it as well.

KVM should support nested VM on at least AMD hardware (however I did not
test that), so DSA may be able to provide something.

 - the specifics of the tasks justify hardware hosted locally (VNC to
   a remote machine is possible of course, but latency makes it quite
   inefficient to do testing that way)

The developer in question is located in australia, africa or south
america?  Otherwise there are DC near enough to not have a lot of
latency.

Bastian

-- 
What kind of love is that?  Not to be loved; never to have shown love.
-- Commissioner Nancy Hedford, Metamorphosis,
   stardate 3219.8


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Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 08:48:58PM +0200, Bastian Blank wrote:
 On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 05:41:39PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
  B. Powerful machine for d-i development (expected cost: 1.5k-2k EUR?)
  =
 
 The estimation is a bit too large for a decent desktop machine.

Meh, I think that's about the right cost for a machine that we can
continue to use for a while. Sure we can buy cheep hardware, but I don't
think it's great to buy new hardware every other year.

1. performing more frequent d-i uploads:
 http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2013/10/msg00194.html
2. implementing some kind of official images with backported linux
   kernels (and possibly other needed bits from the right suite);
 
 Aren't this tasks better done on Debian server hardware instead of
 developer hardware?  Did the developer talk to DSA?

I have no objections at all to the d-i machine. I trust (if this request
is from who I hope it is) that it will be used 100% for Debian work, and
I trust their ability to use this machine to ensure Debian continues to
run smoothly.


Much love,
  Paul

-- 
 .''`.  Paul Tagliamonte paul...@debian.org
: :'  : Proud Debian Developer
`. `'`  4096R / 8F04 9AD8 2C92 066C 7352  D28A 7B58 5B30 807C 2A87
 `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag


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Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Ben Hutchings]

On Sun, 2013-10-20 at 09:11 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
 Lucas Nussbaum lea...@debian.org writes:
 
  C. Laptop for developer (expected cost: 1k-1.5k EUR?)
  =
 
 I have no particular comment on the merits of this specific request, but
 that cost jumped out at me.  I don't know if systems are more expensive in
 Euros, but a System76 laptop that's more than adequate for Debian
 packaging (the Gazelle Professional, on which I'm writing this mail
 message and on which I do a bunch of my development) is only 750 USD.  You
 could probably get the cost down further with some more effort, although
 the System76 laptops are nice in that they'll work properly with Debian
 without any significant mucking about.

I've long used second-hand Thinkpads, bought at about 1 year old for
£300-£400 (roughly same number of EUR) either from a friend or via eBay.
Unless this developer is maintaining a monster package like chromium or
libreoffice, such a second-hand machine should be fine for Debian
development.  And I would expect that to be within the budget of a
'first world middle-class student', though perhaps that covers a wider
range of means than I think.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest.


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Re: Debian money

[Gunnar Wolf]

Giacomo A. Catenazzi dijo [Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 02:10:55PM +0200]:
 A working free software implementation of the flash web plugin is a
 requirement for Debian to provide a complete free software based
 desktop.  At the moment flash is used on so many web sites that the
 common user will not accept a browser without working Flash.  I
 believe that should be a priority of the Debian project to provide a
 complete free software desktop.  And as Gnash is one of the few
 projects where money will help speed up development, I believe
 spending Debian money on Gnash is a good idea.  Why should Debian not
 sponsor upstream development for projects that are important to
 Debian?

 It is useful not only for Debian, so IMHO Debian could donate some
 money, but only if other big distributions (RedHat, SuSe/Novel, Ubuntu,
 etc.) do the same.

Some of the big distributions have no moral problem in including
Adobe's propietary plugin, though. We do.

-- 
Gunnar Wolf • gw...@gwolf.org • (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244


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Re: Debian money

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Gunnar Wolf]
 Some of the big distributions have no moral problem in including
 Adobe's propietary plugin, though. We do.

Really?  I was not aware that it was a moral issue.  I thought it was
a question of licensing, where the license from Adobe prohibited
distribution on the web by third parties.  Where did I misunderstand?
Which big distributions publish and distribute the Adobe plugin on the
web?

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen


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snapshot.debian.{net,org} and spending Debian money

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

more than a year ago it was announced that snapshot.debian.net has
trouble with disk capacity[1].  Some ideas were expressein in blogs and
even some rumor was there that we might have snapshot.debian.org in
some months[2].  Since this time more than 13 monthes went without
that I was able to notice any progress.  I have not read all the mails
about how to spend Debian money but if you ask me money would be very
reasonably spent if this service would be back and running quickly.

Kind regards

Andreas.

[1] http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2008/09/index.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2008/08/msg00060.html

-- 
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Klarmachen zum Ändern!


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Re: snapshot.debian.{net,org} and spending Debian money

[Paul Wise]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 2:10 PM, Andreas Tille andr...@an3as.eu wrote:

 more than a year ago it was announced that snapshot.debian.net has
 trouble with disk capacity[1].  Some ideas were expressein in blogs and
 even some rumor was there that we might have snapshot.debian.org in
 some months[2].  Since this time more than 13 monthes went without
 that I was able to notice any progress.  I have not read all the mails
 about how to spend Debian money but if you ask me money would be very
 reasonably spent if this service would be back and running quickly.

snapshot.debian.org is already being worked on. IIRC the machine is
setup and some archives are syncing to the box, for further details,
perhaps someone from DSA reads this list, or contact
debian-ad...@lists.d.o or #debian-admin on IRC.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise


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Re: snapshot.debian.{net,org} and spending Debian money

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 02:13:15PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
 
 snapshot.debian.org

A DNS entry for this address containing a short status message would
be helpful.

Kind regards

 Andreas. 

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Re: snapshot.debian.{net,org} and spending Debian money

[Stephen Gran]

This one time, at band camp, Andreas Tille said:
 Hi,
 
 more than a year ago it was announced that snapshot.debian.net has
 trouble with disk capacity[1].  Some ideas were expressein in blogs and
 even some rumor was there that we might have snapshot.debian.org in
 some months[2].  Since this time more than 13 monthes went without
 that I was able to notice any progress.  I have not read all the mails
 about how to spend Debian money but if you ask me money would be very
 reasonably spent if this service would be back and running quickly.

Work is progressing, and it's already mostly functional.  We're not
taking it live just yet.  Peter will know more details than I do, but
I'm under the impression we're mostly waiting for a multi-TB sync from
.jp to finish.

Cheers,
-- 
 -
|   ,''`.Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :sg...@debian.org |
|  `. `'Debian user, admin, and developer |
|`- http://www.debian.org |
 -


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Re: snapshot.debian.{net,org} and spending Debian money

[Peter Palfrader]

On Fri, 25 Sep 2009, Andreas Tille wrote:

 provide this info there and ask the .jp admins to also put some
 information about the status online.

Unlikely.  The person who operated s.d.n is overworked as it is.

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  Peter Palfrader  | : :' :  The  universal
 http://www.palfrader.org/ | `. `'  Operating System
   |   `-http://www.debian.org/


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Re: Debian money

[Jesús M. Navarro]

Hi, Bernd:

On Wednesday 16 September 2009 19:14:41 Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
 Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
  Some months ago Debian asked for sponsored hardware:
  http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090208
 
  I did not read any news about his, so maybe we could use some
  money for such infrastructure hardware.

 We were and are still hoping to get at least one machine sponsored as
 described - please note that a performant SAN infrastructure is REALLY
 expensive. If you look at normal market prices, you start with $100k,

You can get an AoE-based SAN from Coraid for much less.  Not the best 
performer nor the most feature-rich but still it's worth have a look at it 
(I'm not at all involved with Coraid; just a quite enough satisfied user).


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Re: Debian money

[Tollef Fog Heen]

]] Bernd Zeimetz 

| Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
| 
|  No need for SAN, direct-attached SAS or a SAS enclosure would be sufficient
|  for both snapshot.d.o and data.d.o (with a proper hardware-raid controller
| 
| Remember, both services might start to grow pretty fast. A direct-attached
| enclosure does not grow... (yeah, you could add another one...I know).

Not really suggesting we should buy one ourselves, but Backblaze makes
those storage pods of 67TB (raw capacity) which do run Debian (in 4U),
costing about 8kUSD in materials.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

Maybe we should ask them to either sponsor one and one as a backup, sell
us one or similar?  We'd not want to run their storage thing, which is
proprietary, but just having that much storage should be plenty for
quite a while, I'd think.

-- 
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UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are


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Re: Debian money / hw summits / partner meetings / government / schools / workshops

[Andre Felipe Machado]

Hello,
It is worth to consider some key face to face and summits with OEMs [0] and
potential partners [1], along with funding developers meetings.
Canonical is already doing [0], as it is very needed. If I recall correctly some
time ago Michlmayr traveled to Asia for some oem meetings.
As an example of potential partner meetings, I am participating in [1] since day
0 (travels, meetings, audio conferences, phone calls, etc, without Debian
funding), and despite being *very* hard and slow (and sometimes ugly because
of the big stakes) at government, the events (sorry, no disclosure yet) are
being good.
Trying to get Debian and Debian Edu at schools will need more meetings also with
government agencies. Schools seed the future of FOSS.
Here at our DLUG, we are trying to make as many debian packaging workshops at
schools and foss events as we could. The interest is surprising, given the heavy
technical subject. Some participants stated that before the workshop, debian
packaging seemed magic and now they feel confortable exploring documentation
and tweaking experimental packages. Maybe future DDs come from such initiatives.
Regards.
Andre Felipe Machado

[0] http://www.ubuntu.com/partners/hardware-summit-2009-sept
[1] http://times.debian.net/1272-SERPRO-chose-Debian-and-wishes-to-collaborate

Re: Debian money

[Leszek Dubiel]

Hello!


The main target of Debian Project is to produce the free and most 
reliable linux distribution in the world. Developers donate their free 
time to project, while users donate money. I think you should use that 
money to assure that developers don't have to spent their private money 
for their tasks (fixing bugs, maintaing packages, going to meetings, 
confrences, flying by airplane, staying in hotels, going on dinner...). 
Developers should get money for everything they need: new hardware, 
transport, food, accomodation (hotels), tickets to exhibitions, internet 
access. Developers should get money for ALL ACTIVITY that has to be done 
by developer. Money should be used to support developers. I think some 
people HAVE TIME, but they are not RICH ENOUGH TO BE A DEVELOPER.




  1 New hardware / equipment
  2 Fund developer gatherings:
  3 Legal costs

You should definitely support this. Developers should not spent their 
private money to develop Debian. Developers SHOULD NOT PAY for beeing 
developer.




  4 Marketing stuff:
a box(es) of equipment to take to stands at various shows and
b ads in the media in various places? Very expensive imho, so I'm
  not convinced. How much money do we spend?

In my opinion it is waste of money. You're not a company, you don't sell 
system, you don't have to tell people to buy your product. Debian 
project is made by developers and if Debian is good enough, then it will 
have many, many users. So why to pay money to get more users? Ubuntu, 
Mint, Xandros, Knoppix do that.


There is one thing debian should put money into. This is called 
corportate identity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_identity). 
Your logo is old and not bautiful. You should make facelifting. 
Developers will not do that, freelancers will not do that. This could be 
done only by professionals and this will cost a lot (eg. 10 thousand 
euros). Maybe companies that work for IBM, CocaCola or Macdonald's will 
do the good job. You will pay once and have perfect logo (perfect face 
of debian) for many years.




c marketing to new developers: posters to put up at universities?
  T-shirts or other gifts for new people working on bug-fixes,
  translations etc.? Could be useful, but again expensive.

Normal users, who don't know much about Linux, will not become 
developers. Don't spent money to convice them to become a developer. 
Only linux gurus could become developers, but linux gurs surely KNOW 
WHAT DEBIAN IS. So you don't have to spent money on these people either.




  5 Pay people to do stuff we don't/can't/won't:
a technical writing for end users (users guide and admin guide):
b News team; person/people to work on collating the news reports
c Press officer / Debian ambassador to go and talk to corporations,
  the press etc.
f suggestion that we should use money to pay outsiders to do some
  existing press/news/admin/whatever work to leave the existing

Yes -- somebody has to talk to users (companies, private people, 
journalists). If nobody would like to spent his time on these 
activities, than you should pay for them.




  6 Fund other related projects
a Debian Edu. Clearly good for us to do - heavily linked with
  Debian.
b Gnash. Petter is very keen on this, but I'm not so sure. Don't
  they have other ways to get funding? Thoughts?

If people in Debian really need these projects and these projects will 
not get donations easily, then Debian should donate them. Especially if 
this money would support freedom (Gnash, Gcj).




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Re: Debian money

[Miguel Figueiredo]

 
 The main target of Debian Project is to produce the free and most
 reliable linux distribution in the world. 

Debian it's our 'product' and we are (very) proud of it. 
And we also believe it's good to share it.

-- media to share it: Debian releases are media images full of free software. 
It's what we release. Why not give away/have it available on physical media 
(not everyone have internet access everywhere), printed manuals, 
merchandising...


-- gatherings of people with a common interest - debian: local/national 
meetings organization support so users/contributors could organize 
themselves/attend/get together. Good things can happen when people with common 
interests get together with a purpose.

As an example, myself and other folks we organize an yearly national 
meeting 
[1] about Debian. The end result it's very interesting (from talks about 
implementation done in schools, to l10n discussion, to free software use) and 
every year we, and i believe others, face some obvious problems: 

- get money to organize an event with quality. 
Work to make it happen it's free but some things cost money.
- merchandising (people ask/want tshirts, CDs/DVDs for offline and live 
use)
Installation/Live CDs with some nice artwork cost creativity and money.

I know that there are similar gatherings in other countries. A little 
help 
would not hurt.


-- Nice Debian booths in selected events


-- Spread the word: people could benefit from using Debian releases and it's 
free software. We have a great distribution. Why not tell the world about it?


-- 'DebianSummerOfCode'-like project


-- And of course, if there is enough hardware given by people/companies who 
think Debian can benefit from it money can be applied elsewhere.


1 - http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hphl=pt-
PTjs=nu=http%3A%2F%2Fdebiandaypt.debianpt.orgsl=pttl=enhistory_state0=


My 2 eurocents,

Miguel


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Re: Debian money

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Wed, 16 Sep 2009, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
 Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
  Some months ago Debian asked for sponsored hardware:
  http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090208
  
  I did not read any news about his, so maybe we could use some
  money for such infrastructure hardware.
 
 We were and are still hoping to get at least one machine sponsored as 
 described
 - please note that a performant SAN infrastructure is REALLY expensive. If you

No need for SAN, direct-attached SAS or a SAS enclosure would be sufficient
for both snapshot.d.o and data.d.o (with a proper hardware-raid controller
so that you get the NVS required to run RAID6 without disabling write caches
entirely).  You also need a 64bit box with *LOTS* of RAM to use as
read­cache, since the datasets are really large.

It should cost less than US$ 50k.  The problem is that you also need to be
able to backup that much disk space.  I have no idea how much that would
cost.  Tape autochangers are NOT cheap, nor are the tapes.

And after all that, there's the network bandwidth.

So yes, this is the sort of stuff that would work much better if sponsored
by a datacenter :-)

-- 
  One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie. -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh


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Re: Debian money

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

 No need for SAN, direct-attached SAS or a SAS enclosure would be sufficient
 for both snapshot.d.o and data.d.o (with a proper hardware-raid controller

Remember, both services might start to grow pretty fast. A direct-attached
enclosure does not grow... (yeah, you could add another one...I know).


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Re: Debian money

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
 Some months ago Debian asked for sponsored hardware:
 http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090208
 
 I did not read any news about his, so maybe we could use some
 money for such infrastructure hardware.

We were and are still hoping to get at least one machine sponsored as described
- please note that a performant SAN infrastructure is REALLY expensive. If you
look at normal market prices, you start with $100k, so thats not really doable
for Debian. Of course it is not hard to get 10T in disks in a machine, but if
they'll be able to handle something like data.d.o is a completely different
question.


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Re: Debian money

[Neil McGovern]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 06:42:46PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
 Russ Allbery r...@debian.org wrote:
  Charles Plessy ple...@debian.org writes:
   [...] but Debian could support companies started by its developers
   to make a living of their Debian-related activities, by contributing to
   their capital.  [...]
  
  We can't do that with moneys collected in the United States under the
  aegis of Software in the Public Interest.  It would jeopardize the
  non-profit status of SPI.  Non-profit charities are not permitted to make
  investments in for-profit businesses.
 
 Are they permitted to make loans?
 
 There are some non-charities like Debian-UK holding debian funds which
 would not be restricted in that way, but I think it would be rather
 out of character for debian to take a position of supporting
 capitalism in this direct way.

For reference, Charities in the UK can also invest in profit making
entities, and indeed own them outright.

Neil
-- 
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most unknown architecture


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Re: Debian money

[MJ Ray]

Russ Allbery r...@debian.org wrote:
 Charles Plessy ple...@debian.org writes:
  [...] but Debian could support companies started by its developers
  to make a living of their Debian-related activities, by contributing to
  their capital.  [...]
 
 We can't do that with moneys collected in the United States under the
 aegis of Software in the Public Interest.  It would jeopardize the
 non-profit status of SPI.  Non-profit charities are not permitted to make
 investments in for-profit businesses.

Are they permitted to make loans?

There are some non-charities like Debian-UK holding debian funds which
would not be restricted in that way, but I think it would be rather
out of character for debian to take a position of supporting
capitalism in this direct way.  It would risks detaching the project
from the users who appreciate it being neutral on many off-topic
issues, as well as those who are politically opposed to the money
trick.

Is there really demand for investment from such a complicated project?

Regards,
-- 
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct


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Re: Debian money

[Russ Allbery]

MJ Ray m...@phonecoop.coop writes:
 Russ Allbery r...@debian.org wrote:

 We can't do that with moneys collected in the United States under the
 aegis of Software in the Public Interest.  It would jeopardize the
 non-profit status of SPI.  Non-profit charities are not permitted to
 make investments in for-profit businesses.

 Are they permitted to make loans?

I would be very hesitant to say without the advise of a good non-profit
accountant or lawyer.  This is very dangerous territory for a non-profit
in the US.

For example, it's common for the fund management arm of a university with
a large endowment to be a somewhat separate legal entity with a strong
firewall between it and university management to ensure that its
investment activities in managing the endowment don't affect the
non-profit status of the university.  And that's a non-profit educational
institution, which is under somewhat fewer restrictions as I understand it
than a non-profit charity.

-- 
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Re: Debian money

[Charles Plessy]

Hello Steve and everybody,

I forsee that it is very difficult because of the hundreds of borders in our
world, but Debian could support companies started by its developers to make a
living of their Debian-related activities, by contributing to their capital.
This way, Debian would invest in its own development, but in the do-o-cratic
manner we all appreciate since the financial support would not create a direct
subordination or custommer-consumer relationship.

Have a nice day, 

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan


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Debian Booths (was: Debian money)

[Joey Schulze]

Jan Hauke Rahm wrote:
 On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 05:04:42PM +0200, Nico Golde wrote:
  * Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt h...@ftwca.de [2009-09-10 16:01]:
   Steve McIntyre lea...@debian.org writes:
 4 Marketing stuff:
   a box(es) of equipment to take to stands at various shows and
 expos. Might be useful, but could be expensive. Where do we store
 it/them? Who organises shipping?
   
   I think this is something which we should pursue. I generally have the
   impression that the Debian booth is relatively boring, while other
   projects seem to be better in properly decorating, displaying their
   products and attracting interest. We should definitely work on that -
   currently, the Debian project booth is usually just like prejudices
   against Debian: Highly technical, unattractive and of no interest to new
   users.
  
  Full ack, on the conferences I visited I always found the 
  booths of other distros way more attractive.
 
 I don't think we need to discuss the perfect Debian booth here but maybe
 it makes sense to collect some improvement ideas in order to get a
 better feeling about how much money would be needed. ATM I can't think
 of anything that's too expensive to buy. What are we missing for a more
 attractive Debian booth?

Improving Debian booths should most probably discussed on the events
lists such as debian-events-na and debian-events-eu I would say.

If these discussions result in a need for booth material to be produced
please talk to the DPL about sponsorship.  When the proposals are good,
he will most probably agree to spend some money on them.

Regards,

Joey

-- 
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Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.


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Re: Debian money

[Luk Claes]

Sune Vuorela wrote:
 On 2009-09-09, Steve McIntyre lea...@debian.org wrote:
  1 New hardware / equipment

a The DSA team have a wishlist of new hardware they'd like, along
  with a set of donated machines that need configuring and/or
  shipping. As far as I'm concerned, so long as the individual
  requests here look reasonable then they get approved as and when
  they happen.

b Maintainers of big packages might benefit a lot if we can
  loan/donate big machines to them to make things faster. Should
  be an easy thing to work out - nominate such people please!
 
 Yep. Both of them is interesting.
 
 I would personally like to be able to rebuild kde in half the time I
 currently spend on it.

Maybe we should think about the combination too: a very fast development
box (or cluster) for Debian contributors?

Cheers

Luk


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Re: Debian money

[Pierre Habouzit]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 05:49:18PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
 Hello Steve and everybody,
 
 I forsee that it is very difficult because of the hundreds of borders in our
 world, but Debian could support companies started by its developers to make a
 living of their Debian-related activities, by contributing to their capital.
 This way, Debian would invest in its own development, but in the do-o-cratic
 manner we all appreciate since the financial support would not create a direct
 subordination or custommer-consumer relationship.

oO

Such a rule would be the worst thing ever. I mean, investing money is
not charity. It's about helping someone who _will_ give the money back
once his company is wealthy enough. Which means that you cannot just
lend money to any DD just because he's starting sth about Debian, but to
someone who has enough leadership and business sense so that it's mostly
obvious he'll success.

IOW we could only lend money to people who will already be able to find
money by themselves easily enough. It's not Debian job at all, not to
mention the legal complexity to do that worldwide.

Sorry, but this idea is nonsensical.
-- 
·O·  Pierre Habouzit
··Omadco...@debian.org
OOOhttp://www.madism.org


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Re: Debian money

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Plessy ple...@debian.org writes:

 I forsee that it is very difficult because of the hundreds of borders in
 our world, but Debian could support companies started by its developers
 to make a living of their Debian-related activities, by contributing to
 their capital.  This way, Debian would invest in its own development,
 but in the do-o-cratic manner we all appreciate since the financial
 support would not create a direct subordination or custommer-consumer
 relationship.

We can't do that with moneys collected in the United States under the
aegis of Software in the Public Interest.  It would jeopardize the
non-profit status of SPI.  Non-profit charities are not permitted to make
investments in for-profit businesses.

I can't comment on the rules in other jurisdictions.

-- 
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Re: Debian money

[Russ Allbery]

Sune Vuorela nos...@vuorela.dk writes:
 On 2009-09-09, Steve McIntyre lea...@debian.org wrote:

c marketing to new developers: posters to put up at universities?
  T-shirts or other gifts for new people working on bug-fixes,
  translations etc.? Could be useful, but again expensive.
  Thoughts?

 I have sometimes felt like I wanted to show some kind of appreciation of
 some people doing more than I expect from them. Currently, the only
 token of appreciation I have is to thank them on my blog.

I think it would be kind of cool to send people a t-shirt from time to
time for doing something neat, but I'm a bit worried that it might turn
into a big argument over who deserves one, which would make me horribly
depressed and annoyed.  It might be better to keep this to individual
actions to avoid the morale-destroying fights over who should be rewarded
by the project as a whole.

-- 
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Re: Debian money

[Pierre Habouzit]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 10:25:52AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
 Charles Plessy ple...@debian.org writes:
 
  I forsee that it is very difficult because of the hundreds of borders in
  our world, but Debian could support companies started by its developers
  to make a living of their Debian-related activities, by contributing to
  their capital.  This way, Debian would invest in its own development,
  but in the do-o-cratic manner we all appreciate since the financial
  support would not create a direct subordination or custommer-consumer
  relationship.
 
 We can't do that with moneys collected in the United States under the
 aegis of Software in the Public Interest.  It would jeopardize the
 non-profit status of SPI.  Non-profit charities are not permitted to make
 investments in for-profit businesses.

Damn, you're right, I totally missed that, given how obvious it was.
This would be totally illegal in France too.
-- 
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··Omadco...@debian.org
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Re: Debian money / Hardware certification

[Michael Goetze]

Hi,

Jesús M. Navarro wrote:
Yes.  There's a kindof market point I've been wishing on Debian for 
years knowing that it simply could happen: certifications and generally 
rising attention to commercial producers, both hardware and (free/open) 
software.


I think there's right now a thread on debian-users of an individual asking for 
hardware 100% supported because of management.  I know that, say, Dell 
certifices/is certified by Red Hat because both the companies have the 
management the time and the money to reach each other, talk and find their 
common interest points.  It's may opinion that Debian is the perfect platform 
for them: all development being in the open you know from far away if your 
hardware/software will be able to play along next Stable version; if you 
need/want to maintain your own (free) software is quite easy to get into 
Debian repos (you just need to play nice); even if you plan to develop on 
the proprietary side, you will be able to use the very same tools than Debian 
for easy and smooth integration.  Being Debian a non for profit with high 
ethics you can count on it not trying to stab you in the back if the wind 
blows in favor of your competitors...


actually, as far as I can tell, this is already a topic on Dell's Agenda 
because, here in Germany at least, they are getting some pressure from 
their customers (e.g. ISPs) to support Debian on their Hardware. So if, 
say, the DPL were to approach them, something constructive might even 
happen without a lot of money being spent. If there is interest in this 
I could try to find out who the right people to approach would be (I 
don't liason directly with Dell, but I know the people in my company who 
do).


Regards,
Michael


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Re: Debian money

[George Danchev]

 Steve McIntyre lea...@debian.org writes:
   4 Marketing stuff:
 a box(es) of equipment to take to stands at various shows and
   expos. Might be useful, but could be expensive. Where do we store
   it/them? Who organises shipping?
 
 I think this is something which we should pursue. I generally have the
 impression that the Debian booth is relatively boring, while other
 projects seem to be better in properly decorating, displaying their
 products and attracting interest. We should definitely work on that -
 currently, the Debian project booth is usually just like prejudices
 against Debian: Highly technical, unattractive and of no interest to new
 users.

While this is something Debian as a project should do at some extend, I think 
an Occam Razor should be applied in order not to blindly follow the 
corporatocracy to the extend when Debian looses its charm as a volunteer 
project and begins to resemble a corporation spending bloody bucks for 
preparing slick and artificial looksfeels, which is not a rocket science. Just 
for the record, I'm not attacking Ubuntu here, not at all, it is just a 
different plateau to exists.

More long lasting, innovative, non-intrusive, and sometimes cheaper and easier 
to achieve ways exists to advertise a volunteer project like that: wearing 
debian/rules tshirts, having car rear window sticker of www.debian.org, using 
Debian on your portable computers... People jealous and really get interested 
if you are *different and innovative*, which could be considered as some sort 
of a rocket science;-)

P.S. This is just my opinion, and I'm not trying to correct anything Marc 
previously wrote.

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Re: Debian money

[Ana Guerrero]

Hi,

We have a significant amount of money, but I would not define it as a 
huge amount.

 There's quite a long list, in *rough* order of the priority I would
 (personally) give them so far. 

  1 New hardware / equipment
  2 Fund developer gatherings:

My full support to spend money on this. In both cases, you can show where
the money was spend and the benefits Debian got from it.


I am less enthusiastic about:

  4 Marketing stuff:
 
a box(es) of equipment to take to stands at various shows and
  expos. Might be useful, but could be expensive. Where do we store
  it/them? Who organises shipping?
 
However, I think we should try and see if it is worth it. Maybe we could spend 
some money in next's year FOSDEM booth?  I am told Debian had a booth in
FOSDEM'2009 but I was unable to find it...
(I do not think this trying should be limited to Europe, but I do not know of 
conferences like FOSDEM in other parts of the world. )


A big please don't to:

  5 Pay people to do stuff we don't/can't/won't:
  6 Fund other related projects
  6 Dunc tank 2?

Ana


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Re: Debian money

[Martin Owens]

Hey Steve,

Even though I'm an Ubuntu blank sheep, I'm hoping to be a Debian black
sheep too. So I've put together my thoughts on your money problems
linked below.

Conclusion: I feel like we should be thinking about automating some of
the mechanisms in which money is involved and more importantly, getting
some tools put together or found that record money use, availability and
purpose.

http://doctormo.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/debian-money/

Regards, Martin Owens

On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 00:57 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
 Steve McIntyre


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Re: Debian money

[Marc Haber]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 06:19:21PM +0200, Harald Geyer wrote:
 Well, after the dunc-tank desaster I started to recommend to people
 not to donate any money to debian at all but to upstreams instead, 
 because debian has more money than it needs and giving more money to
 debian only will cause DDs to start arguing about it and effectively
 distracting them from working on the distro.

Did you actually do this while wearing a Debian shirt on a Debian booth?

 Anyway, the feedback I got after recommending donations to upstreams
 was mostly that people generally don't know which upstreams need them
 and actually would do something useful with it.

The canonical answer would be take the bug or wishlist item that you
would love to have fixed, locate the program's author, donate to him
with a strong suggestion that you would really like to see your pet
bug or wishlist item fixed.

Personally, working on Debian is a very big gratification for me.
Maybe a better one that other things I do for money or am forced to do
for free.

Greetings
Marc

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Re: Debian money

[Harald Geyer]

Marc Haber mh+debian-proj...@zugschlus.de wrote:
 On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 06:19:21PM +0200, Harald Geyer wrote:
  Well, after the dunc-tank desaster I started to recommend to people
  not to donate any money to debian at all but to upstreams instead, 
  because debian has more money than it needs and giving more money to
  debian only will cause DDs to start arguing about it and effectively
  distracting them from working on the distro.
 
 Did you actually do this while wearing a Debian shirt on a Debian booth?

Hm, IIRC I didn't work on any booth after dunc-tank, so most probably
not... Still I got asked several times how to donate to debian after
helping people with problems or just because people know that I'm
familiar with debian.

  Anyway, the feedback I got after recommending donations to upstreams
  was mostly that people generally don't know which upstreams need them
  and actually would do something useful with it.
 
 The canonical answer would be take the bug or wishlist item that you
 would love to have fixed, locate the program's author, donate to him
 with a strong suggestion that you would really like to see your pet
 bug or wishlist item fixed.

Sure, that's a possible answer, but sometimes not the most helpful one.

Well, all I wanted to point out was: Just because people donate money
to debian and not to upstreams doesn't imply that they would object
if debian did support some upstreams with money.

 Personally, working on Debian is a very big gratification for me.
 Maybe a better one that other things I do for money or am forced to do
 for free.

I can very much understand that feeling, but I don't see how that's
related to the question of supporting upstreams...

Harald


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Re: Debian money, booth on german church meeting

[Thomas Koch]

There's a german association, Linux user in der Kirche[1] (Linux user in the 
church), which plans to organize a booth on the next big meeting of the german 
church in 2010.
They aim is to promote the usage of linux in the administrations of church 
communities and of course private use of linux.
The cost of the booth is around 800 Euro, which must be collected from private 
sponsorship until december to make the booth happen.

Maybe debian could sponsor this event?

[1] http://luki.org/

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro


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Re: Debian money, booth on german church meeting

[Martin Schulze]

Thomas Koch wrote:
 There's a german association, Linux user in der Kirche[1] (Linux user in 
 the 
 church), which plans to organize a booth on the next big meeting of the 
 german 
 church in 2010.
 They aim is to promote the usage of linux in the administrations of church 
 communities and of course private use of linux.
 The cost of the booth is around 800 Euro, which must be collected from 
 private 
 sponsorship until december to make the booth happen.
 
 Maybe debian could sponsor this event?

Thanks a lot for your engagement for Debian and GNU/Linux in clerical
environments.

For other events and shows we have always asked the organisers of the
event to sponsor the booth for Free Software.  This even worked for
highly commercial events such as CeBIT and Systems.  Partially these
booths weren't sponsored by the organisers but by companies already
maintaining a booth on that particular show.

I'm not sure the Debian project should start paying for booths now.

I would rather like Debian to help running the booth by providing
hardware if needed or booth material such as posters and large signs.

Regards,

Joey

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Re: Debian money, booth on german church meeting

[Thomas Koch]

 Thomas Koch wrote:
  There's a german association, Linux user in der Kirche[1] (Linux user
  in the church), which plans to organize a booth on the next big meeting
  of the german church in 2010.
  They aim is to promote the usage of linux in the administrations of
  church communities and of course private use of linux.
  The cost of the booth is around 800 Euro, which must be collected from
  private sponsorship until december to make the booth happen.
 
  Maybe debian could sponsor this event?
 
 Thanks a lot for your engagement for Debian and GNU/Linux in clerical
 environments.
 
 For other events and shows we have always asked the organisers of the
 event to sponsor the booth for Free Software.  This even worked for
 highly commercial events such as CeBIT and Systems.  Partially these
 booths weren't sponsored by the organisers but by companies already
 maintaining a booth on that particular show.
 
 I'm not sure the Debian project should start paying for booths now.
 
 I would rather like Debian to help running the booth by providing
 hardware if needed or booth material such as posters and large signs.
 
 Regards,
 
   Joey
 
There's a radical difference between technical exhibitions like CeBIT and the 
Kirchentag: At the Kirchentag most of the exhibitants are non-profit. Compared 
to little initiatives supporting schools in poor countries, a linux booth is 
even more on the profit site:
If people switch to linux there is business to be made in consulting. (Still 
luki is such a small association that there members would not be likely to 
profite from such business.)

Regards, Thomas Koch

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro


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Re: Debian money, booth on german church meeting

[Martin Schulze]

Thomas Koch wrote:
  Thomas Koch wrote:
   There's a german association, Linux user in der Kirche[1] (Linux user
   in the church), which plans to organize a booth on the next big meeting
   of the german church in 2010.
   They aim is to promote the usage of linux in the administrations of
   church communities and of course private use of linux.
   The cost of the booth is around 800 Euro, which must be collected from
   private sponsorship until december to make the booth happen.
  
   Maybe debian could sponsor this event?
  
  Thanks a lot for your engagement for Debian and GNU/Linux in clerical
  environments.
  
  For other events and shows we have always asked the organisers of the
  event to sponsor the booth for Free Software.  This even worked for
  highly commercial events such as CeBIT and Systems.  Partially these
  booths weren't sponsored by the organisers but by companies already
  maintaining a booth on that particular show.
  
  I'm not sure the Debian project should start paying for booths now.
  
  I would rather like Debian to help running the booth by providing
  hardware if needed or booth material such as posters and large signs.
  
 There's a radical difference between technical exhibitions like CeBIT and the 
 Kirchentag: At the Kirchentag most of the exhibitants are non-profit. 
 Compared 
 to little initiatives supporting schools in poor countries, a linux booth is 
 even more on the profit site:
 If people switch to linux there is business to be made in consulting. (Still 
 luki is such a small association that there members would not be likely to 
 profite from such business.)

It seems to me that these consulting businesses would be good
addresses to ask for sponsorship of a Debian/GNU/Linux booth if there
is no way getting a free booth for a charitable association such as
the Debian Project or the GNU/Linux community.

Regards,

Joey

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Re: Debian money, booth on german church meeting

[Martin Schulze]

Martin Schulze wrote:
 Thomas Koch wrote:
   Thomas Koch wrote:
There's a german association, Linux user in der Kirche[1] (Linux user
in the church), which plans to organize a booth on the next big meeting
of the german church in 2010.
They aim is to promote the usage of linux in the administrations of
church communities and of course private use of linux.
The cost of the booth is around 800 Euro, which must be collected from
private sponsorship until december to make the booth happen.
   
Maybe debian could sponsor this event?
   
   Thanks a lot for your engagement for Debian and GNU/Linux in clerical
   environments.
   
   For other events and shows we have always asked the organisers of the
   event to sponsor the booth for Free Software.  This even worked for
   highly commercial events such as CeBIT and Systems.  Partially these
   booths weren't sponsored by the organisers but by companies already
   maintaining a booth on that particular show.
   
   I'm not sure the Debian project should start paying for booths now.
   
   I would rather like Debian to help running the booth by providing
   hardware if needed or booth material such as posters and large signs.
   
  There's a radical difference between technical exhibitions like CeBIT and 
  the 
  Kirchentag: At the Kirchentag most of the exhibitants are non-profit. 
  Compared 
  to little initiatives supporting schools in poor countries, a linux booth 
  is 
  even more on the profit site:
  If people switch to linux there is business to be made in consulting. 
  (Still 
  luki is such a small association that there members would not be likely to 
  profite from such business.)
 
 It seems to me that these consulting businesses would be good
 addresses to ask for sponsorship of a Debian/GNU/Linux booth if there
 is no way getting a free booth for a charitable association such as
 the Debian Project or the GNU/Linux community.

Hi again,

I've just seen that LUKI e.V. is an association that actively seeks
donations.  If you'd have to pay for a booth at the next Kirchentag
and the organisers are unwilling to sponsor a booth, wouldn't LUKI
e.V. be the canonical organisation to ask for sponsorship.

Regards,

Joey

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Re: Debian money, booth on german church meeting

[Steve Langasek]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 10:52:37AM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote:
  It seems to me that these consulting businesses would be good
  addresses to ask for sponsorship of a Debian/GNU/Linux booth if there
  is no way getting a free booth for a charitable association such as
  the Debian Project or the GNU/Linux community.

 I've just seen that LUKI e.V. is an association that actively seeks
 donations.  If you'd have to pay for a booth at the next Kirchentag
 and the organisers are unwilling to sponsor a booth, wouldn't LUKI
 e.V. be the canonical organisation to ask for sponsorship.

My understanding was that this was about helping LUKI afford to *have* a
booth at the event, not about Debian having its own booth at the event.

-- 
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Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/
slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org


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Re: Debian money

[Josselin Mouette]

Le jeudi 10 septembre 2009 à 00:57 +0100, Steve McIntyre a écrit : 
 1 New hardware / equipment
 
a The DSA team have a wishlist of new hardware they'd like […]

Full ack. Hardware is not that expensive, lack of hardware should not
hold back any of our development.

 b Maintainers of big packages might benefit a lot if we can
  loan/donate big machines to them to make things faster. Should
  be an easy thing to work out - nominate such people please!

We could also think of hardware for some specific tasks. We would need
too much for the kernel team, but for example, wouldn’t Xorg developers
win from having one graphics card from each major series from the main
hardware vendors?

 2 Fund developer gatherings:
 
a Teams interested in a face to face meeting […]
b More money for DebConf travel sponsorship […]

Given the compared efficiency of both kinds of meetings, I think we
should favor more specific meetings (like the Extramadura ones) rather
than Debconf, which could end up sucking all our money given the number
of participants, for little added benefit.

 3 Legal costs
 
a Pay for legal advice if needed. We have some cover for legal
  advice via SPI, but we may need to ask for more than the pro bono
  services might be able to give us.

We could already make more use of the SPI legal advice. There have been
quite a number of cases where we did not have enough expertise, and
where we were left in the dark.

 4 Marketing stuff:
[Lots of nice but expensive stuff]

This kind of thing should be encouraged, but maybe with a different pool
of funds. I’d be all for creating a specific entity gathering funds for
marketing operations if there is enough interest in it.

-- 
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: :' :
`. `'   “I recommend you to learn English in hope that you in
  `- future understand things”  -- Jörg Schilling


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Re: Debian money

[Giacomo A. Catenazzi]

Steve McIntyre wrote:


 1 New hardware / equipment

   a The DSA team have a wishlist of new hardware they'd like, along
 with a set of donated machines that need configuring and/or
 shipping. As far as I'm concerned, so long as the individual
 requests here look reasonable then they get approved as and when
 they happen.

   b Maintainers of big packages might benefit a lot if we can
 loan/donate big machines to them to make things faster. Should
 be an easy thing to work out - nominate such people please!


Some months ago Debian asked for sponsored hardware:
http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090208

I did not read any news about his, so maybe we could use some
money for such infrastructure hardware.

ciao
cate


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Re: Debian money

[Mauro Lizaur]

2009-09-10, Steve McIntyre:

 Hi folks,
 
 Suggestions and comments from others
 
 
[...]

  6 Fund other related projects
  
a Debian Edu. Clearly good for us to do - heavily linked with
  Debian.
 


I think that this could be really interesting.
Another thing that could be done regarding Debian and education is
to do something ala (don't hate me) Ubuntu by preparing cds/dvds and 
sending them to public schools from places with little/no resources, 
which unfortunately tend to receive  privative software at *low cost* (!).
Note that I'm not referring to just hey, let's giveaway free cds! \o/
like Ubuntu does, but something more like the OLPC project.
The downside of this idea is that will probably be too expensive,
but OTOH 1 u$s =~ 4 $AR, and I'm sure that in many places the 
conversion rate goes in a similar way.

Saludos,
Mauro

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Re: Debian money

[Frans Pop]

On Thursday 10 September 2009, Steve McIntyre wrote:
  5 Pay people to do stuff we don't/can't/won't:

 g website redesign and restructuring
   This is something we seem unable to make any progress at and that
   is very much overdue. Especially the restructuring part would
   involve loads of tedious work and some compensation for that would
   IMO be in order. Of course we would need to agree on requirements
   first.

  6 Fund other related projects

a Debian Edu. Clearly good for us to do - heavily linked with
  Debian.

Not sure about that. IMO it's up to the schools and governmental 
institutions that use Debian Edu to sponsor that.
However, I have no problem with Debian sponsoring development meetings 
that aim to work on Debian Edu, but that comes under the heading of Fund 
developer gatherings.

b Gnash. Petter is very keen on this, but I'm not so sure. Don't
  they have other ways to get funding? Thoughts?

I don't think Debian as a project should sponsor upstream development. 
That's up to individual DDs.

Cheers,
FJP


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Re: Debian money

[Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt]

Steve McIntyre lea...@debian.org writes:
  4 Marketing stuff:
a box(es) of equipment to take to stands at various shows and
  expos. Might be useful, but could be expensive. Where do we store
  it/them? Who organises shipping?

I think this is something which we should pursue. I generally have the
impression that the Debian booth is relatively boring, while other
projects seem to be better in properly decorating, displaying their
products and attracting interest. We should definitely work on that -
currently, the Debian project booth is usually just like prejudices
against Debian: Highly technical, unattractive and of no interest to new
users.

Marc
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Re: Debian money

[Philipp Kern]

On 2009-09-10, Frans Pop elen...@planet.nl wrote:
 On Thursday 10 September 2009, Steve McIntyre wrote:
  5 Pay people to do stuff we don't/can't/won't:

  g website redesign and restructuring
This is something we seem unable to make any progress at and that
is very much overdue. Especially the restructuring part would
involve loads of tedious work and some compensation for that would
IMO be in order. Of course we would need to agree on requirements
first.

There's a website redesign pending.  When I conclude from my own expiriences
from webwml it's mostly a fear to overload/disappoint translators that blocks
huge updates from happening.

Kind regards,
Philipp Kern


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