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)   <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
> 

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)   
> 

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)   <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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.


-- 
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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?


-- 
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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
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   "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

Re: paying people for Debian work (Re: Why do we take so long to realise good ideas

[Holger Levsen]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 04:15:02PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> I think it is probably not helpful to go into these kind of details
> now but since you raise the point I feel I must respond.  Whether
> Dunc-Tank was a Debian initiative was precisely one of the seriously
> contested points.

agreed on both points.

> Dunc-Tank was [...]

that's quite like how I recall it. Thanks for writing it up, Ian.


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Re: paying people for Debian work (Re: Why do we take so long to realise good ideas

[Ian Jackson]

Sam Hartman writes ("Re: paying people for Debian work (Re: Why do we take so 
long to realise good ideas"):
> Moving this subthread to -project too.
> 
> Holger> But there's one significant difference between LTS and dunc
> Holger> tank: dunc tank was ment as an initiative inside Debian,
> Holger> while LTS is carefully set up on both sides, in- and outside
> Holger> Debian, and the money part of it is *completly* handled
> Holger> outside Debian, and I very much like this and I consider
> Holger> this a main reason why LTS is accepted by the Debian
> Holger> community.
> 
> Is it true that dunc tank was an initiative inside Debian?
> When I go back and read Joerg's mail to debian-devel-announce
> summarizing the concerns with Dunc Tank, it sounds like it was outside
> Debian possibly sharing some of the same people running it.

I think it is probably not helpful to go into these kind of details
now but since you raise the point I feel I must respond.  Whether
Dunc-Tank was a Debian initiative was precisely one of the seriously
contested points.

Dunc-Tank was presented as an initiative which was outside Debian, in
the sense that it was (for example) outside the purview of a GR.
However it was an initiative of the person who was currently the DPL,
and their deputy, and would have involved paying Debian core team
members for their role within Debian.

It seems to that it was not something that would have been possible
for someone without very significant standing in the project; possibly
it was only possible for the DPL.

Frankly, the idea that it was not an initiative of the DPL seems to me
to have been an artificial distinction, contrived to allow it to go
ahead without oversight from the rest of the Debian project.

Ian.

-- 
Ian JacksonThese opinions are my own.

If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is
a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.

Re: paying people for Debian work (Re: Why do we take so long to realise good ideas

[Sam Hartman]

> "Holger" == Holger Levsen  writes:
Moving this subthread to -project too.

Holger> But there's one significant difference between LTS and dunc
Holger> tank: dunc tank was ment as an initiative inside Debian,
Holger> while LTS is carefully set up on both sides, in- and outside
Holger> Debian, and the money part of it is *completly* handled
Holger> outside Debian, and I very much like this and I consider
Holger> this a main reason why LTS is accepted by the Debian
Holger> community.

Is it true that dunc tank was an initiative inside Debian?
When I go back and read Joerg's mail to debian-devel-announce
summarizing the concerns with Dunc Tank, it sounds like it was outside
Debian possibly sharing some of the same people running it.

I was a member at that time, but honestly wasn't paying much attention
to that aspect of the project.

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

Kosovo/Debian Hackathon for Girls, this weekend, task ideas?

[Qendresa Hoti]

Hi everybody,

We are organizing a Hackathon for girls in Prizren,Kosovo this weekend. We
will have 25 girls with skills in Java,Python and C++ working in groups of
five.

Daniel Pocock is helping us with some of the ideas for the Hackathon tasks
but we would like to ask the wider community for suggestions of small tasks
that could be completed by girls with undergraduate level of experience in
one day using Java,Python or C++.

Thank you in advance for any ideas and we will share reports and photos of
the Hackathon on planet Debian. We will also create a wiki page when our
accounts are activated.

Qendresa.

budget ideas wiki page

[Daniel Pocock]

I've created a wiki page where people can list things that are not yet
at the stage for a formal request to the DPL or link to things that have
already been discussed and not progressed:

https://wiki.debian.org/BudgetIdeas

This could provide a useful resource for pitching ideas to potential
donors, to help people find other people interested in the same idea and
to stimulate new ideas.

Regards,

Daniel

Ideas for getting organic traffic:Debian.org:ZS

[Jay Watson]

Hi Debian.org Team,

Hope you are great and everything fine at your end.

I have gone through your website and I felt its well built but can be
improved in several ways to get better sales and revenue from the site. If
you would like me to send you complete list of upgrading and improvements
we could do to your site then kindly let me know so that I can send you the
brief quotation for your website. After in-depth research about your
website and analyzing the targeted market for your business to prevail, we
also execute effective online marketing campaigns by targeting not only
local markets but as well as provincial and international markets as well.
So you will be getting *all-in-one services* when contacting us.


It's only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking
algorithm changes. We will help you to increase your visibility in all the
major search engines by *improving keyword rankings* and *boosting your
real time website traffic* with lots of back links which are always done
through *White Hat* techniques, indeed you position your website properly
to be found at the most critical points in the buying process or when
people need your site.

Our aim is to provide you with complete web marketing solutions to help
your website rank high on the search engines. Before moving on further, we
will have a consultation phase where we will discuss what your website
goals are and how we can accomplish them. In addition, we may ask you
certain questions that may be concerning on the website structure and
strategic foundation for your social media marketing.


Should you have any questions, please let us know. To improve the search
engine visibility of your website, we will look forward to hear from you
when you've time after reading our proposal.

*Sincerely,*


* Jay Watson*

*Sales Consultant Skype: webmarketing.sales*

Re^5: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Lars Versen]

Steve Langasek,
MJ Ray,

the way you give feedback makes it really hard to practise non-violent
communication.

And the biggest problem seems to be, that you are not even aware of the
violent attitude you provide.

I dont have the proper education nor am I getting paid to help you
with your personality improvement.

But it seems quite natural to me that some people react in a negative
way to your hostile way of being.



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Re: Re^5: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Martin Schulze]

Lars Versen wrote:
 Steve Langasek,
 MJ Ray,
 
 the way you give feedback makes it really hard to practise non-violent
 communication.

This mail is really nice, it gets to the point.  This is something I
missed in your original mail.  Maybe you could provide the key items
of your ideas without pointing at anybody?  Maybe this could be used
for a better discussion.

 And the biggest problem seems to be, that you are not even aware of the
 violent attitude you provide.
 
 I dont have the proper education nor am I getting paid to help you
 with your personality improvement.
 
 But it seems quite natural to me that some people react in a negative
 way to your hostile way of being.

Just fyi: the last two paragraphs could also be interpreted as ad hominem
attacks.

Regards,

Joey

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Re^4: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Lars Versen]

   I had reasons why I dont fill the pipe with E-Mails that contain 20
   pages long efforts if the expectation is pretty hostile feedback.

  As you can see, posting generalities didn't really fare much better.

 Right - 20 pages of anything, from someone who doesn't appear to be
 contributing to the community which he insists should change to his
 standards, is not going to be particularly well-received.

Steve Langasek, exactly that is a general misunderstanding of you and a few 
other Debian Developers.
I have three world-class operating system releases to my credit, and you dont 
is cause for respect and fame, but it does not justify the attitude, that 
anybody else has no right to voice his opinion, if he cant show up with similar 
credit.

Conciousness, awareness, understanding and practise of non-violent 
communication.

The Debian Bug Tracking System is open, the developer and project lists are 
open, the entire structure is open. And this has a reason. It is exactly what 
makes Debian special and attractive compared to other distributions. But open 
structures also have their downsides compared to communities that are lead by 
companies.
We see in real life every day how democratic processes are a real challenge to 
all involved people. Most of us are conscious about the fact that democracy is 
not a perfect system. But we are aware that it is the best mechanism available 
to keep huge groups of people together in a peaceful way.

A few smart people with a good understanding of social ethics made up the 
Debian Social Contract. And one of the main points of this Debian Social 
Contract is we will not hide problems and our priorities are our users. 
Thank you for keeping that in mind through all your actions.

Some people obviously value tribalism much higher than the Debian Social 
Contract, when they went to attack Patrick Frank some months ago only because 
he was voicing a concern, that the current Debian Project Leader used 
defacements of other Debian Developers during his electoral compaign. And I am 
not making up this entire case again, just to cause another destructive flame 
war. Feel reminded on the electoral compaign lead in the US mass media between 
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: mud fighting instead of dealing with facts. 
And the reference to Patrick Frank was made up by you, Steve Langasek.
When I have a look at this public conflict from that time around Patrick 
Frank, then I come to the conclusion that we will not hide problems is not 
taken very serious. And observations of behaviour from Debian Developers on 
chat rooms on Internet Relay Chat from the last years show, that many people 
take our priorities are our users not very serious.

A few smart people with a good understanding of social ethics made up the 
Debian Free Software Guidelines. And one of the main points of these Debian 
Free Software Guidelines is No Discrimination.

What is the point of making software that does not discriminate other people, 
but the behaviour of several Debian Developers does?

Did you sign the Debian Social Contract and agree to the Debian Free Software 
Guidelines to get as much reputation as possible for being one of the best 
hackers, or do you enjoy giving people great tools so they can have the most 
benefit from using their computer?

The Debian community is not about your ego and not about mine.
Its about the desires of many people. 
To cover as many desires as possible is the main philosophy of Debian ever 
since.

And exactly that was my point in my first E-Mails, when some people chose to 
try to give my name a bad reputation instead of dealing with the facts.

Most of the Debian Developers need to get conscious about their own 
personality, the personality of other Debian Developers and the personality of 
all the people they have to deal with in general.

I tried to explain why I am convinced about that requirement.

GNU/Debian Linux is used and supported by companies like Hewlett Packard, Intel 
and many others.
Shouldnt that create good self confidence for all the people who help to make 
GNU/Debian Linux what it is?
Why do some people use that self confidence against small people like me, 
instead of trying to catch the message that I try to voice?

The problems that I see and try to express are problems that are seen by other 
people, too. Some people deal with it in a different way. A really smart way of 
dealing with some of these problems of the Debian community was, when Mark 
Shuttleworth gave birth to the Ubuntu project. Much smarter people than me will 
write a book about his life sooner or later. So again, I dont aim to give a 
scienctific work here. But one of the reasons why Ubuntu catches much of the 
fame that would usually be due to the work of many Debian Developers is, that 
Mark Shuttlerworth was giving the Ubuntu community a clear and clean structure 
which is kept together by the company Cannonical. While many Debian Developers 
were angry about the 

Re: Re^4: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Bas Wijnen]

Hi,

This is my first and only mail on this subject.

 Subject: Re: Re^4: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

Why do you start new threads all the time?  It breaks mutt's threaded
view, and it makes sure that your message shows as a new thread.  This
also makes it impossible to ignore the rest of the thread without
specifying that you really want to ignore it with every message from
you.  The only reason I can see for doing this, is that you want to make
sure people don't ignore you, even if they want to.  If that is indeed
the intention, that makes you a spammer IMO.  And thereby even less
sympathetical.

On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 10:02:12AM +0100, Lars Versen wrote:
  Right - 20 pages of anything, from someone who doesn't appear to be
  contributing to the community which he insists should change to his
  standards, is not going to be particularly well-received.
 
 Steve Langasek, exactly that is a general misunderstanding of you and
 a few other Debian Developers.  I have three world-class operating
 system releases to my credit, and you dont is cause for respect and
 fame, but it does not justify the attitude, that anybody else has no
 right to voice his opinion, if he cant show up with similar credit.

I can't show similar credit, and Steve doesn't do that to me.  That's
because I do actually do things in Debian.  I wasn't release manager,
and I'm not a maintainer of important packages, but I am active in the
community, and do some things.  The only thing I've seen from you is
e-mails about how to change things.  

You are not listed as the maintainer of any package, I don't know you as
someone who is active in translations or ports or infrastructure.  In
short, I don't know you at all.  You seem to be a total outsider to the
project.  I fully agree with Steve: as an outsider, you should not
expect positive responses to a proposal to radically change the project.
(Although you didn't really do any proposal so far, you just mentioned
some things nobody contested, and complained about being mistreated.)

 Conciousness, awareness, understanding and practise of non-violent
 communication.

I'd like to add one: no useless communication.  Please don't post to a
list if you have nothing useful to say.

 A few smart people with a good understanding of social ethics made up
 the Debian Social Contract. And one of the main points of this Debian
 Social Contract is we will not hide problems and our priorities are
 our users. Thank you for keeping that in mind through all your
 actions.

You seem to read that as you guys promised to do anything any user
asks.  Guess what?  That's not what we think it means.

 What is the point of making software that does not discriminate other
 people, but the behaviour of several Debian Developers does?

Who is discriminating, on what grounds, and how is that unacceptable?
Do you mean Steve shouldn't be allowed to tell you that you're annoying,
because he doesn't tell others the same thing?  If so, get serious.

 Why do some people use that self confidence against small people like
 me, instead of trying to catch the message that I try to voice?

Because Debian is driven by a community.  People who do things tend to
be taken more seriously, especially when it is about large changes.

If you really want to help make Debian better, you should start by
getting involved.  Build packages, for example.  As long as you're not
willing to do actual work, don't expect people to welcome your advice
about changing Debian.

That's all I have to say about this.  If you want a reply from me,
please post off-list.  I shall not reply to anything which is (also)
sent to the list.  And certainly not if it's sent as a new thread.

Thanks,
Bas

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Re: Re^4: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[MJ Ray]

Lars Versen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Steve Langasek, exactly that is a general misunderstanding of you and
 a few other Debian Developers.
 I have three world-class operating system releases to my credit,
 and you dont [...]

I don't believe Steve Langasek ever wrote that.  Please try to quote
accurately and give references where appropriate.  If no quote or
reference is available, that might suggest the point should be cut.

[...]
 What is the point of making software that does not discriminate other
 people, but the behaviour of several Debian Developers does?

I don't know.  There is a difference between discriminating against a
person and judging a person according to their actions.

 Did you sign the Debian Social Contract and agree to the Debian Free
 Software Guidelines to get as much reputation as possible for being
 one of the best hackers, or do you enjoy giving people great tools so
 they can have the most benefit from using their computer?

Neither.

 [...] GNU/Debian Linux is used and supported by companies like Hewlett
 Packard, Intel and many others.
 Shouldnt that create good self confidence for all the people who help
 to make GNU/Debian Linux what it is?

Not necessarily.  They are just companies and most companies act in
their narrow self-interest.

 Why do some people use that self confidence against small people like
 me, instead of trying to catch the message that I try to voice?

To stop you doing the harm to the project that they forsee.

Hope that helps,
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Re: Re^4: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 02:35:57PM +, MJ Ray wrote:
 Lars Versen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Steve Langasek, exactly that is a general misunderstanding of you and
  a few other Debian Developers.
  I have three world-class operating system releases to my credit,
  and you dont [...]

 I don't believe Steve Langasek ever wrote that.  Please try to quote
 accurately and give references where appropriate.

Thanks for the vote of confidence in my moral character, but aside from the
attribution of uncharacteristically sloppy punctuation, that is AFAICR a
direct quote.  To be sure, I don't in any sense regard those releases as
exclusively mine; a Debian release is certainly a huge committment on the
part of the release manager, but even if we were to discount the significant
efforts of all the individual package maintainers who make unstable
something worth trying to release, every release I've been involved in has
been a group effort on the part of the release team and other motivated
developers.

The context for that comment was that, during a series of IRC ban evasions
one night on the part of our soliloquist (Frank? Lars? Sybil?[1]), I
had the honor of kickbanning him from #debian-devel; at which point he chose
to message me privately about my action, and I obligingly engaged him in the
most insulting way possible to distract him from his previous activity of
disrupting Debian's official IRC channels.  I think there may also have been
some comments in there about sex with his mother.  None of those comments
should be taken as indicative of anything besides my disdain for a
particular disruptive non-contributor.

-- 
Steve Langasek   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]

[1] Attempting to avoid the consequences of his past actions by changing
identities seems to be a pattern with Frank.  Aside from his long history of
ban evasion on two IRC networks and several Debian channels, we see in his
latest message that he persists in the charade that Lars and Patrick are not
the same person -- in spite of telling coincidences of style, topic, word
choice, and misuse of English, and in spite of the fact that he himself was
the first to name Patrick Frank in this thread.  I for one think those
actions speak much louder -- and with greater brevity -- than his words.


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Re^3: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Lars Versen]

Russ Allbery, thanks a lot for your opinion.

I will use your E-Mail not to continue my topic on your back now,
but you make a few interesting points that help me to go one step further with 
my explanations.

You are correct that my first E-Mail was very much simplified and 
non-scientifical. I can only describe observations and personal opinion, 
because I am not a scientist. And I am aware of the fact that a certain type of 
personality has more problems to accept opinions of other people than others, 
especially if the opinion does not seem scientifically proven.
That has also to do with the way some people think of the right approach to 
understand all the questions in life. If you take the point of view of many 
people who learn from sports magazines or TV shows, if you take the point of 
view from an expert for english literature, if you take the point of view from 
a physics student or the point of view from a philosopher.
Its again no boolean type of choice between right and wrong. Fans of Douglas 
Adams know the humor behind the approach to find the universal answer.
In my humble opinion, a complete personality is able to adapt answers from all 
kinds of different scientific disciplines, not only from that field where you 
had good marks in school or in the subjects where you graduaded.
I heard Debian Developers say about Ian Murdock that he talks out of his skull 
and that he has to shut up. And their justification was that he only studied 
economy and trade instead of physics. Which makes it a fundamental problem for 
the Debian project, because that spirit is poisoned.
There surely was a time where the ability to write good code and a general 
understanding of computer science was good enough to keep a large group of 
people together to work on certain tasks. But a mature and huge project like 
Debian requires social skills, too.

Also in that context a similar point of criticism: no actionable content 
provided yet
I had reasons why I dont fill the pipe with E-Mails that contain 20 pages long 
efforts if the expectation is pretty hostile feedback.
Careful people dont build an entire house so others can just go and destroy it 
to have fun. 
I try to take this in small steps.
And if the voiced feedback stays hostile I wont give my life to sell you my 
ideas about social ethics for the price of a punch in the face. And dont get me 
wrong here. I dont smell big business. I will repeat myself. I see this as my 
way of contributing to the community.

And for the last point that I chose a poor forum for that discussion I cant say 
much. The mailing list description says its for discussions about the Debian 
project. When a conflict management system is off-topic there, please instruct 
me.

And scientifical or not - the ability to feel empathy can be learned.

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Re: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Russ Allbery]

Lars Versen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 You are correct that my first E-Mail was very much simplified and
 non-scientifical. I can only describe observations and personal opinion,
 because I am not a scientist. And I am aware of the fact that a certain
 type of personality has more problems to accept opinions of other people
 than others, especially if the opinion does not seem scientifically
 proven.

I personally didn't see anything in your original message that was
sufficiently novel to reach questions of whether people would accept your
opinions or not.  To generally paraphrase, what I got from your message is
that people should be nice to each other, aggressive responses may hurt
people or make them feel attacked, and mediating largely consists of
finding ways to get people to talk to each other constructively.

There isn't a lot to respond to in that.  I think all of those points are
obviously true, at least at the level of generality with which they were
stated.  I'm not sure what there is to be accomplished by restating them.
I doubt there is anyone reading this list who hasn't heard the same things
many times before.

 I heard Debian Developers say about Ian Murdock that he talks out of his
 skull and that he has to shut up. And their justification was that he
 only studied economy and trade instead of physics. Which makes it a
 fundamental problem for the Debian project, because that spirit is
 poisoned.

If you're referring to the recent discussion about Debian Planet carrying
Ian Murdock's blog, I think what's going on here is substantially more
complex than you're implying.  I think a lot of the negative reaction
towards Ian's recent blog postings is tribalism, an instinct as old as
humanity.  Ian is now actively pushing OpenSolaris over Debian, and
whether one agrees with him or not, it's a natural human tendency to want
to defend one's own community over advocacy from a different community.  I
highly doubt Ian's surprised at that sort of reaction, or that he really
needs anyone else to defend him.  No, it's not particularly productive to
react that way, but it's not, in the grand scheme of things, one of the
social problems that I'd tackle first.  Note that plenty of people spoke
up here to defend the value of hearing what he has to say even if he's
advocating a different community.

 Also in that context a similar point of criticism: no actionable content
 provided yet

 I had reasons why I dont fill the pipe with E-Mails that contain 20
 pages long efforts if the expectation is pretty hostile feedback.

As you can see, posting generalities didn't really fare much better.

Personally, I don't think one can solve social problems by having general
discussions about social skills or abstract conversations about how
mediation works.  I think most of the discussions like this, either here
or on debian-private, are largely a waste of time.  Most social change
comes from leading by example, participating in the community, treating
other people the way you think everyone should be treated, and building
the sort of constructive communities that you want to see in the packaging
teams in which you're contributing.  A small amount of that accomplishes
far more than all the debian-project threads about how people should do
this and should do that.  People tend to react poorly to being told what
they should do, and react positively to being treated with respect.

I'm not opposed to the idea of a social committee, but I think it would
succeed to an extent directly proportional to the degree to which it dealt
directly with specific situations and practical solutions and enabled
conversation about the actual problems rather than meta-conversation about
problem-solving.  If I were looking for how to form such a committee, I'd
try to find people with past experience running successful teams and
mediating disagreements, the people that other people in Debian say things
like he's great to work with or she's always been helpful and
supportive about.  The people will matter a lot more than the structure.

 And scientifical or not - the ability to feel empathy can be learned.

I agree.  However, I don't think Debian's going to teach it, except
possibly indirectly and in the same way that any interactions with other
people can teach empathy if people are open to learning it.

Empathy isn't something that's taught so much as it's something that one
individually decides to learn.

-- 
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Re: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Steve Langasek]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 12:08:37PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
  I had reasons why I dont fill the pipe with E-Mails that contain 20
  pages long efforts if the expectation is pretty hostile feedback.

 As you can see, posting generalities didn't really fare much better.

Right - 20 pages of anything, from someone who doesn't appear to be
contributing to the community which he insists should change to his
standards, is not going to be particularly well-received.

-- 
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Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]


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Re: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[MJ Ray]

Lars Versen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 What are your comments, questions or ideas, please?

Oxygen is good. Competition is bad. I like Jello.

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Re: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Lars Versen]

Steve Langasek,
MJ Ray,

there is much easier ways to tell me, that you are not interested in this 
topic. 

I am sure you both have your reasons to choose this way of communicating that 
to me.

The problem I have with this feedback is, that you might scare those people 
away from participating, who actually understand what I was writing in my 
E-Mail, because they dont want to become your target.

I can understand that not all people are ready for self reflection and 
awareness. But mature and smart people can manage to choose a passive form of 
refusing participation.

Lets try to use the few chances for self improvement and personality growth.







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Re: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt]

Lars Versen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
 The problem I have with this feedback is, that you might scare those
 people away from participating, who actually understand what I was
 writing in my E-Mail, because they dont want to become your target. 

I'm not scared by them. I understood your mail completly and am happy to
say that my comment is Please go away.

Marc
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Re: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[MJ Ray]

Lars Versen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 The problem I have with this feedback is, that you might scare those
 people away from participating, who actually understand what I was
 writing in my E-Mail, because they dont want to become your target.

I don't want to scare anyone, so I'll link to the last similar
appearance at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2007/06/author.html#00138
to reassure anyone who wants to actually participate in similar topics
that they won't get silly responses.

The problem I have with this thread is that there is nothing to
participate in!  It's rhetoric, with a few hamster-beating questions.

The other response I considered was Yes!  Apple pie and motherhood!

Hope that explains,
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Re: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Tapio Lehtonen]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 12:57:35PM +0100, Lars Versen wrote:

 The problem I have with this feedback is, that you might scare those
 people away from participating, who actually understand what I was
 writing in my E-Mail, because they dont want to become your target.

I did not understand what You wrote in Your e-mail. It did feel a bit
like coming from those that give speeches standing on a soap box in
Hyde Park Corner. 

I do not wish to continue this discussion, but if You insist on
writing, You need to concentrate on clear and consice messages.

-- 
Tapio Lehtonen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.iki.fi/tapio.lehtonen


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Re^2: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Lars Versen]

The feedback that I received so far on my E-Mail shows certain aspects of 
personality,
that are part of the deductive reasoning, 
why the social climate within the Debian community can be tricky.

First of all, the content of my E-Mail - my personal opinion - is not addressed 
at all.
Instead, the person behind the E-Mail is addressed in such a way, 
that it causes bad reputation without any obvious reason.

And the interesting point is not that a few people think there is a relation 
between me
and people who might be useful to take over the role of a black sheep.


I come in peace.

My motivation is to work for a more social environment,
where I can be who I am,
the way I am,
to satisfy certain desires.

One main desire is to be able to use my computers.

On these computers I use GNU/Debian as operating system,
because it suits me best.

I want to be a part of the community to be able to expand my knowledge,
and to let other people benefit from the knowledge I gained.

Sometimes I am distracted from these three core desires,
because I am not any better than those people,
who I address with my appeal.

Mea culpa.


Am I in the position to teach Debian Developers better social ethics?

My social environment does not allow me to be a teacher,
a preacher
or a world healer.

But I still try to make my social environment a little bit better,
because that might be my way of contributing to something,
that is of value to me,
like other people create lines of code to help that things grow.


So back to the main point, please.

As feedback to my E-Mail I received statements like:

You might possibly be a person who I had a private battle with at some point 
in time

I had to delete lots of dull stuff only to tell you that you sound like a 
troll

I am happy to say go away

And this can feel quite violent.

Which leads straight back to the content of my first E-Mail.

- gaining conciousness
- becoming aware
- understanding personality
- practise of non-violent communication


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Re: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Russ Allbery]

Lars Versen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 First of all, the content of my E-Mail - my personal opinion - is not
 addressed at all.  Instead, the person behind the E-Mail is addressed in
 such a way, that it causes bad reputation without any obvious reason.

The content of your message was not, so far as I could tell, actionable.
It was a variety of thoughts about what effective mediation might be, plus
a general statement that people should be nice to each other.  I don't see
a lot to discuss there.  Certainly this is a poor forum to discussion
mediation techniques in the abstract, and in the absence of specific
actionable things that groups or people in Debian could do, there isn't a
lot of Debian content.

-- 
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ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Lars Versen]

First of all, I want to assure you that I care for GNU/Debian as a Linux 
distribution,
and I care for Debian as a community.
To lead a scientifical proof for that, I would have to tell you at least a part 
of my story of life.
Which I can do at some point in time, but that would be too distracting from my 
main point at the moment.
Please try to trust in my words, that I do indeed care for you guys out there 
and for the work you all do.

In case you get the feeling anyways, that I am aiming to cause trouble, then 
please choose a private form to express that. Send me an E-Mail. But please 
dont use my piece of work here to run defacements or to do flaming.

A long time ago there was a public discussion that some sort of conflict 
management system is required, that would help to fix problems that arise from 
social conflicts.

The name for that idea got a lot of attention. I will keep refering to 
SOC-CTTE from now on, to make it easier for me, because you all know what I 
mean.

The achievements that have been visible to me were three main points.

The first point is the most important one. Which was a general agreement that 
some form of SOC-CTTE is necessary, to create more social stability in smaller 
groups and the Debian project as a whole.

But the other two points were only about how the SOC-CTTE should be elected and 
what powers it should have.

Totally missing for me is, how the conflict management could actually be done.
Which seems to be the most important point.


The most trivial but one of the hardest things to achieve is,
to gain conciousness about the fact,
that we are all people.

And people make mistakes.

The less aware you are about your non-prefect existence,
the more serious mistakes you usually make.

And maybe you dont notice yourself when many of these mistakes happen,
but your social environment does.

And the social environment we all have in common is the Debian community,
either as developers,
as business partners
or as users and fans.

It helps a lot to have people around you who you trust,
who keep reminding you on the above point,
when you are stuck in an emotional situation,
that prevents you from finding a constructive solution to a problem.


The next step can be awareness,
that we all are part of group mechanisms,
due to the different roles that we have to play every day.

Our role as daughter or son,
our role as mother or father,
our role as wife or husband,
our role as friend,
our role as employee or employer,
our role as citizen, 
our role as developer,
etc.

Because each role can cause its own conflict of interests.
Each role can lead to moments of feeling sad, happy, stressed, excited, angry, 
etc.


Another part is understanding of personality.

Personality is founded in parts of genetics,
it is founded by the parents
and it is founded by the social environment.

Personality is who we think we are, 
how we are seen by others
and how our behaviour and our way of thinking is influenced.

I think I can speak for all of us when I make up the claim, 
that we all believe in humanity and human rights,
no matter if we are developers, business partners or users and fans.

And we all agree that Free and Open Source Software is the right way to go.

Quite easy so far.

But how about the choice if we use console only or a graphical user interface?
Or the choice of the editor?
How about the choice of the window manager or the desktop environment?
And How about the choice of a chat client?

You might see easily how this can lead quite fast to disagreements.

And these choices are not of the boolean type,
there is no right and wrong,
because it is founded in personality, in likes and dislikes.


Now how can highly intelligent and skilled people find a ballance,
between tolerance and accepting other people's likes
and standing up for a personal preference?

By non-violent communication, pretty much.

And violence starts where another party has a disadvantage or is feeling bad.

When you tell a person who is behaving in such a way,
that you cant understand the motivation of the person,
that the person should see a psychiatrist,
or when you call a person with a different opinion an idiot or troll,
then you raise the escalation level a lot.

And negative action tends to cause a negative reaction.

Which can lead to a circle of further escalation.


Now what SOC-CTTE members will have to do is,
to constantly walk both conflict parties through these 4 steps
of conciousness, awareness and understanding.

And lead all involved people back to the path of non-violent communication.


What are your comments,
questions or ideas, please?


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Re: ideas regarding a conflict management strategy

[Steve Langasek]

Dear Patrick,

On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 03:52:22AM +0100, Lars Versen wrote:

 In case you get the feeling anyways, that I am aiming to cause trouble,
 then please choose a private form to express that. Send me an E-Mail. But
 please dont use my piece of work here to run defacements or to do flaming.

I wonder, has it not occurred to you up until now that changing your name
does not disguise your identity, because no matter what name you choose your
message is always the same?

 Now what SOC-CTTE members will have to do is,
 to constantly walk both conflict parties through these 4 steps
 of conciousness, awareness and understanding.

This is something that you are certainly in no position to judge.  Do you
not see the irony that instruction on non-violent communication should
come from someone who repeatedly abuses IRC channels to force himself upon
developers?

-- 
Steve Langasek   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]


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Re: ideas....

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 08:43:09PM +0100, John Watson wrote:
 Some fantastic ideas
 
 
 First of all I would like to say how great Debian is as a operating system
 and a linux distro. I have tried many distribution but always come back to
 Debian. What I find wrong with these so called  distros is that they always
 artificially alter components, components deleted/missing  and  loads of
 useless bells and whistles that never work.  I have some ideas which may
 or may not improve the project or least something to  discuss about..
 
 
 1) I just find that releases are being delayed due to the obsession with
 security.

First, that's not actually true. While security surely is one concern,
it certainly isn't the only one under consideration when releasing.

Second, I don't think security is something we should be compromising
on.

 If Microsoft was Debian then Microsoft would only be releasing
 Windows XP now,

Well, they aren't. And just in case you didn't notice, it took Debian
less time to release etch than it took Microsoft to release Vista; and
on top of that, they had to throw out a bunch of planned features in
order to make that happen, which was not the case for us.

I really don't see where your statement is coming from.

[...]
 I would suggest having two releases of Debian, one really stable which
 could be released every 2 years, another one stable released every 6
 months by taking a freeze of the current testing distro and spending a
 month (no more) fixing any major bugs. I personally believe the testing
 version is as stable as many of the other distros in the market. I normally
 use the testing version however when it comes to a release of the stable
 version, updates on testing are few with a increase temptation to switch to
 a different distro.

Is there a problem with starting to use testing, say, six months to a
year after the release? If so, what?

 2)One real issue with Debian is a lack of admin tools, (such as yast is for
 SuSE). Considering starting a project to develop a range of gui based admin
 tools for Debian.
 
 What are folks view on this and is there any other similar projects?

I don't think there is anyone working on that currently, but there's
nothing wrong with it. Creating an interface that would give one a
control panel type of view, allowing to configure packages using
debconf, could surely be a good idea.

[... strange unintelligible question about money snipped ...]

-- 
Lo-lan-do Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
  -- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22


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Re: ideas....

[Philippe Cloutier]

2)One real issue with Debian is a lack of admin tools, (such as yast 
is for SuSE). Considering starting a project to develop a range of gui 
based admin tools for Debian.
 
What are folks view on this and is there any other similar projects?


Yes, there is for example kcontrol. It may not be a pure admin tool 
(it also does user configuration), but it allows to administrate the 
system.
knetworkconf was added with etch. With some bugfixing that should become 
a more interesting tool.



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Re: ideas....

[Mike Hommey]

On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 11:41:43PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
wrote:
 Being paid based on popularity does not alter the fact that some
  subset of people are being paid, and others are not, for what could be
  equivalent amounts of work done.  Such an imbalance would make Debian
  unpalatable for me, personally.  Other developers may or may not agree,
  but I for one think that injection of paid work into Debian would make
  Debian less fun for me.

What injection ? There is already people being paid to work on Debian.

Mike


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Re: ideas....

[cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)]

On Sunday 08 April 2007, Mike Hommey wrote:
 On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 11:41:43PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Being paid based on popularity does not alter the fact that
  some subset of people are being paid, and others are not, for what
  could be equivalent amounts of work done.  Such an imbalance would make
  Debian unpalatable for me, personally.  Other developers may or may not
  agree, but I for one think that injection of paid work into Debian
  would make Debian less fun for me.

 What injection ? There is already people being paid to work on Debian.

geese, we wen't over this last time this came up, there's a difference 
between:
1) Debian paying people to work on Debian, and 
2) a 3th party paying people to work on Debian

the major one being wether the politics involved with deciding who gets 
payed become a Debian issue, or remain something outside of Debian
-- 
Cheers, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)



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Re: ideas....

[Mike Hommey]

On Sun, Apr 08, 2007 at 02:55:19AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
wrote:
 On Sun, 8 Apr 2007 08:55:25 +0200, Mike Hommey [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: 
 
  On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 11:41:43PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava
  [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 
  Being paid based on popularity does not alter the fact that some
  subset of people are being paid, and others are not, for what could
  be equivalent amounts of work done.  Such an imbalance would make
  Debian unpalatable for me, personally.  Other developers may or may
  not agree, but I for one think that injection of paid work into
  Debian would make Debian less fun for me.
 
  What injection ? There is already people being paid to work on Debian.
 
 If you do not see the distinction between getting a job with an
  external entity paying people to work on debian, and having ones fellow
  developers in an a position to determine whether one gets money or not,
  then I don't know how to explain it.
 
 Already one could find reluctance in opposing aj or Ted or
  Raphael on technical issues, even one feels it might not be in the best
  interest of the project, since in the future one could be in need of
  the money that could be steered ones way by the dunc tank powers that
  be.
 
 The injection of an employer-employee relationship in Debian is
  not something I think is in the best interest of the project.

Sorry, I just zapped from my mind the part of the initial post where the
framework idea exposed just looks like dunc tank.

Indeed, such thing would be half new, since we've had the dunc tank
experiment. But money is not something new in Debian, that was my
point. Some uses of it may, though.

Mike


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Re: ideas....

[Adrian von Bidder]

On Friday 06 April 2007 21.43:09 John Watson wrote:

 I would suggest having two releases of Debian, one really stable which
 could be released every 2 years, another one stable released every 6
 months by taking a freeze of the current testing distro and spending a
 month (no more) fixing any major bugs.

Many people are using testing or a mix of stable and testing for desktop use 
and have found that very good.  For bigger deployments and other more 
sensitive areas, stable is great - I don't want to fiddle around with my 
fai setup every 6 months even if it means I run Oo.org 2 while 2.1 is 
already out etc.  1.5 to 2 years is a reasonable timeframe in a commercial 
surrounding, the major problem Debian needs to solve in that area is 
support of new hardware, like SATA.

 2)One real issue with Debian is a lack of admin tools, (such as yast is
 for SuSE). Considering starting a project to develop a range of gui based
 admin tools for Debian.

Please don't start yet another project.  There's webmin, there's the YaST 
for Debian project and I believe there were some others, too.  And then 
there is the idea of building up debconf into a full admin tool.  I set up 
a SLES10 server a few months ago, see 
http://fortytwo.ch/blog/archives/2006/10/#e2006-10-30T14_22_18.txt for a 
few comments.

To reiterate again here: any configuration tool that modifies configuration 
files, especially at unexpected times like from an init script (gaah!  
That's really a traumatic experience.) is evil to some degree.  A full 
config file parser that also preserves comments is much harder to do, but 
after all Debian has no marketing department saying that this config tool 
mus be finished in two weeks ...

 [money]

As the past year has proved, money is a difficult topic in a volunteer 
organisation.  Would I want Debian to accept a 10 million dollar donation?  
Probably not.  What would I do if I had 10 million dollars to spend on 
Debian?  I guess the wisest course would be to hire some people and get 
them to improve Debian so that it does exactly what I want.  Added bonus if 
they can get the improvements integrated in Debian.  If it's just 10 
millions, that would be probably 3 to 5 people, and if I could resist the 
temptation to try to force those people into prominent roles within Debian 
it might even work out in a much improved distribution without too much 
controversy, and without touching onto some fundamental values of the 
project (that people are sometimes paid for Debian work is a very old fact, 
so that part of this idea should work out fine.)

Now somebody get me that money :-)

cheers
-- vbi



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Re: ideas....

[Bart Martens]

Hi John,

On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 20:43 +0100, John Watson wrote:
 1) I just find that releases are being delayed due to the obsession
 with security. 

I prefer the Debian project to continue to focus on quality and security
to keep this wonderful volunteer-run GNU/Linux distribution suitable for
business use.

 If Microsoft was Debian then Microsoft would only be releasing Windows
 XP now, understanding security and reliability is important however
 there needs to be a cut off point. 

Closed-source software can hide insecure parts.

  
 I would suggest having two releases of Debian, one really stable
 which could be released every 2 years, another one stable released
 every 6 months 

That is more or less what already happens.
http://www.debian.org/News/2007/20070218

If you feel that some software should be updated in Debian stable, then
you are welcome to report a wishlist bug in the BTS pointing to this:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/ch-pkgs.en.html#s-upload-stable

If someone just wants something newer made available for Debian stable,
then he/she can use and contribute to the Backports project.
http://www.backports.org/

 by taking a freeze of the current testing distro and spending a
 month (no more) fixing any major bugs.

You're very welcome to help fixing bugs to reduce the freeze period to
just one month. :)

  I personally believe the testing version is as stable as many of
 the other distros in the market. I normally use the testing version

There is a reason why Debian is better than the other distros in the
market. :)

  however when it comes to a release of the stable version, updates on
 testing are few with a increase temptation to switch to a different
 distro. 

I agree with you that some packages are not updated to the newest
upstream releases for too long, so you are welcome to notify the
packagers by reporting wishlist bugs in the BTS and/or report inactive
maintainers to the MIA-team.

 So those are the ideas, now flame me.

No flame please. :)

I have not commented in detail on your ideas about how to use money in
the project, because I'm just a volunteer interested in showing off how
smart I am :) and unfortunately also revealing how much I still can
learn.  Note that the Debian project is very volunteer-driven, and money
is a sensitive subject.  For now I prefer to stay out of flamewars about
money in Debian, and focus on the interesting parts: the software.

Regards,

Bart Martens




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Re: ideas....

[Sven Luther]

On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 12:18:49PM +0200, Bart Martens wrote:
 Hi John,
 
 On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 20:43 +0100, John Watson wrote:
  1) I just find that releases are being delayed due to the obsession
  with security. 
 
 I prefer the Debian project to continue to focus on quality and security
 to keep this wonderful volunteer-run GNU/Linux distribution suitable for
 business use.

Releases are being delayed, because the developers loose to much time fighting
between themselves :)

Friendly,

Sven Luther


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Re: ideas....

[MJ Ray]

John Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 2)One real issue with Debian is a lack of admin tools, (such as yast is for
 SuSE). Considering starting a project to develop a range of gui based admin
 tools for Debian.

I think debconf is slowly growing more GUI.  If one uses a gnome-apt
and selects the gnome debconf front end, does that start to give
graphical admin?  Is that the sort of direction the project should
head, do you think?

 3) [...] If I donate a million pounds to the Debian cause,  what
 happens to this investment?

Money decisions have mostly been left to the projec

A 10-million dollar donation question was posed in the recent project
leader debates.  See around lines 645 and 753-869 of
http://people.debian.org/~mjr/irc/dpl-debate-2007/dpl-debate-botless.html
  Anthony Towns is uncertain whether we could handle it;
  Wouter Verhelst would refuse it;
  Aigars Mahinovs would give it to Ubuntu;
  Steve McIntyre would spend it on conferences;
  the others didn't really answer AFAICS.

There might be other things in the platforms on
http://www.uk.debian.org/vote/ and we should know who's elected in a
few days.

[...]
- The investment is placed into a Escrow type account.
- If the project is completed on the time the allocated  investment is
passed to the project leader.
- The would be the projects leaders responsibility to share the
contribution accordingly.
- The project is only completed so long its agreed upon by the
investor and the project leader.

I dislike that this leaves developers without payment while they're
doing the work, which is a bit vulnerable, not sustainable.  Some
portion should be paid at start and for each milestone.  I know this
gambles some of the money, but it does give better feedback and
management than this all-or-nothing payment plan.  It's quite normal,
that if I'm working for someone new, I insist on some guarantee if
it's more work than I'm willing to gamble.  I think most of the
debian-related projects which people would fund are going to be more
work than a developer would usually gamble.

Regards,
-- 
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Webmaster/web developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop maker,
developer of koha, debian, gobo, gnustep, various mail and web s/w.
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Re: ideas....

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Heya,

 2)One real issue with Debian is a lack of admin tools, (such as yast
 is for
 SuSE). Considering starting a project to develop a range of gui based
 admin
 tools for Debian.
One of the reasons why I am using Debian is that there is no yast. Tools
like yast too often try to know more than the admin, which can be pretty
much pain in the ass if you want to configure something yast  Co don't
like. Imho the mix of apt* and debconf is all you need.

Cheers,

Bernd


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Re: ideas....

[John Watson]

On 07/04/07, Bernd Zeimetz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Heya,

 2)One real issue with Debian is a lack of admin tools, (such as yast
 is for
 SuSE). Considering starting a project to develop a range of gui based
 admin
 tools for Debian.
One of the reasons why I am using Debian is that there is no yast. Tools
like yast too often try to know more than the admin, which can be pretty
much pain in the ass if you want to configure something yast  Co don't
like. Imho the mix of apt* and debconf is all you need.

Cheers,




I agree with you to a limited extent, for example if you open yast it will
overwrite the current settings with out warning, its complete bloatware and
does not work nearly half the time. Again it would be nice to have a set of
fast gui tools to do quick changes if required. I will go ahead with the
project as a independent project however aimed for the Debian system. Any
suggestions would be great.


Thanks.



John Watson.

Re: ideas....

[John Watson]

On 07/04/07, MJ Ray [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:







3) [...] If I donate a million pounds to the Debian cause,  what
 happens to this investment?

Money decisions have mostly been left to the projec

A 10-million dollar donation question was posed in the recent project
leader debates.  See around lines 645 and 753-869 of
http://people.debian.org/~mjr/irc/dpl-debate-2007/dpl-debate-botless.html
Anthony Towns is uncertain whether we could handle it;
Wouter Verhelst would refuse it;
Aigars Mahinovs would give it to Ubuntu;
Steve McIntyre would spend it on conferences;
the others didn't really answer AFAICS.

There might be other things in the platforms on
http://www.uk.debian.org/vote/ and we should know who's elected in a
few days.




Lets say if I was a investor, why would I invest into the debain project,
what incentives are in place? Where is the inestment going or would people
just waste even more time fighting on  how the investment is allocated?.  Or
do we just not accept any type of investment, if we dont accept any type of
investment who pays for the conferences, servers and legal expenses.  If the
project is going to grow then some type of frame work (if any) needs to be
in place. Am I correct in saying  there was some type of dispute few months
ago?






[...]
- The investment is placed into a Escrow type account.
- If the project is completed on the time the allocated  investment
is
passed to the project leader.
- The would be the projects leaders responsibility to share the
contribution accordingly.
- The project is only completed so long its agreed upon by the
investor and the project leader.

I dislike that this leaves developers without payment while they're
doing the work, which is a bit vulnerable, not sustainable.  Some
portion should be paid at start and for each milestone.  I know this
gambles some of the money, but it does give better feedback and
management than this all-or-nothing payment plan.  It's quite normal,
that if I'm working for someone new, I insist on some guarantee if
it's more work than I'm willing to gamble.  I think most of the
debian-related projects which people would fund are going to be more
work than a developer would usually gamble.




Simple, give the investor the option to place the investment into a escrow
or as a initial investment. It would then be up to the project leader   to
encourage the investor to make the payment as an initial investment.




Thanks.



John

Re: ideas....

[John Watson]

No flame please. :)

I have not commented in detail on your ideas about how to use money in
the project, because I'm just a volunteer interested in showing off how
smart I am :) and unfortunately also revealing how much I still can
learn.  Note that the Debian project is very volunteer-driven,



Yes but the framework example I just given is still volunteer-driven, ideas
is suggested by volunteers,  project leader is voted by volunteers, I dont
see any reason why such a framework would stop debian being a
volunteer-driven type project.


and money

is a sensitive subject.



Again another reason why to have a framework in place to limit future
disputes and
possible delays.



For now I prefer to stay out of flamewars about

money in Debian, and focus on the interesting parts: the software.



Its not a discussion about money, its about placing a framework in place on
how money is allocated if debian recieves investment.

Regards,


Bart Martens




John.

Re: ideas....

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 15:34:23 +0100, John Watson
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:  

 I agree with you to a limited extent, for example if you open yast it
 will overwrite the current settings with out warning, its complete
 bloatware and does not work nearly half the time. Again it would be
 nice to have a set of fast gui tools to do quick changes if
 required. I will go ahead with the project as a independent project
 however aimed for the Debian system. Any suggestions would be great.

Make the tools policy compliant -- no user changes should be
 lost, including comments. Even if the changes were made by just using
 vi.  Secondly, do not expect that every confi file is ever going to
 change to one common config format.  

If that is done, then the gui tool might even be useful.

manoj
-- 
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Manoj Srivastava [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/
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Re: ideas....

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 15:32:13 +0100, John Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: 

 
 
 
 No flame please. :)
 
 I have not commented in detail on your ideas about how to use money
 in the project, because I'm just a volunteer interested in showing
 off how smart I am :) and unfortunately also revealing how much I
 still can learn.  Note that the Debian project is very
 volunteer-driven,

 Yes but the framework example I just given is still volunteer-driven,

If one is being paid to do work, it makes the work no longer  a
 volunteer activity.  So says my dictionary.

 ideas is suggested by volunteers, project leader is voted by
 volunteers, I dont see any reason why such a framework would stop
 debian being a volunteer-driven type project.

Being paid based on popularity does not alter the fact that some
 subset of people are being paid, and others are not, for what could be
 equivalent amounts of work done.  Such an imbalance would make Debian
 unpalatable for me, personally.  Other developers may or may not agree,
 but I for one think that injection of paid work into Debian would make
 Debian less fun for me.

 and money is a sensitive subject.

 Again another reason why to have a framework in place to limit future
 disputes and possible delays.

No, the mere presence of a framework would, in my eyes, change
 the very nature of Debian, and increase, not decrease, disputes and
 delays.

 For now I prefer to stay out of flamewars about money in Debian, and
 focus on the interesting parts: the software. 

 Its not a discussion about money, its about placing a framework in
 place on how money is allocated if debian recieves investment.

And the implicit assumptrion being that injection of monetary
 rewards into a volunteer activity is de-facto OK, which is a viewpoint
 not shared by everyone.

manoj

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ideas....

[John Watson]

Some fantastic ideas


First of all I would like to say how great Debian is as a operating system
and a linux distro. I have tried many distribution but always come back to
Debian. What I find wrong with these so called  distros is that they always
artificially alter components, components deleted/missing  and  loads of
useless bells and whistles that never work.  I have some ideas which may
or may not improve the project or least something to  discuss about..


1) I just find that releases are being delayed due to the obsession with
security. If Microsoft was Debian then Microsoft would only be releasing
Windows XP now, understanding security and reliability is important however
there needs to be a cut off point.

I would suggest having two releases of Debian, one really stable which
could be released every 2 years, another one stable released every 6
months by taking a freeze of the current testing distro and spending a
month (no more) fixing any major bugs. I personally believe the testing
version is as stable as many of the other distros in the market. I normally
use the testing version however when it comes to a release of the stable
version, updates on testing are few with a increase temptation to switch to
a different distro.


2)One real issue with Debian is a lack of admin tools, (such as yast is for
SuSE). Considering starting a project to develop a range of gui based admin
tools for Debian.

What are folks view on this and is there any other similar projects?

3)What drives the development of other distros is money, any investment into
the opensource community, virtually 100% of this is spent on research and
development. Any purchase of proprietary software such as windows only 15%
of the cost is spent on research and development.  There is major advantages
for business and individuals to invest in free software, however what
framework is place?. If I donate a million pounds to the Debian cause,  what
happens to this investment?

If such a framework was in place it could increase investment resulting in
increase development and interest in the project.  A typical example ...

  - Some person(s) has an idea for a project (advert in the newyork
  times to a general software project).
  - A project leader is allocated so long there is enough interest.
  (Could be voted upon)
  - Advert placed on the Debian site (possibly in a new so called
  classified section)
  - Possible investor(s)  contributes money to this project.
  - The investment is placed into a Escrow type account.
  - If the project is completed on the time the allocated  investment is
  passed to the project leader.
  - The would be the projects leaders responsibility to share the
  contribution accordingly.
  - The project is only completed so long its agreed upon by the
  investor and the project leader.



So those are the ideas, now flame me.



John.

Re: ideas....

[Kevin Mark]

(note: These are my own comments and not that of Debian)
On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 08:43:09PM +0100, John Watson wrote:
 Some fantastic ideas
  
  
 First of all I would like to say how great Debian is as a operating system and
 a linux distro. I have tried many distribution but always come back to Debian.

Thanks for choosing Debian.

 What I find wrong with these so called  distros is that they always
 artificially alter components, components deleted/missing  and  loads of
 useless bells and whistles that never work.  I have some ideas which may 
 or
 may not improve the project or least something to  discuss about..

Debian in order to comply with the DFSG alters packages, also.

  
 1) I just find that releases are being delayed due to the obsession with
 security. If Microsoft was Debian then Microsoft would only be releasing
 Windows XP now, understanding security and reliability is important however
 there needs to be a cut off point.

Each distro has its release goals. Debian tries to focus on security and
rc bugs and releases when it feels it has met each of its release goals. 
Why would we want to be lax on security and have folks call is the
microsoft of the free software world?
  
 I would suggest having two releases of Debian, one really stable which could
 be released every 2 years, another one stable released every 6 months by
 taking a freeze of the current testing distro and spending a month (no more)
 fixing any major bugs. I personally believe the testing version is as stable
 as many of the other distros in the market. I normally use the testing version
 however when it comes to a release of the stable version, updates on testing
 are few with a increase temptation to switch to a different distro.

The released versions of Debian are for supporting critical infrastrure
but also is used for desktops. This reduces support costs and increases
managability. If you want something more 'current' for desktops, then
'testing' or even ubuntu may be used, if you dont mind the risk. So you
can do this now, no need for another choice.

 2)One real issue with Debian is a lack of admin tools, (such as yast is for
 SuSE). Considering starting a project to develop a range of gui based admin
 tools for Debian.

Debian has admin tools, although most of them are not gui. Webmin was in
debian at some point but was not being maintained and was removed and
afaik no one has resumed maintaining it. There was also a project
started to port yast to debian, afaik this project is still incomplete
and needs folks to step-up and move things along. So many folks use
non-gui tool but if you know folks who want to improve the gui tools,
direct them to the webmin or yast for Debian projects. If you have
others you can recommend, use the 'rfp' (request for package) in the
wnpp psuedo-package in the BTS (bug tracking system) at bugs.debian.org.

 What are folks view on this and is there any other similar projects?
  
 3)What drives the development of other distros is money, any investment into
 the opensource community, virtually 100% of this is spent on research and
 development. Any purchase of proprietary software such as windows only 15% of
 the cost is spent on research and development.  There is major advantages for
 business and individuals to invest in free software, however what framework
 is place?. If I donate a million pounds to the Debian cause,  what happens to
 this investment? 

The closest way I know to invest in FLOSS is with 'bounties', there are
a few websites that I recall seeing on the intraweb including the one on
the ubuntu site. Spending money in FLOSS projects is a very devisive
issue, one that needs to be researched more before it can be used more.

  
 If such a framework was in place it could increase investment resulting in
 increase development and interest in the project.  A typical example ...
how to spend money 
 
 So those are the ideas, now flame me.

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Re: Google Summer of Code 2007 - mentors and project ideas wanted

[Aigars Mahinovs]

On 09/03/07, Steve McIntyre [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

[ Please respect the Reply-To and discuss things on debian-project. ]

The Google Summer of Code is running again this year[1]. Last year we
started ten projects with students, and six of them ran to
completion[2], providing us with new useful code. This year, we're
applying again for Debian to be a mentoring organisation. With luck,
we'll get some enthusiastic new developers working for us, paid full
time by Google for the duration of the summer. We will hear in the
next few days whether or not Debian has been accepted; in the
meantime, we need to get working.


I have maintained a project last year. It was not the most successful
one, but it did have a positive result. It is most probable that I
will also have the time for it this year (assuming I do not get
elected DPL).

--
Best regards,
   Aigars Mahinovsmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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|: :' :  http://www.debian.orghttp://www.laka.lv  |
|`. `' |
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RE: Google Summer of Code 2007 - mentors and project ideas wanted

[Kevin Abate]

%contact
{
   $name='Mr. Kevin Peter Abate';
   @post-mail-address=
   '1820 Binz Street, Apartment 8',
   'Houston, Texas 77004-7256';
   $email='[EMAIL PROTECTED]';
   $voicemail='+1 832 632 4207';
   $home='+1 713 529 3235';
}

i was thinking about the virtual exchange reserve -- asset management 
without any fee.


Linking together currency markets, foreign stock exchanges and commodities 
exchanges is not going to be an easy task.  That's why this would be an 
excellent project for the summer of code.


Not only that, but the ability to send checks by e-mail will be critical in 
the coming generation's economic understanding.  Sending information by 
phone, e-mail and post, you can confirm the source of funds and can confirm 
the destination of funds.  It's like credit except more secure against 
identity theft.


Think about it and get back to me,
Kevin



From: Steve McIntyre [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Subject: Google Summer of Code 2007 - mentors and project ideas wanted
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[ Please respect the Reply-To and discuss things on debian-project. ]

The Google Summer of Code is running again this year[1]. Last year we
started ten projects with students, and six of them ran to
completion[2], providing us with new useful code. This year, we're
applying again for Debian to be a mentoring organisation. With luck,
we'll get some enthusiastic new developers working for us, paid full
time by Google for the duration of the summer. We will hear in the
next few days whether or not Debian has been accepted; in the
meantime, we need to get working.

Admins
==
Our two current admins are Steve McIntyre [EMAIL PROTECTED] and
Stefano Zacchiroli [EMAIL PROTECTED]; if last year is anything to go
by, we'll probably add more admins later once the programme is up and
running. Admins are responsible for approving mentors and students.

Mentors and ideas
=
At this point, we have not nominated any specific mentors as part of
our application; we expect to add more mentors shortly as people get
in touch. If you want to be a mentor, add yourself in the wiki and
please also contact Steve and Zack. If you have ideas for projects
that you'd like to oversee, please add them to the list in this year's
wiki page[3]. As a starting list, we've copied in the list of projects
from this time last year already. To be a mentor, you will need to
have a Google account. If you don't have one already, that would be a
useful thing to set up in advance. Once we know the procedure for
signing up mentors, we will pass on the details to those interested.

Discussion
==
Please find us on the debian-project mailing list or
irc.debian.org:#debian-soc if there's anything you need to discuss
with us.

[1] http://code.google.com/soc/
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2006
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2007

--
Steve

Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Hubert Chan]

On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 13:56:10 +0200, Adeodato Simó [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:

 * Steve Langasek [Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:57:38 -0700]:
 Nor is it actually required.  Any DD can delete an upload out of the
 delayed queue on gluck.

 Er, the directories have the sticky bit set.

And it also wouldn't help those of us who aren't DDs (yet), as we would
have to get someone else to delete it for us, which with possible
delays may be too late.

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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Steve Langasek]

On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 01:56:10PM +0200, Adeodato Simó wrote:
 * Steve Langasek [Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:57:38 -0700]:

  Nor is it actually required.  Any DD can delete an upload out of the delayed
  queue on gluck.

 Er, the directories have the sticky bit set.

Ah; this seems to be a regression compared to the previous permissions on
the directories, then.

-- 
Steve Langasek   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]   http://www.debian.org/


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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Thomas Viehmann]

Joe Wreschnig wrote:
 I would much rather have a carefully thought-out policy than people who
 barely know Python instigating mass NMUs trying to reach a target that
 changes every few weeks. Which is to say, I like Loïc's idea.
My apologies for wrongly interpreting your motives.

It is my impression that the previous non-smooth python transitions were
fare more successful and less stressful.

Kind regards

T.
-- 
Thomas Viehmann, http://thomas.viehmann.net/


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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Sun, 30 Jul 2006 11:51:45 +0900, Junichi Uekawa [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: 

 Hi,
  Do you have a rough overview (maybe from your ubuntu experience)
  which (types of) packages will be affected?
 
 An example might be adding support to wacom-tools to automatically
 configure a device node on tablet PCs and ensuring that X is
 configured to automatically use that device node. In general, the
 integration work stems from packages that provide hardware support
 plus packages that depend on that hardware.

 By changing the following current practice:

 1. Create patch
 2. Send patch to BTS
 3. wait forever

 to

 1. Create patch
 2. Send patch to BTS
 3. 7-day delayed NMU

I think I would prefer:
 1. Create patch
 2. Send patch to BTS (with intent to NMU notice)
  3. Give time for maintainer to respond
 4. Upload to N-day delayed queue (where N can be determined based on
severity of bug, importance  of package, proximity to a freeze,
etc)

N can be less than 7, compensating for the time  spent looking
 for maintainer input.

manoj
-- 
I kissed my first girl and smoked my first cigarette on the same
day. I haven't had time for tobacco since. -- Arturo Toscanini
Manoj Srivastava   [EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/
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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Anthony Towns]

On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 10:04:09AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
 I think I would prefer:
  1. Create patch
  2. Send patch to BTS (with intent to NMU notice)
   3. Give time for maintainer to respond
  4. Upload to N-day delayed queue (where N can be determined based on
 severity of bug, importance  of package, proximity to a freeze,
 etc)
 N can be less than 7, compensating for the time  spent looking
  for maintainer input.

The point of the delayed queue is so that you don't have to remember
to act if the maintainer doesn't respond. That can be pretty difficult,
it's easy to remember to do something if the maintainer *does* respond --
you get a cue in the form of the maintainer responding; but when they
don't, you have to remember spontaneously yourself, even though by that
time you may have any number of other things distracting you.

For NMUers, the ideal workflow is:

 (a) find a problem
 (b) fix it
 (c) set the process in motion to have that fix be in Debian
 (upload to DELAYED, make sure the bug report is up to date,
  mail the maintainer directly, subscribe to the PTS, etc)
 (d) forget about it until something happens

 (e) if the maintainer responds, deal with that as appropriate (eg,
 by obsoleting the DELAYED upload with an improved patch, etc)

 (f) if the DELAYED upload is accepted, _and_ bugs are filed against it,
 fix them

The first set, (a)-(d), can all be done in a single session without any
coordination, and the other two bits of work need to be done in response
to given actions only, rather than needing a specific time set aside
for them in advance.

And if the maintainer's response is to include the patch (or a better
one) and upload it, the DELAYED upload will be REJECTed, and it will be
as if there was never a DELAYED upload in the first place.

Cheers,
aj



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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Hubert Chan]

On Sun, 30 Jul 2006 11:51:45 +0900, Junichi Uekawa [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:

 Hi,
  Do you have a rough overview (maybe from your ubuntu experience)
 which  (types of) packages will be affected?
 
 An example might be adding support to wacom-tools to automatically
 configure a device node on tablet PCs and ensuring that X is
 configured to automatically use that device node. In general, the
 integration work stems from packages that provide hardware support
 plus packages that depend on that hardware.

 By changing the following current practice:

 1. Create patch
 2. Send patch to BTS
 3. wait forever
[...]

Well, step 3 has never been mandated.  Developers are allowed to change
step 3 to: do an NMU as described in the Developer's Reference.  The
fact that what you listed is current practice (sometimes) has more to do
with the way developers act, and less to do with the NMU rules.

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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Hubert Chan]

On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:29:57 +1000, Anthony Towns aj@azure.humbug.org.au said:

 The point of the delayed queue is so that you don't have to remember
 to act if the maintainer doesn't respond. That can be pretty
 difficult, it's easy to remember to do something if the maintainer
 *does* respond -- you get a cue in the form of the maintainer
 responding; but when they don't, you have to remember spontaneously
 yourself, even though by that time you may have any number of other
 things distracting you.

Well, if you forget, then the patch must not really have been that
important to begin with. ;)

Yeah, I can see that there may be cases where it would be nice to reduce
the NMUer's workload (e.g. if they're doing mass-NMUs, and so have a
whole pile of packages to worry about), but I think that should be done
as a special case, rather than a general rule.

Then again, if the NMUer isn't responsible enough to remember to upload
after [appropriate delay], can s/he be trusted to follow up on the bugs
resulting from the NMU?

[...]

 And if the maintainer's response is to include the patch (or a better
 one) and upload it, the DELAYED upload will be REJECTed, and it will
 be as if there was never a DELAYED upload in the first place.

Not having used the DELAYED queue before, is it possible for the
maintainer to reject an upload without making their own upload?

e.g. if the NMU is broken, but it will take me more than a week to test
a proper fix.  Or if I decide that the package shouldn't be changed
after all.  etc.

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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Adeodato Simó]

* Hubert Chan [Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:09:26 -0400]:

 Not having used the DELAYED queue before, is it possible for the
 maintainer to reject an upload without making their own upload?

 e.g. if the NMU is broken, but it will take me more than a week to test
 a proper fix.  Or if I decide that the package shouldn't be changed
 after all.  etc.

No, there is not. If the NMU is horribly broken, telling that to the
NMUer should get them into doing something (withdrawing it, or fixing
it). If not, and it's really important that the upload does not make
into the archive, you can e.g. just reupload the current version (e.g.
1.2-3 as 1.2-4, which is bigger than 1.2-3.1).

Cheers,

-- 
Adeodato Simó dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer  adeodato at debian.org
 
ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol


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Re: package ownership in Debian (was: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?)

[Matthew Palmer]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 07:41:46PM +0200, Fabio Tranchitella wrote:
 Hi Pierre,
   please don't Cc me, I read this list. :)
 
 Il giorno ven, 28/07/2006 alle 19.28 +0200, Pierre Habouzit ha scritto:
  and that won't happen because I'm not very keen on leraning yet another 
  VCS, and that other's think the same, and that you will find poeple 
  that never used svn or just can't use it, and poeple that never used 
  bzr or don't like it , or ...
 
 I was talking about repositories, not a single monolithic
 repository: you are free to use cvs, svn, monotone, bzr, darcs or
 whatever else you prefer. If every developer would use a common server
 for his repositories, it would be easier for the others to find and use
 them.

Find: Yes.  Use: Not unless they know how to use the system, which Pierre
has already ruled out.

- Matt


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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Anthony Towns]

[switched to -project]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 05:37:11PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
 Steve Kemp [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Neither Ubuntu nor Debian do anything special to get hardware support
   that is provided by the kernel proper and tools that neither group
   created.
 That's not actually true. I do a lot of work in Ubuntu to add extra 
 hardware support. [...] If Debian had slightly less of a culture of 
 Keep your hands off my package, I'd do it here instead.

What if we introduced the concept of area maintenance? Like saying
Matthew Garrett is part of our hardware support team, so can thus NMU
any package that needs changes to support that release goal. with the
proviso that a bug gets filed with the NMU patch [0] at the same time.
We already have something like that with 0-day NMUs for certain
transitions authorised by the RMs.

Such teams would have to be composed of people who didn't have a habit
of uploading broken packages and then not fixing them, of course.

Cheers,
aj

[0] Do we have a tool to automate that atm btw? What is it?


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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Martin Michlmayr]

* Anthony Towns aj@azure.humbug.org.au [2006-07-29 16:05]:
 proviso that a bug gets filed with the NMU patch [0] at the same time.
 
 [0] Do we have a tool to automate that atm btw? What is it?

nmudiff in the devscripts package.
-- 
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/


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Re: package ownership in Debian (was: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?)

[Loïc Minier]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006, Gustavo Franco wrote:
 I agree, but we need to keep in mind that Ubuntu has less officially 
 supported
 packages (the main section) and the others are in universe section, 
 supported
 by volunteers like us, that work on (almost) whatever thing they think is 
 ok.

 Actually, I would be fine with only supporting a smaller set officially
 in Debian too.  Of course, not all Debian Developers would agree with
 me on this.

 I think Ubuntu has also two upload keyrings, one for people approved to
 upload to main (the officially supported set) and one for people
 allowed to upload to universe (more or less the rest).

-- 
Loïc Minier [EMAIL PROTECTED]


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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Matthew Garrett]

Anthony Towns aj@azure.humbug.org.au wrote:

 What if we introduced the concept of area maintenance? Like saying
 Matthew Garrett is part of our hardware support team, so can thus NMU
 any package that needs changes to support that release goal. with the
 proviso that a bug gets filed with the NMU patch [0] at the same time.
 We already have something like that with 0-day NMUs for certain
 transitions authorised by the RMs.

That's certainly an interesting idea, and I'd be happy to explore it. 
How do other people feel?
-- 
Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]


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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Matthew Palmer]

On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 12:54:39PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
 Anthony Towns aj@azure.humbug.org.au wrote:
 
  What if we introduced the concept of area maintenance? Like saying
  Matthew Garrett is part of our hardware support team, so can thus NMU
  any package that needs changes to support that release goal. with the
  proviso that a bug gets filed with the NMU patch [0] at the same time.
  We already have something like that with 0-day NMUs for certain
  transitions authorised by the RMs.
 
 That's certainly an interesting idea, and I'd be happy to explore it. 
 How do other people feel?

I'd be happy for someone who had a particular interest in an area of my
package to NMU it straight away if they needed to for some purpose, as long
as they didn't break it or at least were equally quick at fixing it back up
to it.

- Matt


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