Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Louis-Philippe Véronneau]

On 2021-03-25 04 h 18, Christian Kastner wrote:
> Why would someone get paid to organize one, though?
> 
> I've never organized one, but it was my impression from others that this
> was always done voluntarily and from own initiative.
> 

Jonathan said he didn't have time to organise one, Raphael replied it
would have been possible to hire someone using Debian money for that.

It's all in the thread :)

-- 
  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  Louis-Philippe Véronneau
  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋   po...@debian.org / veronneau.org
  ⠈⠳⣄



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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Philip Hands]

Christian Kastner  writes:

...
>   * Someone gets paid to improve Debian

Some packages end up in this situation because there is no need for them
to be in the archive.

If you pay someone to keep them in, you are removing the evolutionary
pressure that ensures that Debian doesn't fill up with dross, so you're
actually paying someone to make Debian worse in that case.

How can one tell the difference between useful stuff and dross?

Given the diversity of use cases that Debian covers, I think the only
way is to allow things to drop out of the archive if they attract
insufficient interest to stay in, be that from volunteers or paid-for
effort funded by interested users.

That way, people that care get to notice the thing dropping out of the
archive, and do something about it ... or not.

If we had a committee deciding which mediocre packages were sufficiently
important to have money thrown at them, we'd effectively block new
enthusiastic volunteers to step up to do the job unpaid, we'd remove any
incentive for users to fund such work directly, and we'd remove a lot of
the incentive for writing a replacement that was better than the things
that nobody wants to maintain.

As Jonas points out, we'd almost certainly also demoralise the fine
people that already maintain loads of rather uninspiring packages, and
cause them to make the problem worse by orphaning those packages.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,GERMANY


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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Christian Kastner]

On 23.03.21 17:28, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> If Debian paid for working on orphaned packages, then I would probably 
> orphan some of the packages I now maintain as a volunteer, to then work 
> on those same packages for pay.

First, I think that at least two alternative scenarios have to be taken
into consideration:
  (1) Someone else who is interested in the package picks it up
  (2) There is not much interest in the package anyway, and it gets
  removed from the archive

> I would not consider that cheating: Some of "my" packages are
> genuinely less fun to maintain, and would certainly be *lesser* fun
> if knew that others were paid for doing similar tasks.
Playing the devil's advocate, and assuming (1) and (2) from above do not
apply: what would be wrong with that?
  * You got rid of a package that you're not having any fun maintaining,
and can focus on other fun tasks
  * Someone gets paid to improve Debian
  * Debian's users get an improved Debian
  * Debian's donors see their money put to actual good use

I am *not* advocating for this solution. *If* one were to go down this
path, then clearly this would need far more debate. I'm just saying that
sometimes, it's necessary to look at a problem from many angles.

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Christian Kastner]

On 23.03.21 16:40, Gard Spreemann wrote:

> Jonas Smedegaard  writes:
>> Seems backwards to to me to pay for keeping packages alive that we have 
>> lost interest in.
> 
> That's a good point, I agree. What about packages that we have lost
> interest in, but that our users very much have not? Admittedly, I have
> no idea of what the cardinality of that intersection is.
> 
> Or alternatively: are there hard-to-maintain packages that are highly
> useful to users, but where there just isn't enough interest to overcome
> a very high maintenance burden? Could paid work help offload the
> maintainer of such packages (leaving them with more of the fun parts and
> less of the non-fun ones)?

Indeed, that's exactly the point I was trying get at in my other
question to the DPL candidates.

I've amended that other questions with a quantifiable, and thus
hopefully better example of what you describe above: RC bugs in stable.

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Christian Kastner]

On 23.03.21 16:04, Louis-Philippe Véronneau wrote:
> On 2021-03-22 16 h 43, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
>> Le vendredi, 19 mars 2021, 17.49:54 h CET Louis-Philippe Véronneau a écrit :
>>> I for one would be less motivated to help with videoteam tasks if I knew
>>> someone was paid to organise a miniconf.
>>
>> Would your motivation also be affected if an individual was paid only for a 
>> specific task that noone in the team found particularily interesting to do?
> 
> I'm not opposed to paid labor per-say. I think the previous examples of
> Debian paying TOs to do accounting is a good one.
> 
> So to answer your question, I wouldn't be opposed if we contracted an
> enterprise to handle our gear for us.
> 
> I don't think it's something particularly fun to do and I see that more
> as an administrative task, akin to accounting.
> 
> "Organising a miniconf" isn't though.

Why would someone get paid to organize one, though?

I've never organized one, but it was my impression from others that this
was always done voluntarily and from own initiative.

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Andrei POPESCU]

On Ma, 23 mar 21, 16:40:32, Gard Spreemann wrote:
> 
> That's a good point, I agree. What about packages that we have lost
> interest in, but that our users very much have not? Admittedly, I have
> no idea of what the cardinality of that intersection is.

[just a user here]

If such packages and users exist it looks like a good candidate to set 
up a business financed via crowd funding.

Or maybe Debian should provide the crowd funding platform for this.

Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser


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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Gard Spreemann (2021-03-23 16:40:32)
> 
> Jonas Smedegaard  writes:
> 
> > Quoting Gard Spreemann (2021-03-23 16:18:10)
> >> Is there a fundamental difference between paying someone to do 
> >> "non-fun administrative tasks" like accounting, and paying someone 
> >> to help out with orphaned/RFA'd packages (cf. Christian Kastner's 
> >> recent "How to motivate contributors to work on QA" question)?
> >> 
> >> It seems to me, to some extent, that a package that is orphaned or 
> >> RFA'd is per definition "not fun enough" for a volunteer to work 
> >> on.
> >
> > Accounting is a mandatory activity regardless of its fun-factor.
> >
> > Seems backwards to to me to pay for keeping packages alive that we 
> > have lost interest in.
> 
> That's a good point, I agree. What about packages that we have lost 
> interest in, but that our users very much have not? Admittedly, I have 
> no idea of what the cardinality of that intersection is.
> 
> Or alternatively: are there hard-to-maintain packages that are highly 
> useful to users, but where there just isn't enough interest to 
> overcome a very high maintenance burden? Could paid work help offload 
> the maintainer of such packages (leaving them with more of the fun 
> parts and less of the non-fun ones)?

Yes, paid work helps some maintainers - but that's the wrong question!

The right question is if paid work helps Debian *and* does not at the 
same time disturb (other parts of) Debian too much.

Next question is then how much is "too much" - I have no answer for 
that.

If Debian paid for working on orphaned packages, then I would probably 
orphan some of the packages I now maintain as a volunteer, to then work 
on those same packages for pay.  I would not consider that cheating: 
Some of "my" packages are genuinely less fun to maintain, and would 
certainly be *lesser* fun if knew that others were paid for doing 
similar tasks.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private

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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Gard Spreemann]

Jonas Smedegaard  writes:

> Quoting Gard Spreemann (2021-03-23 16:18:10)
>> 
>> Louis-Philippe Véronneau  writes:
>> 
>> > On 2021-03-22 16 h 43, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
>> >> Le vendredi, 19 mars 2021, 17.49:54 h CET Louis-Philippe Véronneau 
>> >> a écrit :
>> >>> On 2021-03-19 08 h 02, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
>> > I've been telling a few people last month that I would really 
>> > liked to have an Enterprise Edition Online MiniDebConf, 
>> > unfortunately I don't have any time/energy to instigate that 
>> > currently.
>> 
>>  Something for a Debian fellow that we could hire ;-)
>> >>>
>> >>> I for one would be less motivated to help with videoteam tasks if 
>> >>> I knew someone was paid to organise a miniconf.
>> >> 
>> >> Would your motivation also be affected if an individual was paid 
>> >> only for a specific task that noone in the team found particularily 
>> >> interesting to do?
>> >> 
>> >> (I don't know much about how the videoteam works, so I don't know 
>> >> if that's a good example, but let's see…) For example, what if 
>> >> someone (paid) handled the storage and timely shipping of all the 
>> >> hardware, as well as the actual ordering of new hardware, leaving 
>> >> the (what I assume is the more interesting part) configuring, 
>> >> design and conception of the system to volunteers?
>> >
>> > I'm not opposed to paid labor per-say. I think the previous examples 
>> > of Debian paying TOs to do accounting is a good one.
>> >
>> > So to answer your question, I wouldn't be opposed if we contracted 
>> > an enterprise to handle our gear for us.
>> >
>> > I don't think it's something particularly fun to do and I see that 
>> > more as an administrative task, akin to accounting.
>> >
>> > "Organising a miniconf" isn't though.
>> 
>> Is there a fundamental difference between paying someone to do 
>> "non-fun administrative tasks" like accounting, and paying someone to 
>> help out with orphaned/RFA'd packages (cf. Christian Kastner's recent 
>> "How to motivate contributors to work on QA" question)?
>> 
>> It seems to me, to some extent, that a package that is orphaned or 
>> RFA'd is per definition "not fun enough" for a volunteer to work on.
>
> Accounting is a mandatory activity regardless of its fun-factor.
>
> Seems backwards to to me to pay for keeping packages alive that we have 
> lost interest in.

That's a good point, I agree. What about packages that we have lost
interest in, but that our users very much have not? Admittedly, I have
no idea of what the cardinality of that intersection is.

Or alternatively: are there hard-to-maintain packages that are highly
useful to users, but where there just isn't enough interest to overcome
a very high maintenance burden? Could paid work help offload the
maintainer of such packages (leaving them with more of the fun parts and
less of the non-fun ones)?


 Best,
 Gard


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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Gard Spreemann (2021-03-23 16:18:10)
> 
> Louis-Philippe Véronneau  writes:
> 
> > On 2021-03-22 16 h 43, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
> >> Le vendredi, 19 mars 2021, 17.49:54 h CET Louis-Philippe Véronneau 
> >> a écrit :
> >>> On 2021-03-19 08 h 02, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> > I've been telling a few people last month that I would really 
> > liked to have an Enterprise Edition Online MiniDebConf, 
> > unfortunately I don't have any time/energy to instigate that 
> > currently.
> 
>  Something for a Debian fellow that we could hire ;-)
> >>>
> >>> I for one would be less motivated to help with videoteam tasks if 
> >>> I knew someone was paid to organise a miniconf.
> >> 
> >> Would your motivation also be affected if an individual was paid 
> >> only for a specific task that noone in the team found particularily 
> >> interesting to do?
> >> 
> >> (I don't know much about how the videoteam works, so I don't know 
> >> if that's a good example, but let's see…) For example, what if 
> >> someone (paid) handled the storage and timely shipping of all the 
> >> hardware, as well as the actual ordering of new hardware, leaving 
> >> the (what I assume is the more interesting part) configuring, 
> >> design and conception of the system to volunteers?
> >
> > I'm not opposed to paid labor per-say. I think the previous examples 
> > of Debian paying TOs to do accounting is a good one.
> >
> > So to answer your question, I wouldn't be opposed if we contracted 
> > an enterprise to handle our gear for us.
> >
> > I don't think it's something particularly fun to do and I see that 
> > more as an administrative task, akin to accounting.
> >
> > "Organising a miniconf" isn't though.
> 
> Is there a fundamental difference between paying someone to do 
> "non-fun administrative tasks" like accounting, and paying someone to 
> help out with orphaned/RFA'd packages (cf. Christian Kastner's recent 
> "How to motivate contributors to work on QA" question)?
> 
> It seems to me, to some extent, that a package that is orphaned or 
> RFA'd is per definition "not fun enough" for a volunteer to work on.

Accounting is a mandatory activity regardless of its fun-factor.

Seems backwards to to me to pay for keeping packages alive that we have 
lost interest in.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private

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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Gard Spreemann]

Louis-Philippe Véronneau  writes:

> On 2021-03-22 16 h 43, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
>> Le vendredi, 19 mars 2021, 17.49:54 h CET Louis-Philippe Véronneau a écrit :
>>> On 2021-03-19 08 h 02, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> I've been telling a few people last month that I would really liked to
> have an Enterprise Edition Online MiniDebConf, unfortunately I don't
> have any time/energy to instigate that currently.

 Something for a Debian fellow that we could hire ;-)
>>>
>>> I for one would be less motivated to help with videoteam tasks if I knew
>>> someone was paid to organise a miniconf.
>> 
>> Would your motivation also be affected if an individual was paid only for a 
>> specific task that noone in the team found particularily interesting to do?
>> 
>> (I don't know much about how the videoteam works, so I don't know if that's 
>> a 
>> good example, but let's see…) For example, what if someone (paid) handled 
>> the 
>> storage and timely shipping of all the hardware, as well as the actual 
>> ordering of new hardware, leaving the (what I assume is the more interesting 
>> part) configuring, design and conception of the system to volunteers?
>
> I'm not opposed to paid labor per-say. I think the previous examples of
> Debian paying TOs to do accounting is a good one.
>
> So to answer your question, I wouldn't be opposed if we contracted an
> enterprise to handle our gear for us.
>
> I don't think it's something particularly fun to do and I see that more
> as an administrative task, akin to accounting.
>
> "Organising a miniconf" isn't though.

Is there a fundamental difference between paying someone to do "non-fun
administrative tasks" like accounting, and paying someone to help out
with orphaned/RFA'd packages (cf. Christian Kastner's recent "How to
motivate contributors to work on QA" question)?

It seems to me, to some extent, that a package that is orphaned or RFA'd
is per definition "not fun enough" for a volunteer to work on.

 Best,
 Gard


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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Louis-Philippe Véronneau]

On 2021-03-22 16 h 43, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
> Le vendredi, 19 mars 2021, 17.49:54 h CET Louis-Philippe Véronneau a écrit :
>> On 2021-03-19 08 h 02, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
 I've been telling a few people last month that I would really liked to
 have an Enterprise Edition Online MiniDebConf, unfortunately I don't
 have any time/energy to instigate that currently.
>>>
>>> Something for a Debian fellow that we could hire ;-)
>>
>> I for one would be less motivated to help with videoteam tasks if I knew
>> someone was paid to organise a miniconf.
> 
> Would your motivation also be affected if an individual was paid only for a 
> specific task that noone in the team found particularily interesting to do?
> 
> (I don't know much about how the videoteam works, so I don't know if that's a 
> good example, but let's see…) For example, what if someone (paid) handled the 
> storage and timely shipping of all the hardware, as well as the actual 
> ordering of new hardware, leaving the (what I assume is the more interesting 
> part) configuring, design and conception of the system to volunteers?

I'm not opposed to paid labor per-say. I think the previous examples of
Debian paying TOs to do accounting is a good one.

So to answer your question, I wouldn't be opposed if we contracted an
enterprise to handle our gear for us.

I don't think it's something particularly fun to do and I see that more
as an administrative task, akin to accounting.

"Organising a miniconf" isn't though.

-- 
  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  Louis-Philippe Véronneau
  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋   po...@debian.org / veronneau.org
  ⠈⠳⣄



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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Didier 'OdyX' Raboud]

Le vendredi, 19 mars 2021, 17.49:54 h CET Louis-Philippe Véronneau a écrit :
> On 2021-03-19 08 h 02, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> >> I've been telling a few people last month that I would really liked to
> >> have an Enterprise Edition Online MiniDebConf, unfortunately I don't
> >> have any time/energy to instigate that currently.
> > 
> > Something for a Debian fellow that we could hire ;-)
> 
> I for one would be less motivated to help with videoteam tasks if I knew
> someone was paid to organise a miniconf.

Would your motivation also be affected if an individual was paid only for a 
specific task that noone in the team found particularily interesting to do?

(I don't know much about how the videoteam works, so I don't know if that's a 
good example, but let's see…) For example, what if someone (paid) handled the 
storage and timely shipping of all the hardware, as well as the actual 
ordering of new hardware, leaving the (what I assume is the more interesting 
part) configuring, design and conception of the system to volunteers?

OdyX


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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hi,

On 18/03/21 at 20:44 +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
> I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
> money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
> which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
> funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
> restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
> your own criteria of course).

I think that it's important to remember that Debian's money comes from
donations (from individuals and various kinds of organizations). It's
important that we can face those donors and explain how we used their
money to improve Debian, and convince them that we made good use of it,
so that they will donate in the future.

I have doubts that this will be possible with such a plan.

I think that we are already in a state where it has been widely
communicated that Debian has money and can help developers pay for
whatever they need that benefits Debian. The number of declined requests
is probably close to zero. Also, we do not currently require a report
from people getting funded, so there's close to zero administrative
burden.

So I'm not sure there's a problem to solve here. Maybe it's just that
developing Debian does not require that much money.


Hijacking the thread a bit, if I may suggest, one area where we could
maybe spend more money is DebConf, with more travel sponsorship, and
higher-standard accomodation.  On the latter, some of us (me included)
are getting old, and I must admit that the prospect of sharing a room
with others, especially during such an intense event, has not been
particularly motivating. Anyway that's probably a question for when
DebConf can happen non-virtually again.

Lucas

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Russ Allbery]

Sam Hartman  writes:

> I'd like to ask you to look at the elephant in the room.  This
> conversation came up specifically because we were talking about an
> organization loosely associated with Debian paying some Debian
> developers.

> Yet, you didn't consider any of the middle options in your
> analysis--only the option of staying effectively all volunteer or going
> all industrial consortium.

Yes, this is a very good point and I didn't address that.

> do you have any thoughts on the middle options like having industrial
> consortiums that we work with so that Debian developers who are
> comfortable in that model can pursue that?

Personally, I'm pessimistic that this would be stable in practice, but
it's possible that I'm borrowing trouble where none need exist.

The specific outcome that I would expect from that sort of hybrid model is
that the folks with the stable funding stream and full-time engagement in
Debian would come to dominate the project, not out of any malice or
nefarious intent, but simply because they have more resources and
engagement and Debian is effectively their job.  In other words, were the
consortium to be successful at the level required to close the resourcing
gap, I would expect the rest of Debian to effectively collapse into it,
leaving an industry consortium core surrounded by a halo of volunteers.

The incentives that I can see would seem to push in that direction.  For
example, it's difficult to do project management when some folks on the
project can put steady and predictable effort into it and other folks on
the project are volunteers and by the nature of volunteer work are often
not going to be able to promise timelines or level of effort for large
projects [1].  The natural tendency is to shift the most critical work
onto the most reliable people.

This is a perfectly fine model for an effective non-profit, but it doesn't
look very much like Debian does today.

Note that I wouldn't expect this to happen with more modest engagements
with increased funding, such as what Raphael is proposing.  It would
require very significant increased funding and corresponding staff.  But
neither would I expect more modest efforts to have much long-term effect
on the overall resourcing gap, unless we coupled that with decreasing
Debian's aspirational scope.

That said, maybe I'm completely wrong.  I am certainly not an expert in
non-profits, and if someone has experience or research on volunteer-run
non-profits with paid staff that have avoided this outcome, I'd be curious
to read it.

[1] I want to acknowledge that some volunteers do promise timelines and
level of effort and fulfill those promises.  Indeed we ask this of the
DPL candidates every year.  But I think this is unusual for work that
requires more advance scheduling than the sort of shift sign-ups that
you'd see at, say, volunteer food banks.  Most volunteers will not be
able to do this for the length of a major Debian project, hence the
regular questions to DPL candidates about the viability of the time
committment.  I also have personal qualms about whether asking for
reliable commitment without compensation from people who live in an
otherwise capitalist society is entirely ethical.

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

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Sam Hartman]

> "Russ" == Russ Allbery  writes:


Russ> This is a deep structural problem that we're going to struggle
Russ> to solve with modest changes such as increased efficiency to
Russ> try to make our scaling more sublinear, or increased
Russ> recruitment (of still primarily unpaid volunteers).  There is
Russ> more happening than before, and we're struggling to keep up,
Russ> let alone get out in front and lead.  This is due,
Russ> fundamentally, to a lack of resources, and it's hard for me to
Russ> see how we can close that resource gap while still being a
Russ> volunteer project (nor do I want us to stop being a volunteer
Russ> project).  For example, one obvious way to get a similar
Russ> scaling of resources would be to change from being a volunteer
Russ> project to being an industry consortium with paid staff so
Russ> that we can be the recipient of that increased corporate
Russ> spending.  But I highly doubt most Debian Developers (myself
Russ> included) have any appetite for that.
I'm engaging because you seem to have ignored an option that is obvious
Russ> at least to me given the discussion this all came out of.

I'm wondering if you have any interesting thoughts so I'm asking.
I'm not trying to be confrontational or to disagree with anything
Russ> you've said, just wondering if there are things we all can
 learn from considering more.

I'd like to ask you to look at the elephant in the room.
This conversation came up specifically because we were talking about an
organization loosely associated with Debian paying some Debian
developers.

Yet, you didn't consider any of the middle options in your
analysis--only the option of staying effectively all volunteer or going
all industrial consortium.

do you have any thoughts on the middle options like having industrial
consortiums that we work with so that Debian developers who are
comfortable in that model can pursue that?

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Russ Allbery]

Gunnar Wolf  writes:

> Debian is very large and diverse, and I know that any generalization
> will underrepresent people. Maybe this would mostly apply to
> long-standing DDs, or whatever. That said, I feel many areas of Debian
> consist of people quite similar to myself -- Fully employed
> professionals who can _spare some cycles_ for the aspects they can
> contribute to the project.

> In my case, fortunately my livelihood is guaranteed, and depending on
> many things, I will have more or less time available for the projects in
> Debian I most care about... Adding money offers to the mix won't change
> the results.

The unpleasant realization that I came to a while back is that the free
software world has fundamentally changed in large part due to our success,
but in a way that is quite challenging for volunteer projects.

Free software won, in the sense that many (all?) of the largest
corporations in the world are now based heavily on free software.  Many
well-funded corporations have embraced this fact and started investing in
free software development.  As a result, the pace of change in the free
software world has increased dramatically, both in terms of rate of change
in specific pieces of software and in terms of the quantity of new useful
software that is being generated.

Debian has invested a lot of effort into improving our infrastructure and
tooling so that we can scale sublinearly with the amount of software that
we package and the amount of churn in the software that we do package.  We
have been largely successful!  But sublinear does not mean zero, and I'm
not sure the slope of increased effort over increased churn is that much
less than 1.  As a result, this dramatic increase in the pace of software
development requires a similarly (if slightly lesser) increase in the pace
of Debian development.

However, this is where we encounter the fundamental economic problem: the
pace of change in free software in general has occurred because of a
dramatic increase in the number of people who are paid to develop free
software as a substantial portion of their job.  This unlocked significant
additional resources in the form of paid work hours for free software.
This is great for free software as a whole (overall; it causes problems as
well, but I won't get into that here).  But Debian is not structured (nor
do I think we want it to be structured) in such a way as to get a similar
significant infusion of resources.

Some project members have always been able to work on Debian during paid
work time, and that hasn't changed, and possibly has increased slightly as
a second-order effect from the growing commerical acceptance of free
software, but the change is nowhere near as dramatic as the acceleration
of development from, e.g., Facebook, Google, and Intel paying significant
number of engineers to do full-time free software devleopment.

This is a deep structural problem that we're going to struggle to solve
with modest changes such as increased efficiency to try to make our
scaling more sublinear, or increased recruitment (of still primarily
unpaid volunteers).  There is more happening than before, and we're
struggling to keep up, let alone get out in front and lead.  This is due,
fundamentally, to a lack of resources, and it's hard for me to see how we
can close that resource gap while still being a volunteer project (nor do
I want us to stop being a volunteer project).  For example, one obvious
way to get a similar scaling of resources would be to change from being a
volunteer project to being an industry consortium with paid staff so that
we can be the recipient of that increased corporate spending.  But I
highly doubt most Debian Developers (myself included) have any appetite
for that.

The obvious alternative is to scale back our aspirations and find a
narrower niche in which we can find the resources to scale to keep up with
that niche.  It's unsatisfying, but to some extent it's already happening;
for example, despite heroic efforts packaging individual applications,
it's not really feasible to do Node development purely using software
packaged in Debian the way that is to do Python or Perl development.  And
this is not new; doing Java development using only software packaged by
Debian has been similarly iffy for a while.  We just don't have the raw
resources required to keep up with packaging the entirety of complex and
extremely fast-moving ecosystems, and to some extent have acknowledged
that and put our attention elsewhere.

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

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Sam Hartman]

> "Gunnar" == Gunnar Wolf  writes:


Gunnar> In my case, fortunately my livelihood is guaranteed, and
Gunnar> depending on many things, I will have more or less time
Gunnar> available for the projects in Debian I most care
Gunnar> about... Adding money offers to the mix won't change the
Gunnar> results.

For me that's true up until the point where I can make most of what I'm
making from my day job on Debian or other FOS activities.
Which is to say there's a boundary condition.  On one side of that
boundary, money doesn't motivate someone who is professionally employed.
on the other side, enough money allows someone to consider a career
change.
I think some of us would jump at that if we could.

--Sam

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Gunnar Wolf]

Jonathan Carter dijo [Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 09:16:15PM +0200]:
> On 2021/03/18 19:46, Raphael Hertzog wrote:> I announced this on
> debian-project[1] and on Planet Debian[2] a while ago.
> > But at this point, we have only funded a single project[3], leaving us
> > with more than 25 KEUR available for further projects.
> > 
> > I did not expect this lack of interest... if I were not running Freexian,
> > I would have proposed projects out of the long list of distro-tracker
> > wishlist bugs...  I enjoy working on this project and I wish I had more
> > time for it.
> > 
> > 1/ How do you explain this lack of interest?
> 
> I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think
> that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying
> to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well.
> For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently
> working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median
> Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well.

I might be too biased by my own reality, and that of some of my peers
with whom I have most contact, but I completely agree with Jonathan's
assessment of this point.

Debian is very large and diverse, and I know that any generalization
will underrepresent people. Maybe this would mostly apply to
long-standing DDs, or whatever. That said, I feel many areas of Debian
consist of people quite similar to myself -- Fully employed
professionals who can _spare some cycles_ for the aspects they can
contribute to the project.

In my case, fortunately my livelihood is guaranteed, and depending on
many things, I will have more or less time available for the projects
in Debian I most care about... Adding money offers to the mix won't
change the results.

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi Phil,

On Thu, 18 Mar 2021, Philip Hands wrote:
> I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
> money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
> which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
> funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
> restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
> your own criteria of course).
> 
> That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since
> people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that
> have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding
> would almost certainly sort out once and for all.

I really like your idea! I wonder if there would be some infrastructure
that would make it easy to describe projects and track how much money
has been allocated by the various DD.

I stumbled recently on opencollective.org which provides some nice tools
to maintain budgets in a transparent manner while working with a fiscal
sponsor to handle the administrative side.

But AFAIK it has nothing to help decide how to spend the money.

But if we find something usable, we could have a volunteer in charge of
entering the "votes" of the DD by adjusting a Debian pledge in a open
system (and have some associated ledger where the DD allocations are
tracked). 

It could be even be open to external donors to help reach the monetary
goal on a specific project.

> Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would
> hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work.

+1

Cheers,
-- 
  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀   Raphaël Hertzog 
  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁
  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋The Debian Handbook: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
  ⠈⠳⣄   Debian Long Term Support: https://deb.li/LTS


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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Sruthi Chandran]

On 19/03/21 3:59 pm, Enrico Zini wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 09:16:15PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
>
>> I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think
>> that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying
>> to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well.
>> For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently
>> working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median
>> Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well.
> Thinking at how we set our bar for membership in building a reputation
> within the project, I imagine we implicitly select people who are able
> to sustain themselves reasonably well without Debian's help.
>
> I'm not sure it's something I'd want to change. I see being an employer
> as a radically different thing than being a volunteer-based project.
> In practice, I see more than these two options.
>
> On the "employer" side, our ecosystem does include employers who pay
> people to do Debian-related work. While Debian Developer's bills are
> currently mostly outside of what Debian can or wants to worry about, the
> Debian ecosystem does include the possibility of doing Debian work and
> having bills paid.
>
> There is also a "contractor" side: without developing the infrastructure
> to hire people ourselves, we are able to (and do) contract employers (or
> self-employed people) to do things we need.
>
> I'm writing this to suggest that although we can't (and probably
> shouldn't) take responsibility for Developers' bills, we could have some
> limited level of control over the financial angle which we might decide
> to use, to encourage our community to develop towards specific strategic
> directions we might care about.
>
> For example, on the 'employer' side:
>
>  - Are the possibilities of making a living with Debian work available
>enough and advertised enough?
No!
>  - While not hiring pepole directly, could Debian encourage Debian as a
>professional career?
Yes!
>  - Could (and do we want to) offer infrastructure for that? For example:
> - a channel for employers active in Debian's ecosystem to post job
>   offers
> - a channel for advertising Debian contributions that happen during
>   paid time of some employer
> - a list of important that are currently not getting solved, and
>   that an employer might want to pick up, and get credit for
Yes!
>
> And on the 'contractor' side:
>
>  - Are the possibilities of contracting external work exploited enough?
No!
>  - Are they clear enough?
No!
>  - Do we need some procurement guidelines?
Yes!
>  - Do we need procurement know-how and support? (I sometimes have
>problems for which I could use external help, but I don't know how to
>find and choose a professional that provides it).
Yes!
>
> I'm not expecting you and Sruthi to answer these questions now: I think
> that questions to prospective DPLs should be more about vision.
>
> To turn this all into an actual question: should Debian consider things
> like that to be within its problem space?
Yes, definitely. Debian should always remain a voluntary project, but
there is nothing wrong in facilitating paid work. I believe this will in
fact encourage diversity and we will be able to attract people who could
not dedicate time just because of monetary constraints.
>
> If all goes well and you have a magic wand and everything, how do you
> see the Debian ecosystem dealing with money problems a few years into
> the future?

If I have a magic wand, I will have a system of streamlined income and
expenditure. Leaving behind a fixed deposit of amount necessary to run
Debian for a 5 years, everything else would be spent on projects,
hardware, events and activities benefiting the project as a whole. When
it is safe to have in-person events, personally I would look forward to
funding more and more local Debian events. While the expenditure is
happening at one end, there will be attention on getting enough donation
to keep these activities in the future years too.

Phil's idea of allocating per head budget for DDs which can be pooled
together to fund projects etc will definitely be explored. Another
approach I would try is drafting out a "budget plan" allocating
pre-approved amounts to various teams/projects which does not need
further approval from DPL. The "budget plan" can be prepared based on
the proposals received from the community.





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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Sruthi Chandran]

On 19/03/21 1:14 am, Philip Hands wrote:
> ...
> Could it be that people are being protective of their motivation?
I agree with this point. Not all want money as their motivation.
> ...
> I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
> money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
> which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
> funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
> restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
> your own criteria of course).
>
> That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since
> people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that
> have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding
> would almost certainly sort out once and for all.
>
> You'd probably want to have some sort of oversight (e.g. some ex-DPLs)
> just to ensure that the madder ideas get filtered out, but if you ask
> people to only suggest ideas that they'd want to spend their own money
> on if they had it to spare, that should ensure that most people don't
> get too silly.
>
> Also, one could say that the people suggesting the project should not be
> the beneficiary, and should write some sort of report indicating how
> well it went before they would get any new budget allocated.  People
> that had thought of funding things that turned out to be successful
> could then be given larger budgets to play with in future.
>
> Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would
> hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work.
>
> Cheers, Phil.
This sounds like a good plan to me. We should have serious discussion on
this.



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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Sruthi Chandran]

On 18/03/21 11:16 pm, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Dear DPL candidates,
>
> when I was younger, I dreamed to be paid to do Debian work. But that was
> not possible, and that's the reason why I started my own company Freexian
> 16 years ago. Through those years I always kept this goal in mind (it's
> part of my personal mission statement for Freexian).
Some of my Debian work is sponsored by Gitlab and I am happy that I can
dedicate my whole time to Debian without having to worry about earning a
living. So I can understand your thought process.
> Now thanks to the success of the Debian LTS sponsorship and of the
> numerous companies that understand the importance of giving back to
> Debian, Freexian is in the position to pay some people to do useful Debian
> work. We formalized this with a mechanism to propose projects to be
> funded:
> https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/project-funding/
> 
> I announced this on debian-project[1] and on Planet Debian[2] a while ago.
> But at this point, we have only funded a single project[3], leaving us
> with more than 25 KEUR available for further projects.
This sounds like a good idea from which both our community and Debian as
a project can benefit.
>
> I did not expect this lack of interest... if I were not running Freexian,
> I would have proposed projects out of the long list of distro-tracker
> wishlist bugs...  I enjoy working on this project and I wish I had more
> time for it.
>
> 1/ How do you explain this lack of interest?
>
> I have read recently from other Debian members that they have a feeling
> that Debian is stagnating, and I share that feeling to some degree. If we
> had plans and motivated people, surely some of those would have stepped up
> to implement them in exchange of some remuneration. Do you share that
> feeling too?

I am not sure this is lack of interest. As mentioned by some of the
replies already, not all who contribute to Debian are looking for
monetary benefit. But yes, there are people who would be happy to
receive some monetary compensation to balance out their work. A bit more
publicity might help here. As Jonathan mentioned, mentioning in miniDCs
etc would help reach out to wider audience, mostly new comers (who might
need the monetary benefit the most).

> 2/ I really want this initiative to be successful so I'm now looking into
> ways to make it work. I'm considering paying someone to identify useful
> projects. That person could talk to various teams, make proposals based on
> their own experience, and even run a poll among Debian developers. The
> idea is that we want to find high-impact projects that can help Debian get
> out of this "stagnation".
>
> What do you think of this idea?
>
> I'm considering past DPLs for this role as they have a broad knowledge of
> the project and usually also some vision for the future. But I'm open to
> anyone than can convince me they would do a good job for this. :-)
This is a good initiative that I also believe should succeed. One person
working on identifying high impact projects sounds good, but being said
that, I do not think we can find a perfect way to work out things during
this election discussion. We can either have further discussions on this
topic (may be at -devel or -project) or you can go ahead with the
experiment and see where it goes.
> 3/ While the DPL can't spend Debian's money to pay people, the funds
> available in Freexian's reserve have been clearly earmarked in this
> direction by the LTS sponsors.
>
> Do you think the DPL should be able to propose projects that would be
> funded through this initiative, so that DPLs can have a bit more impact in
> areas where they want to improve the current situation?
I do not think this will be a good idea. DPL suggesting projects or
people to be paid will not go well. While I strongly believe that there
should be options for people to earn living by contributing to Debian,
Debian and DPL should not be involved directly with those activities.
> Sorry for the hard questions and thanks for the time you spend for
> Debian. :-)
>
> The election is always a period where we look back a bit and think of
> bigger changes, so even if those questions are meant for the prospective
> DPL, I welcome feedback from everybody really.
>
> Cheers,
>
> [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2020/11/msg2.html
> [2] 
> https://raphaelhertzog.com/2020/12/14/funding-debian-development-projects-with-freexian-first-project-received/
> [3] https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/project-funding/-/issues/4



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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Sam Hartman]

Adam, I think a more respectful way of including trans members of our
community would be to count them as the gender they identify with
(assuming you know).
You'll still end up with a category for nonbinary of course.

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Louis-Philippe Véronneau]

On 2021-03-19 08 h 02, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
>> I've been telling a few people last month that I would really liked to
>> have an Enterprise Edition Online MiniDebConf, unfortunately I don't
>> have any time/energy to instigate that currently.
> Something for a Debian fellow that we could hire ;-)
> 

I for one would be less motivated to help with videoteam tasks if I knew
someone was paid to organise a miniconf.

We've had quite a few online events in the last 6 months and it's also
OK to take a break :)

Maybe next year, when we can have in-person events, there will be less
online events and people will have more time to organise such a miniconf?

In any case, I don't feel like us failing to organise this miniconf is
problematic in any way.

-- 
  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  Louis-Philippe Véronneau
  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋   po...@debian.org / veronneau.org
  ⠈⠳⣄



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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Adam Borowski]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2021 at 01:42:37PM +0100, Ulrike Uhlig wrote:
> But the Flosspols study of 2005 had already made the  point that
> this might be a problem for diversity: there are 10 times more women working
> in proprietary software (~20%) than in free software (~2%)

Data for Debian: 0.9%

Methodology:
I've taken the author of the last changelog entry of all packages in
Stretch.  Overwhelmed by the number of people to check, I've limited that
to "key packages" only (by the old definition, which included popcon).

I've then tried to guess the gender to every person, by, in order:
* knowing the person
* is the first name gender-specific? (I'm familiar with western and slavic
  names)
* ldap
* 60 seconds of duckduckgo search

This assigned each name to one of categories:
! invalid (eg. team in changed-by)
? unknown
x trans
f ladies
m gentelmen

The figure above is # of most recent changed-by (ie, number of packages,
not people); f/(m+f).

Alas, I no longer have the raw data.  Or more exactly, it's on a broken N900
that _might_ be recoverable.  Backup your phones, folks!

I believe counting Changed-by: is far more accurate than looking at
Maintainer: and/or Uploaders:, even though it overestimates NMUers.  But
hey, unlike Bullseye Stretch didn't have h01ger raid all over it. :þ


[I intentionally didn't include any analysis of possible causes; if you do,
please respond on !d-vote unless it's relevant to the election.]

Meow!
-- 
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ It's time to migrate your Imaginary Protocol from version 4i to 6i.
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀
⠈⠳⣄

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Ulrike Uhlig]

Hello,

as said in private some time ago to Raphaël, I find Freexian's 
initiative great, and I wish there were more options to get paid to do 
Debian work.


On 19.03.21 11:29, Enrico Zini wrote:

On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 09:16:15PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:


I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think
that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying
to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well.
For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently
working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median
Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well.


Thinking at how we set our bar for membership in building a reputation
within the project, I imagine we implicitly select people who are able
to sustain themselves reasonably well without Debian's help.


… yes, and these people are generally men living in the Global North. 
Most of them do have full time jobs, others are students, and their free 
time is spent on Debian. For many of these people, working on Debian is 
not about having to earn money, it's about the joy of creating something 
as great as Debian. But the Flosspols study of 2005 had already made the 
 point that this might be a problem for diversity: there are 10 times 
more women working in proprietary software (~20%) than in free software 
(~2%), because most of them have less free time or need to sustain 
themselves financially with their work. This is also true for people 
from less economically secure backgrounds, specifically the Global South.



I'm not sure it's something I'd want to change. I see being an employer
as a radically different thing than being a volunteer-based project.


I'd be interested in looking a bit closer at the volunteer system: are 
we excluding people by doing that? How could that be changed?


I think Enrico is asking the right questions below already. I would add:

(How) could the Freexian model be extended? Which other organizations 
could do this work, identify useful projects and invite people to work 
that are not necessarily part of the group of usual suspects?



In practice, I see more than these two options.

On the "employer" side, our ecosystem does include employers who pay
people to do Debian-related work. While Debian Developer's bills are
currently mostly outside of what Debian can or wants to worry about, the
Debian ecosystem does include the possibility of doing Debian work and
having bills paid.

There is also a "contractor" side: without developing the infrastructure
to hire people ourselves, we are able to (and do) contract employers (or
self-employed people) to do things we need.

I'm writing this to suggest that although we can't (and probably
shouldn't) take responsibility for Developers' bills, we could have some
limited level of control over the financial angle which we might decide
to use, to encourage our community to develop towards specific strategic
directions we might care about.

For example, on the 'employer' side:

  - Are the possibilities of making a living with Debian work available
enough and advertised enough?
  - While not hiring pepole directly, could Debian encourage Debian as a
professional career?
  - Could (and do we want to) offer infrastructure for that? For example:
 - a channel for employers active in Debian's ecosystem to post job
   offers
 - a channel for advertising Debian contributions that happen during
   paid time of some employer
 - a list of important that are currently not getting solved, and
   that an employer might want to pick up, and get credit for

And on the 'contractor' side:

  - Are the possibilities of contracting external work exploited enough?
  - Are they clear enough?
  - Do we need some procurement guidelines?
  - Do we need procurement know-how and support? (I sometimes have
problems for which I could use external help, but I don't know how to
find and choose a professional that provides it).

I'm not expecting you and Sruthi to answer these questions now: I think
that questions to prospective DPLs should be more about vision.

To turn this all into an actual question: should Debian consider things
like that to be within its problem space?

If all goes well and you have a magic wand and everything, how do you
see the Debian ecosystem dealing with money problems a few years into
the future?


^ that, and adding: do you think that we could improve on diversity and 
sustainability by having more possibilities to get paid to do Debian work?


take care,
Ulrike

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Christian Kastner]

On 19.03.21 11:29, Enrico Zini wrote:
>> I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think
>> that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying
>> to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well.
>> For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently
>> working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median
>> Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well.
> 
> Thinking at how we set our bar for membership in building a reputation
> within the project, I imagine we implicitly select people who are able
> to sustain themselves reasonably well without Debian's help.

That might be the case, but generally speaking, that self-sustainment is
achieved by devoting one's time to some other cause, like $DAYJOB, hence
the lack of time for Debian.

I have the suspicion that quite a few Project members have somewhat
flexible jobs (freelancers, or project work, or part-time work), and I
believe that a financial incentive might enable them to dedicate more of
their time to Debian, than to other projects.

I also think that it's important to make a distinction of what gets paid
and what doesn't. A frequent counter-argument I hear to getting paid for
Debian work is that it would be unfair to those not getting paid. I
disagree with this.

Not all tasks are equal, and I many Debian chores come to mind that
nobody wants to do, but still have to be done, and we're grateful to
that one person doing it once very four weeks. I think financially
motivating it someone to do that chore once a week, or even more often,
would be worthwhile.

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi,

On Thu, 18 Mar 2021, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> > 1/ How do you explain this lack of interest?
> 
> I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think
> that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying
> to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well.
> For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently
> working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median
> Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well.

I share that analysis to some degree. But this means that we are not good at
attracting young persons who are not in this situation...

And actually this is somewhat confirmed when you look at the persons who
are paid LTS contributors: only one of them is very young (and is the one
who accepts to work the most on it), most of them only accept to work for
10 to 30 hours per month on LTS, as they have other professionnal
activities that they enjoy. They do LTS work as a way to continue to
contribute to Debian during work hours because they are attached to the
project and believe in the importance of LTS for the success of Debian.
And also because it can be somewhat intellectually challenging to work
on very diverse packages.

However, this doesn't explain it all either: the funding offer has been
built so that you don't have to allocate too much time, you don't have to
implement the project yourself, you can just describe the project, let
someone else do the work and review it. BTW, the first project funded
followed this approach as the security team members are all very busy.

The second conclusion that we could draw from this is that we're definitely
not in the same situation than in the past and that paying people to work
on Debian is likely to be much less problematic because many of the
current members would not be jealous, they are in a professional
situations that they are satisfied with.

It would be interesting to poll all Debian developers to have their direct
opinions instead of doing wild-guesses here.

> I've been telling a few people last month that I would really liked to
> have an Enterprise Edition Online MiniDebConf, unfortunately I don't
> have any time/energy to instigate that currently.

Something for a Debian fellow that we could hire ;-)

> It could cover aspects that already make Debian good for business, and
> cover areas where it could improve. I used to be on an Ubuntu mailing
> list called ubuntu-enterprise, it mostly contained feature requests from
> people who wanted more features for enterprise and large deployment use,
> but even those were really interesting. Also, I think even just some of
> our usual sponsors would already be interested in speaking at such an
> event, but I digress...

Found the project you mention: https://launchpad.net/~enterprise-ubuntu

FWIW I am considering changing the "Debian LTS" sponsorship into some broader
"Debian for enterprise" sponsorship that would cover LTS but also other
projects that would make Debian more enterprise-friendly.

> > 2/ I really want this initiative to be successful so I'm now looking into
> > ways to make it work. I'm considering paying someone to identify useful
> > projects. That person could talk to various teams, make proposals based on
> > their own experience, and even run a poll among Debian developers. The
> > idea is that we want to find high-impact projects that can help Debian get
> > out of this "stagnation".
> > 
> > What do you think of this idea?
> 
> Sounds great!

Any advice on how to find the right person? Or on who the right person
could be?

Wouldn't that person be doing useful leadership work that the DPL should
be doing really?

> problems in the team and this is how they're going to do it". Sometimes
> it's better to allow things to happen than to make them happen. I'm
> hoping that if we are able to have sprints/meetings again in person,
> that many of our teams will take advantage of it and spend some time and
> project money to get together and work on projects. If you invite and
> let Debian teams know that they could apply for some funding from
> Freexian to get someone to spend more time on some problem, then that's
> probably going to scale a bit better since they might already have a
> better idea on how to integrate this kind of work into their team.

It would certainly make sense to get people of each team together
and discuss on their priorities and how they could leverage the Freexian
funding.

Cheers,
-- 
  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀   Raphaël Hertzog 
  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁
  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋The Debian Handbook: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
  ⠈⠳⣄   Debian Long Term Support: https://deb.li/LTS

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Enrico Zini]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 09:16:15PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:

> I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think
> that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying
> to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well.
> For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently
> working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median
> Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well.

Thinking at how we set our bar for membership in building a reputation
within the project, I imagine we implicitly select people who are able
to sustain themselves reasonably well without Debian's help.

I'm not sure it's something I'd want to change. I see being an employer
as a radically different thing than being a volunteer-based project.
In practice, I see more than these two options.

On the "employer" side, our ecosystem does include employers who pay
people to do Debian-related work. While Debian Developer's bills are
currently mostly outside of what Debian can or wants to worry about, the
Debian ecosystem does include the possibility of doing Debian work and
having bills paid.

There is also a "contractor" side: without developing the infrastructure
to hire people ourselves, we are able to (and do) contract employers (or
self-employed people) to do things we need.

I'm writing this to suggest that although we can't (and probably
shouldn't) take responsibility for Developers' bills, we could have some
limited level of control over the financial angle which we might decide
to use, to encourage our community to develop towards specific strategic
directions we might care about.

For example, on the 'employer' side:

 - Are the possibilities of making a living with Debian work available
   enough and advertised enough?
 - While not hiring pepole directly, could Debian encourage Debian as a
   professional career?
 - Could (and do we want to) offer infrastructure for that? For example:
- a channel for employers active in Debian's ecosystem to post job
  offers
- a channel for advertising Debian contributions that happen during
  paid time of some employer
- a list of important that are currently not getting solved, and
  that an employer might want to pick up, and get credit for

And on the 'contractor' side:

 - Are the possibilities of contracting external work exploited enough?
 - Are they clear enough?
 - Do we need some procurement guidelines?
 - Do we need procurement know-how and support? (I sometimes have
   problems for which I could use external help, but I don't know how to
   find and choose a professional that provides it).

I'm not expecting you and Sruthi to answer these questions now: I think
that questions to prospective DPLs should be more about vision.

To turn this all into an actual question: should Debian consider things
like that to be within its problem space?

If all goes well and you have a magic wand and everything, how do you
see the Debian ecosystem dealing with money problems a few years into
the future?


Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 4096R/634F4BD1E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini 


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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Jonathan Carter]

On 2021/03/18 23:33, Philip Hands wrote:
> There were enough people keen on that happening that if we'd each had an
> earmarked e.g. 1k budget to allocate, we could have just agreed it
> amongst ourselves, and done it, without a lot of back and forth on the
> lists trying to establish whether there really was something like a
> project-wide consensus about it, and perhaps even not needing to ask
> permission from the DPL[1].

Ah, I see what you meant now, yes that sounds interesting!

-Jonathan

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Philip Hands]

Jonathan Carter  writes:

> On 2021/03/18 21:44, Philip Hands wrote:
>> I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
>> money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
>> which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
>> funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
>> restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
>> your own criteria of course).
>> 
>> That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since
>> people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that
>> have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding
>> would almost certainly sort out once and for all.
>> 
>> You'd probably want to have some sort of oversight (e.g. some ex-DPLs)
>> just to ensure that the madder ideas get filtered out, but if you ask
>> people to only suggest ideas that they'd want to spend their own money
>> on if they had it to spare, that should ensure that most people don't
>> get too silly.
>> 
>> Also, one could say that the people suggesting the project should not be
>> the beneficiary, and should write some sort of report indicating how
>> well it went before they would get any new budget allocated.  People
>> that had thought of funding things that turned out to be successful
>> could then be given larger budgets to play with in future.
>> 
>> Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would
>> hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work.
>
> I think as things stand now, every DD pretty much already has the entire
> Debian budget available at their disposal if they can think of a way to
> spend it that benefits the project.

I was reflecting on the way the Peertube funding was achieved.

There were enough people keen on that happening that if we'd each had an
earmarked e.g. 1k budget to allocate, we could have just agreed it
amongst ourselves, and done it, without a lot of back and forth on the
lists trying to establish whether there really was something like a
project-wide consensus about it, and perhaps even not needing to ask
permission from the DPL[1].

Then again, maybe it's good to have that project-wide consensus phase,
but it means that things take much longer to get done, and are a lot
more effort than they ought to be, which is probably enough to make sure
that fewer such things get done.

One major benefit that I'd expect to see coming from the personal budget
approach would be that all those that had contributed their budgets
towards something would feel a personal responsibility for how it went,
and thus would be much more likely to follow up to make sure that things
went well, if only in order to justify having a budget in future.

Cheers, Phil.

[1] one would presumably need to run it past someone to check that the
non-profit rules were being complied with, but that could be done by a
delegated team.  I'd have thought that could mostly be managed by having
a good write-up of what is and is not allowed on the wiki, so people
know not to bother trying things that are not allowed.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,GERMANY


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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Jonathan Carter]

On 2021/03/18 21:44, Philip Hands wrote:
> I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
> money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
> which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
> funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
> restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
> your own criteria of course).
> 
> That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since
> people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that
> have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding
> would almost certainly sort out once and for all.
> 
> You'd probably want to have some sort of oversight (e.g. some ex-DPLs)
> just to ensure that the madder ideas get filtered out, but if you ask
> people to only suggest ideas that they'd want to spend their own money
> on if they had it to spare, that should ensure that most people don't
> get too silly.
> 
> Also, one could say that the people suggesting the project should not be
> the beneficiary, and should write some sort of report indicating how
> well it went before they would get any new budget allocated.  People
> that had thought of funding things that turned out to be successful
> could then be given larger budgets to play with in future.
> 
> Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would
> hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work.

I think as things stand now, every DD pretty much already has the entire
Debian budget available at their disposal if they can think of a way to
spend it that benefits the project.

Something like the budget-per-DD idea might be good to encourage people
to actually use Debian money if they can, this is also why I brought an
expenditure policy into my platform, because I think people will feel
more comfortable spending Debian money if it's really explicit that it
really is ok to do so.

-Jonathan

Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Philip Hands]

Hi Raphael,

I'm not running for DPL, but since you asked...

Raphael Hertzog  writes:

> 1/ How do you explain this lack of interest?
>
> I have read recently from other Debian members that they have a feeling
> that Debian is stagnating, and I share that feeling to some degree. If we
> had plans and motivated people, surely some of those would have stepped up
> to implement them in exchange of some remuneration. Do you share that
> feeling too?

Could it be that people are being protective of their motivation?

I'd guess that many people know about studies showing that one can turn
a pleasurable hobby into a tiresome chore simply by being paid to do it.

I think one might be able to avoid that to some extent if it's clear
that the work is something that has attracted no volunteers so far,
despite being a good idea that's been around for a while -- that should
allow people to draw a line between those things they were happy to do
unpaid, and the thing that they're being paid to do, such that they
don't stop doing both when the payments stop.

> 2/ I really want this initiative to be successful so I'm now looking into
> ways to make it work. I'm considering paying someone to identify useful
> projects. That person could talk to various teams, make proposals based on
> their own experience, and even run a poll among Debian developers. The
> idea is that we want to find high-impact projects that can help Debian get
> out of this "stagnation".
>
> What do you think of this idea?
>
> I'm considering past DPLs for this role as they have a broad knowledge of
> the project and usually also some vision for the future. But I'm open to
> anyone than can convince me they would do a good job for this. :-)

I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's
money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD
which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian
funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit
restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply
your own criteria of course).

That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since
people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that
have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding
would almost certainly sort out once and for all.

You'd probably want to have some sort of oversight (e.g. some ex-DPLs)
just to ensure that the madder ideas get filtered out, but if you ask
people to only suggest ideas that they'd want to spend their own money
on if they had it to spare, that should ensure that most people don't
get too silly.

Also, one could say that the people suggesting the project should not be
the beneficiary, and should write some sort of report indicating how
well it went before they would get any new budget allocated.  People
that had thought of funding things that turned out to be successful
could then be given larger budgets to play with in future.

Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would
hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,GERMANY


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Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Jonathan Carter]

Hi Raphaël

On 2021/03/18 19:46, Raphael Hertzog wrote:> I announced this on
debian-project[1] and on Planet Debian[2] a while ago.
> But at this point, we have only funded a single project[3], leaving us
> with more than 25 KEUR available for further projects.
> 
> I did not expect this lack of interest... if I were not running Freexian,
> I would have proposed projects out of the long list of distro-tracker
> wishlist bugs...  I enjoy working on this project and I wish I had more
> time for it.
> 
> 1/ How do you explain this lack of interest?

I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think
that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying
to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well.
For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently
working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median
Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well.

> I have read recently from other Debian members that they have a feeling
> that Debian is stagnating, and I share that feeling to some degree. If we
> had plans and motivated people, surely some of those would have stepped up
> to implement them in exchange of some remuneration. Do you share that
> feeling too?

We're always going to be growing in some ways and stagnating in other
ways. What I've found is that the people complaining about stagnating
parts are very eager to ignore all the parts where the innovation is
happening. Motivating people is great, it's something that's been at the
top of my mind regularly when it comes to Debian. In my experience,
having co-ordinated events do more to make things happen than flinging
some carrots at people. Over the last year we had DC20 online and
another bunch of online events (Fique em Casa Use Debian, MiniDebConf
Online, MiniDebConf Online Gaming Edition, MiniDebConf Online Brazil
2020 and MiniDebConf Online India). Each event brought with it its own
innovations, unique flavours and some new people who are curious about
Debian. I think that you'll have more success talking about the Freexian
initiatives at these kinds of events and attract new people to work on
ideas. Of course, if they're new they might work a bit slower and
ultimately cost a bit more, but I think overall that would still be
worth it.

I've been telling a few people last month that I would really liked to
have an Enterprise Edition Online MiniDebConf, unfortunately I don't
have any time/energy to instigate that currently. It could cover aspects
that already make Debian good for business, and cover areas where it
could improve. I used to be on an Ubuntu mailing list called
ubuntu-enterprise, it mostly contained feature requests from people who
wanted more features for enterprise and large deployment use, but even
those were really interesting. Also, I think even just some of our usual
sponsors would already be interested in speaking at such an event, but I
digress...

> 2/ I really want this initiative to be successful so I'm now looking into
> ways to make it work. I'm considering paying someone to identify useful
> projects. That person could talk to various teams, make proposals based on
> their own experience, and even run a poll among Debian developers. The
> idea is that we want to find high-impact projects that can help Debian get
> out of this "stagnation".
> 
> What do you think of this idea?

Sounds great!

> 3/ While the DPL can't spend Debian's money to pay people, the funds
> available in Freexian's reserve have been clearly earmarked in this
> direction by the LTS sponsors.
> 
> Do you think the DPL should be able to propose projects that would be
> funded through this initiative, so that DPLs can have a bit more impact in
> areas where they want to improve the current situation?

It's probably best to have as many ideas come into that funnel as
possible, so I'd say it would probably be a good idea to get some ideas
from the DPL too. There's a very long list of projects within Debian
that could do with more help, structure or even a complete reboot,
although some tact and planning will also go a long way, you don't want
to jump in to a team and tell them "oh we paid someone to fix all the
problems in the team and this is how they're going to do it". Sometimes
it's better to allow things to happen than to make them happen. I'm
hoping that if we are able to have sprints/meetings again in person,
that many of our teams will take advantage of it and spend some time and
project money to get together and work on projects. If you invite and
let Debian teams know that they could apply for some funding from
Freexian to get someone to spend more time on some problem, then that's
probably going to scale a bit better since they might already have a
better idea on how to integrate this kind of work into their team.

> Sorry for the hard questions and thanks for the time you spend for
> Debian. :-)

Thanks for the questions!

How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects

[Raphael Hertzog]

Dear DPL candidates,

when I was younger, I dreamed to be paid to do Debian work. But that was
not possible, and that's the reason why I started my own company Freexian
16 years ago. Through those years I always kept this goal in mind (it's
part of my personal mission statement for Freexian).

Now thanks to the success of the Debian LTS sponsorship and of the
numerous companies that understand the importance of giving back to
Debian, Freexian is in the position to pay some people to do useful Debian
work. We formalized this with a mechanism to propose projects to be
funded:
https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/project-funding/

I announced this on debian-project[1] and on Planet Debian[2] a while ago.
But at this point, we have only funded a single project[3], leaving us
with more than 25 KEUR available for further projects.

I did not expect this lack of interest... if I were not running Freexian,
I would have proposed projects out of the long list of distro-tracker
wishlist bugs...  I enjoy working on this project and I wish I had more
time for it.

1/ How do you explain this lack of interest?

I have read recently from other Debian members that they have a feeling
that Debian is stagnating, and I share that feeling to some degree. If we
had plans and motivated people, surely some of those would have stepped up
to implement them in exchange of some remuneration. Do you share that
feeling too?

2/ I really want this initiative to be successful so I'm now looking into
ways to make it work. I'm considering paying someone to identify useful
projects. That person could talk to various teams, make proposals based on
their own experience, and even run a poll among Debian developers. The
idea is that we want to find high-impact projects that can help Debian get
out of this "stagnation".

What do you think of this idea?

I'm considering past DPLs for this role as they have a broad knowledge of
the project and usually also some vision for the future. But I'm open to
anyone than can convince me they would do a good job for this. :-)

3/ While the DPL can't spend Debian's money to pay people, the funds
available in Freexian's reserve have been clearly earmarked in this
direction by the LTS sponsors.

Do you think the DPL should be able to propose projects that would be
funded through this initiative, so that DPLs can have a bit more impact in
areas where they want to improve the current situation?

Sorry for the hard questions and thanks for the time you spend for
Debian. :-)

The election is always a period where we look back a bit and think of
bigger changes, so even if those questions are meant for the prospective
DPL, I welcome feedback from everybody really.

Cheers,

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2020/11/msg2.html
[2] 
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2020/12/14/funding-debian-development-projects-with-freexian-first-project-received/
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/project-funding/-/issues/4
-- 
  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀   Raphaël Hertzog 
  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁
  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋The Debian Handbook: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
  ⠈⠳⣄   Debian Long Term Support: https://deb.li/LTS


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