> Yes, indeed. This is a very interesting article. I was aware > of the problems of funding especially bad feelings that can > develop when certain developers are paid and others not, but > I had never considered it from an angle of "crowing-out" of > volunteer programmers. This "crowding-out" of volunteers is > clearly something that I don't want to happen as I want > Bacula to remain free and open rather than commercial or > semi-commercial.
I think another aspect that we haven't seen a lot of discussion on is transparency and accountability, which is often the big catch with commercial donors. One idea I've been toying with proposing is the idea of having a formally reviewed proposal process (similar to applying for a grant) for projects to be funded by the foundation. The formal review would include estimates of time, level of effort, timelines, and formal requirements for documentation and code standards. Asking someone to think about these things in advance tends to sort the serious contributors from the kibitzers. I believe the Apache and Samba folks have adopted this approach for this very reason. The review of the proposal would be conducted by Kern and a technical review body selected by him for technical relevance, usefulness, and furthering the general good. The proposals could then be ranked based on that technical review, and funded from the foundation accordingly. Some risk management controls would need to be implemented (along with a legal obligation to repay the foundation if you receive money and don't complete the project). Proposals would be open to anyone, and repeat proposals would be encouraged -- if you have a track record of doing good work, that should be a plus in your favor. Perhaps that idea could be combined with the "authorized providers" idea in that they could become part of that technical review body -- if you contribute resources/money, your opinion of what should be prioritized should (IMHO) count a little bit more than the random community at large (the "put up or shut up" model). Contributions of time should count as well as funding. > What I would like to encourage is > a few more long time contributors that work in the core code. See above. While most of us do this for the love of it, a little money coming back in makes it a lot easier to convince the PTBs of the importance of the work. Even a token amount goes a long way to making that case, and if there's a clear audit trail, I think a lot of organizations would be interested. > This is the major area that is lacking in Bacula. Perhaps > this will happen over time, perhaps it will improve if I > start making a few public appearances next year in free > software meetings. > Any suggestions from anyone along this line would be welcome. I'd also start hitting the bigger storage management conferences. The IBM zSeries Expo in EMEA would be a good place to reach a lot of the enterprise-level customers, as would Guide/SHARE Europe (usually colocated with above). ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
