On 22/07/10 at 14:22 +1000, Russell Coker wrote: > On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Lucas Nussbaum <lu...@lucas-nussbaum.net> wrote: > > > That's an interesting idea. But where is the money going to come from? > > > > This idea is likely to get so much people against it that it's not worth > > discussing. > > Involvement of Debian funds would cause problems, but there are other options. > > We could have Debian maintain a list of consultants and companies that > provide > phone and Jabber support. Also a mapping of consultants to areas of > expertise > would be good (EG if someone happens to need some paid expert advice on > Debian > SE Linux ;).
We currently have 827 consultants in 64 countries listed on http://www.debian.org/consultants/, which is pretty easy to find. It's true that this listing could be improved, but still, it's there (also, you are not listed). > Maybe we could have an IRC channel where people could post questions like "I > want to pay $50 per hour to have someone fix a bug in my Perl code on > Debian/Lenny". If such a channel was available then I'd occasionally use it > for my clients, early last year one DD got a small series of $US100 contracts > through me that probably took him about 30 mins each to complete - that's a > rate of $US200 per hour and the client was totally happy! > > With some of these jobs the faster the response is the more the client is > willing to pay. If you can fix something within the next hour the client > will > often pay twice what they would pay to have it fixed tomorrow. In the past > I've had ongoing requirements for rapid expert advice on Perl in Debian/Lenny > and PHP with libraries backported to Lenny from Squeeze which I couldn't find > adequate resources in a small enough amount of time. So what you are proposing is that an entity would setup a service where users would post support requests (or development requests), and developers would, sometimes, pick up the offers and get paid for that. While I would be totally against using Debian funds to set up such a service, there's nothing preventing someone from investigating the idea of creating a company that would provide that service without the official endorsement of Debian. However, there are several problems: - are there enough potential clients? If they are willing to pay, why would they choose this instead of one of the 827 consultants we already have listed? - is it legally possible/easy to do? this would potentially involve developers from many countries with different regulations. - are there enough interested developers? This doesn't seem very different from bounty-sponsored development. It has been tried before. Why did it fail? L. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100722060252.ga13...@xanadu.blop.info