* Anthony Towns <[email protected]> [2003-10-09 17:15]: > I suspect that HP shareholders think that they're using HP research labs > to make a profit.
Sure, but they don't make a profit *directly*. They're not selling any stuff, they just do R&D. Other parts of HP sell what they've developed. > Certainly it'd be reasonable to restrict "Debian Labs" to groups > that are doing R&D rather than sales. Do you want to limit > consulting work too though? Well, if we don't, then any Debian consulting business can call themselves "Debian Labs" which is not what I'd like to see (if they do 100% consulting and don't put any work into Debian). Perhaps consulting should be possible, as long as R&D is the main focus? > If I've got $50k to spend getting, say, Gnucash improved to better > handle Australian accounting rules [0], does it make any real sense to > exclude Debian Labs from any possiblity of working on it? If you do want No, I think that's perfectly valid. > > Labs), but they shouldn't use HP Debian Labs direcetly to sell any > > services or products. > > Not even Debian stable CDs? Why not, exactly? What conflict of interest do > you see here? Well, okay. They can surely sell Debian CDs in order to fund more R&D. (But they shouldn't call themselved "Debian Labs" in order to be in a better position to sell CDs in order to make a profit.) > (For reference, I joined Debian specifically because it doesn't > discriminate against people trying to make money out of free > software, even by building proprietary software on top of it -- > indeed, we go so far as to explicitly support such uses in a few > ways) Sure, I have no problem with this. But Debian (the project) doesn't make money out of what we do, and you could argue the same should apply to a Debian Labs (this is a big difference between Debian and Red Hat/Fedor, btw). > is their any salary limit? How about if they do it cheaper than any > competing support organisations, but still make a profit? Then they should clearly use the money (profit) to fund more R&D. > I agree (presuming the .5:.5 ratio is determined by the contributor, > and can be 0:1 or 1:0 etc). Yes, it should be up to the contributor. Debian can just make a suggestion; what they do is completely up to them. > FWIW, I'm in favour of requiring Debian Labs to be R&D focussed and to > employ full time researchers, to provide debs of everything they develop, > to focus on getting their successful research into main, and letting ... > Solitaire all year", eg. But we shouldn't force them to ever say "no" > to money for working on things that actually improve Debian, imo. Right, I agree. (I know I didn't respond to all questions, but I don't actually have answers for all of them. I think your comments are incredibly useful for this discussions, though, and hope others will comment on them.) -- Martin Michlmayr [EMAIL PROTECTED]
