* Sam Hartman <[email protected]> [2019-03-20 14:10]: > Let me start by saying that I think it would be valuable to find ways > to get more people paid to work on Debian; I was excited to see that in > your platform. > > I'm nervous because of our past experience in this area.
I wasn't sure how to reply to your message or what level of detail to go into. While I think it's important to have a discussion about this topic, I don't think -vote is the right place, nor am I sure it's the right time. > I'm really hoping you have answers though because I agree with you that I do not have the answers. However, I believe it's important to start a conversation about this topic. > lack of funding is something that slows down our project and I'd > like to find a way to get more people funded, but I think it's > important for us to do so in a manner that people are comfortable > with. Of course. If you look at my platform, I wrote that the project has to figure out what kind of project it wants to be. Maybe the project decides that the project itself should have no paid positions, but we should make that decision after carefully considering the pros and cons, and acknowledging that times have changed and that our approach limits what we can do (or we have to find creative ways to get around these limitations). > >Yes, external grants and external paid work. None of that is > >controversial. > > by which I think you're saying that the idea of helping Debian > Developers get external grants to work on Debian would not be > controversial. Yes. As usual, when you say 95% things that are completely sane and non-controversial and 5% that is controversial, people only focus on the 5%. The big part of my platform is to help create a more healthy commercial ecosystem _around_ Debian. This involves getting more companies actively involved and showing them the importance of getting actively involved in Debian. For a few years, I worked at HP in a team doing Debian related work and my role was to help get the team more actively involved in Debian (unfortunately not with a lot of success due to various reasons mostly unrelated to Debian). From this experience I know that companies can find it challenging to figure out how to talk to in Debian, where to get started, etc, and the project can make things easier. External grants is another area I mentioned. A lot of developers are not even aware that this is an opportunity, so just creating awareness is a first step. For example, the NLnet Foundation has two calls for projects funded by the EU and I'm sure some Debian-related topics would fit in well. The whole idea is to create more _opportunities_. > In that same mail you talked about potentially turning the DPL into a > paid position, acknowledging that would be controversial. Yes, I think we ought to have a conversation about this. This is not my main focus at the moment though or the highest priority on the list. However, in each DPL election the question about time commitment comes up, which shows us something. Also, like it or not, the DPL role is unique in the project. While the influence of the DPL is limited, there is still a great deal of influence. I see several problems that the current situation has: * Conflict of interest: I'm happy to see that your and Joerg's employers would support your DPL activities. However, I've no idea who they are or what they want from Debian. Maybe they use Debian and want to give back with no strings attached, but I could definitely see a situation where a company tries to exert undue influence over Debian by having the DPL on payroll. * Fairness and privilege: you and Joerg can run for DPL because of your employer support; Jonathan and I can run because we're willing to sacrifice a hit to our income. But how many potential DPL candidates are we ruling out because they have full-time jobs that don't involve Debian, that have children, etc, etc. Of course, you can argue that this applies to _any_ volunteer in Debian (and this is true; there's a reason why the majority of FOSS contributors are from developed nations). But in Debian, there are a lot of opportunities to contribute if you have little time: you can maintain a few small packages, you can do translations, etc. Being DPL is all or nothing. The more you put in, the more you get out of it. (Of course, we have seen DPLs putting in varying amounts of time and effort; but I think we agree that those who were able to commit to being DPL had the biggest impact.) (Again, I don't think -vote is the place to have that conversation; but I wanted to give my thoughts since you asked.) > In the past Debian did try to pay developers for working on Debian; the > project I'm most familiar with was the dunc-tanc experiment [1]. That > ended up being rather controversial. > > [1] > https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/10/msg00026.html > > It seems like having the Debian Project and DPL working to get more paid > developers might run into some of the same issues. > In particular there might be a perception that there would be two > classes of developers and that volunteers would be > frustrated/disappointed they were not getting paid. Lots of good points were raised. However, this was in 2006 and the world around has completely changed. We have also changed (in that we have grown older and realise we all need to survive somehow). Anyway, a good counter example is the LTS effort. While not Debian, it's as close as Debian as you can get (and there are good arguments that it's something Debian ought to do directly). It has been completely non-controversial (apart from some minor questions about the usage of the Debian name) and it has filled an important need that we were not able to fill with volunteers. We would not have Debian LTS today if it weren't for the sponsors providing the funds to pay for this work (and Raphaël Hertzog's imitative in making it happen in the first place and keeping it going). And let's face it, the lack of LTS was a huge reason for companies to move away from Debian. The concerns about creating two classes are well founded, but if you look around, I think most of these concerns are more about _control_ rather than remuneration itself. For example, plenty of volunteers spent time on Ubuntu, which is obviously dominated by a commercial entity. They didn't have a problem with Canonical making (or hoping to make) money out of Ubuntu. They had a problem that as a community member you were a second class citizen. This is of course something we have to avoid. Another example is GNOME which has an Executive Director, admin staff and which recently hired an engineer. I see no controversy there. There are many similar projects like this. The world has changed fundamentally in the last 10 years. As Zack pointed out, many people are _already_ paid to work on Debian, just not by Debian. Of course, that's an important distinction but someone could also argue that it's unfair that some people are paid by their employers while others aren't. (Why can you spend DPL time on your employer's time and I can't?!?) By creating more paid opportunities around Debian, those who want to get a job doing Debian work can do so. Of course I can see envy when 10 people _want_ to be paid to do Debian work, but only one is paid by the project while the rest has to fund unrelated work. But if 9 of those people can find work elsewhere to work on Debian (probably with better conditions that Debian could provide!), then Debian would just be one employer among many others. Also, I think we underestimate why people contribute to Debian. Some *prefer* contributing to Debian as a hobby. Let's face it, a job involves a lot of things you don't want to do, but you have to do them anyway. While being a volunteer involves certain things you'd rather not do, you have much more liberty to decide how to spend your time. This makes a _huge_ difference. BTW, Debian is already paying Outreachy students to work on Debian. The only controversy here is around diversity, not about paying people. Debian could offer more grants from Debian money to test the waters to find out what people are comfortable with. Finally, I see one risk: we keep repeating that something is controversial even though we're not sure it's *still* controversial. By repeating this myth, we're keeping it alive. The world has changed. Debian has to finds ways to adapt. -- Martin Michlmayr https://www.cyrius.com/
