On Thu, 20 Jun 2019 at 09:42, Ross Gardler <[email protected]> wrote:
> We don't pay for software development in our projects because our > "software project communities consist of individuals who choose to > participate in ASF activities." Paying people to produce the software is > not creating communities of people who choose, but rather (in part) > people paid by us to be present. > I want to point out here that the purpose of Outreachy is to remove the socio-economic barriers that exist that prevent people from choosing to contribute to something like an Apache project this isn't semantic hair-splitting as it stands, with open source in general, contributing requires that you have the resources (computer, knowledge/skills, free time) to do so. and the temperament to do so (i.e., the ability to deal with the culture/environment that goes along with contributing). which probably doesn't seem like a big deal to a lot of people here. but that's survivorship bias for you (i.e., necessarily, we all have those things, so we're less aware of how much they contribute to our ability to contribute) these barriers to contribution lock out a substantial number of people. and I would argue that THIS also makes it difficult to "provide software for the public good". because we only have a thin sliver of "the public" represented here if this was just about paying people salaries to contribute to Apache projects, yes, I could see the argument that we were choosing which projects win. I could see that argument that those people were not "choosing to be here" (in the sense that the choice is being made by the market--because a lot of people contribute on their employer's dime, as you point out) but that's not what Outreachy is doing. Outreachy is about removing barriers. about enabling people to make that choice in the first place. something that likely isn't even consciously present for a lot of us because it's not something that we have to consider > By putting ourselves in a position of influence we can no longer be independent of market forces we already put ourselves in a position of influence when we allocate funds via TAC, or when allocate funds/resources to projects that request them for other reasons. and we trust ourselves to do that in a way that is fair and vendor/market/project-neutral this is the same rebuttal I have to the "slippery slope" argument. it presumes that we are unable to exercise good judgment when required to do so
