-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 In the last weeks we exchanged a lot about the need and possibility to introduce money in the development of Parabola/GNU/Linux-libre.
Tiberiu offered to sponsor the project from the Fundatio Ceata, which presents a number of advantages, especially on of ethical alignment. Aurélien rose a strong shield against the principle of introducing money, pretexting the antagonism between friendship and money. His position was mostly rationalized against, and maybe because he does not master the English language well enough, or maybe because he could not verbalize his emotions into reasonable arguments, his minority position mostly remained a lonely voice. As the consensus minus one seems to be to embrace Tiberiu's plan, I want to address Aurélien's position in other words than his own with the objective to ease the tension and reframe the discussion. I certainly don't want that the core feature of Parabola, i.e. friendship, be dissolved by the introduction of money. A corollary is that Aurélien cannot feel excluded for taking a different position that the rest of Parabola stakeholders. First, I want to say that I think Aurélien puts too much emphasis on the properties of money: it seems to me that *competition*, from what I've read so far, is a more precise term for the consequences of introducing money that Aurélien seems to reject. I explain. Parabola is built on human affinities and friendship, to build a free operating system that respects users' freedom and community. In other words, Parabola is conceived itself as a community, with collaboration as its fundamental feature, not only between developers but primarily between users of the distro, whether or not they have a role in steering, building, or maintaining the distribution. In Aurélien's view, introducing money is that alchemy would dissociate the synergy and reduce it to its composing elements. I can agree with the intuition that money has the capacity to change the current equilibrium of Parabola and that in any case we're facing a phase transition to a different metastable system. On the other hand, I certainly wish that the new metastable system of Parabola+funding will not destroy any of the founding features, because then, it would kill the project. It's critical to understand that Aurélien's position is not just an extreme anti-money position, but an intuition of the avalanche of consequences that such a move can produce. In my understanding, money comes with several challenges: it makes more abstract and "objective" relations of causality that were until now internalized and purely emotional; it may make explicit some relations that were implicit; it requires accountability where the common space was undefined and implicit. In this list I didn't mention competition, because I don't believe in the interdependence of competition and money: I prefer seeing money as a mean to an end, and if it's used collaboratively, then competition has nothing to do in the picture. Competition will become an issue however if money is considered as an end. It will open questions such as "why would that person get more money than I do?", etc. As I said earlier, money is not a problem but its allocation is. What purpose does it serve, and how fair can it be? Allocation of money-as-a-mean is not the same as allocation of money-as-an-end. If the end is to earn money, then it's the latter case. I think Parabola should focus on the former case, namely that money should be allocated to facilitate the development of the project. With the original proposal by Icarious and Emulatorman, the goal was to provide continuity to the project. In the spirit of solidarity, allocating money to developers in need is both cheap and a mean to reinforce the community, not a mean to dislocate it. How this spirit is defined can be a challenge for the same reasons of the overhead created by introducing money in the system. Thus it's important to think about ways and means, objectives and clarify the goals and values. There is no intrinsic moral issue with money considered as an additional resource. All moral issues attached to it come from the possibilities it enables. But such possibilities are not deterministic: the nuclear bomb demonstrated that because it's technically possible (to destroy life on Earth), it's not necessarily happening (thanks to deterrence). So money itself may come with issues, but that does not means money is cancer. Knowing the issues and routing around them should be enough. Tiberiu already mentioned the goals of his foundation in sponsoring Parabola. Contrary to a typical sponsorship agreement (for example with a corporation), Ceata does not have to expect a direct return, as the success of Parabola is a sufficient return. So for Parabola there's no question about how to handle the overhead by writing reports, etc. The concern of the community remains the same as always: how can we build solidarity and reinforce community patterns, except with additional resources. I hope this revisit of the problem can help steer the future towards a sane approach of natural growth. I'm available for further exploration of the topic and concrete proposals on how to make this happen. == hk P.S.: I took the liberty to interpret Aurélien's words because he did not respond to my repeated questions about his personal use of money. These questions were not made to demonstrate a contradiction in his position, but to shift the issue from money to dissociation and competition. 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