Hi Ian,
Ian wrote on 2010-06-20 09.34:
Mozilla is quite hard to compare with us. I know many of the Mozilla
folks, and they are in a much more luxury situation than we are.
The question is why? What is it about Mozilla that is different from
OOo?
the difference is that Mozilla
1. has a foundation, and
2. this foundation has millions of dollars to spend
This is somehow different to what we have. Our community budget is
limited, and Oracle is not an OpenOffice.org foundation, but a company.
The difference is that OpenOffice.org (not Oracle!) has no offices
worldwide, does not employ people. Believe me, the difference is huge,
and things are hardly comparable.
At least I don't know about any job offers the OpenOffice.org community
(again, not Oracle, as you compare to Mozilla) has. If I missed that,
and there's a site from an OpenOffice.org foundation offering a job with
a decent team, that would help some marketing folks doing their tasks
all day long with being paid for it, please, let me know, I'd surely be
interested. ;-)
Question is how to define what is volunteer work and what is not. Oracle
pay people for doing work of the same type that volunteers do. The real
issue is that Oracle provides the money so they can choose how to spend
it. It is certainly more difficult for general money under the control
of team OOo or the CC to be spent on work time without causing problems
- in fact there are problems on travel expenses because some people get
them covered and some don't.
I'm all for covering (valid) expenses, which is different from paying
for work. One covers expenses, the other pays for work time.
The problem is: When we pay for work time, where to start? Who to pay? I
can name you dozens of people contributing to OpenOffice.org for years,
spending thousands of hours, who are not paid. Why then shall we pay
someone who did a new starting page for one project, and others who
contribute regularly are left behind?
If we started to pay people for work time, we need to do it equally, and
for that, we don't have the money.
One way to pay volunteers for work would be for a group of volunteers to
raise money eg through an EU grant or other enterprise and use it to
target specific parts of the project. That is really no different from
Oracle paying the engineers or Louis.
The difference between us and Oracle is, is that Oracle people are
contracted, we are volunteers. Of course, they are paid for similar
things we do, but they are contracted, we aren't. If we now start to
make differences between the volunteers, this will lead to risks.
Believe me, I really would love to compensate people's efforts and work,
but with a total budget of 100.000 € per year, we cannot pay the work of
dozens of contributors, plus travel, lodging and others.
What I'm saying is that the principle of paying some people and not
others is already set, the issue is more about the mechanism for payment
and the priority and methods for raising funds and who controls them
than it is the principle.
I think we are not "paying" people at the moment.
What we do now is refunding people's expenses, and we try to be fair and
transparent in that process. Name me one request we erroneously
rejected, and I'll look into it.
What we do not do is paying people for their work time. Exceptions are
the contests like summer internship and documentation bounty, but to my
opinion, this is okay for the reasons I've stated in my last e-mail.
Believe me, I was more than happy if we had some donation of a few
million dollars, could hire people on behalf of the community, but it's
not possible. Therefore, we need to spend our resources and invest our
money wisely, and be fair to everyone.
Florian
--
Florian Effenberger <[email protected]>
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead
Tel: +49 8341 99660880
Fax: +49 8341 99660889
Mobile: +49 151 14424108
Skype: floeff | Twitter/Identi.ca: @floeff
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