Hi Cristoph and others, On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 12:04:08AM +0200, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
Am 17.05.2010 23:50, schrieb Jonas Smedegaard:On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 12:43:19PM -0500, David Farning wrote:One consideration is that these deployment specific issues are often boring -- stuff like bug fixes. As such we are paying the developers the going rate rate for developers in their country or region. This brings three advantages:1. The deployment issues are fixed. 2. These fixes are pushed upstream for inclusion into Sugar.3. There is a growing pool of skilled developers, with knowledge of how to work with the Sugar community, co-located with deploymentAnother (quite related) consideration is the risk of discouraging similar volunteer efforts. This brings (at least) two disadvantages:1. Increasing the gap between developers and users. 2. Encumbering the project with (more) discrete communiction.Luke raised similar concerns during the "Sugar Labs Budget" discussion last April and I still stick to my reply from back then (http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005028.html):Quote from http://mako.cc/writing/funding_volunteers/funding_volunteers.html:"Done critically, creatively, and transparently, voluntary free software projects can use money and paid labor to a tremendous benefit that only magnifies their accomplishments."I personally think this is something that Sugar Labs should be aiming for.Also I think it's important to realize there's a difference between paying development and paying developers. As a Sugar user I don't particularly care about who commits the code or writes the documentation as long as the job of fixing bugs and improving and advancing the platform gets done.
I am not Sugar developer, nor am I a user. Just a volunteer distributor. I fully agree with Mako's statement quoted above.A key part as I see it is that of transparency. Making deals with commercial partners have a tendency to spawn discrete communication and work shared openly but as a result, not a peer process (a famous example is that of Google Android release process of linux kernel patches).
- Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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