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Proposal to Fund Debian Sparks Debate
lisah writes "The announcement earlier this week of 'experimental' group Dunc-Tank's plans to bankroll the work of certain Debian developers has sparked some controversy across the open source community. The leaders of Dunc-Tank say their primary motivation is to see that Debian version 4.0, also known as etch, is released on time this December. Debian developer Lucas Nussbaum, however, says that research shows that 'sometimes, paying volunteers decreases the overall participation.' Dunc-Tank member Raphaël Hertzog countered that the opposite is true and 'many Debian developers are motivated to work when things evolve,' a veiled reference to Debian's notoriously slow release cycle. Dunc-Tank member and kernel developer Ted Ts'o took the idea a step further and said, 'If money were among anybody's primary motivators...they probably wouldn't be accepting a grant from Dunc-Tank; they could probably make more money by applying for a job with Google — or Microsoft.'"
I'm fucking a dog as I type this
/. faggotry! first fucking psot
long live
Debian developer Lucas Nussbaum, however, says that research shows that 'sometimes, paying volunteers decreases the overall participation.
That's because when you pay volunteers, they become employees. And anyone who's ever worked in an office knows how that works.
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Seriously could they? Whats so appealing to MS or google about developers who take their sweet ass time to deliver anything, innovate little and basically just bug fix. I think applying for the job is as far as most debian developers would get. Try Mr Shuttleworth, probably wont pay anywhere near as well but higher probability of success.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Why do you think Vista's release cycle is so long already?
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Debian is one of a very few of the major staple distros that hasn't been taken over by greed (see RH (RH), Novell (SUSE)). I really like the fact that the Debian I use is the same Debian everyone else is using, not a development playground or redheaded stepchild money pit.
than bounties paid by Ubuntu or Drupal to contributers?
Dunc-Tank.org is organizing and raising money to step in and fund full time coding to ensure a deadline is met...
I work a lot with Drupal and see this on the message boards often. "I'd like to see this feature built and I'm willing to pay XXX for it" Someone builds the feature and cashes in. Innovation and capitalism at work.
I think Dunc-Tank.org has a great thing going here and wish them well with it.
Is this the sign of a major change in Debian's idealistic views?
Nope. What you learned in an office does not hold true everywhere in life.
Just like your specificity does not disprove the truthiness of my generality.
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but is something, and that something is, well, money.
I've rarely seen a better motivator for getting something done - especially in a timely manner - than money. If I'm volunteering with children or for a good cause (no, I know - Debian is a good cause too, but you know what I mean) then I'm going to do my best regardless because I feel like I'm helping benefit people who are less fortunate than me. However, if I'm working a job to maintain myself (and possibly my family) and I'm volunteering to develop a large open-source project and not getting payed for that extra work I do when I get home or when I'm up late at night, then a little money can go a long way.
I don't think money would cause those being payed to work less at all, instead I think we'd see an increase in both the timeliness of development and the quality of code in the next Debian release.
What has happened to Debian of late? I'm the first to admit that I don't follow the politics of the linux scene with anything more then a passing glance but the current Debian team appears to be disolving into a clusterfuck of massive egos clashing about trivial changes. Wost still it seems that they end up bitching and debating more then they actually spend doing something. The whole situation reminds me of the People's Front of Judea, fighting with the Judean Peoples Front. They just debate endlessly and end up doing nothing.
Highly motivated people can often not devote as much time as they would like to OSS because they have to go to a regular job to pay for food etc.
There are a lot of key Linux developers who provide huge benefit to the community, but would like to make it pay so that they can make a fulltime job of it. Go look at what some people like Hans Reiser have to say http://kerneltrap.org/node/5654 "Doing GPL work is doing charity work in our current legal and economic framework. That should be and could be changed, but for now it is so. I have done my share of charity, and I would not have a problem doing proprietary work.", and http://www.namesys.com/ "For free software based on support revenues to be viable, people have to be more inclined to use our support service than they are to use the support services of persons who bundle our software with what they sell. Frankly, they are not, and this is why providing service on free software is failing as a business model for producing free software."
For my own part, I write OSS that saves people literally millions of dollars per year, yet I can only treat it as a hobby because it can't pay my bills.
Hopefully at some stage people start **paying** for stuff that is valuable to them. Unfortunately people grab what they can get for free.
Having good roads is very valuable, and you would not have those if they were not paid for. They are typically paid for by taxes because most people would not voluntarily dip into their pockets to pay for roads etc.
I think any methods that help get money into the hands of **key** OSS developers is a good thing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Ok, it's only considered news if a Debian-related matter doesn't spark debate.
(I do like and use debian the distro though)
sic transit gloria mundi
Paying selected developers could cause problems.
Instead, use the money to ensure that any developer who wants to contribute has a good experience, and to get the stuff done that no developers want to do. For example, you could pay people to do testing.
I thought a more linuxy type idea would be to offer 'open bounties' to development teams for implementing particular applications or particular tasks, which would be paid upon successful testing by other users?
They can lead to competition which can get unhealthy. Instead of collaboration, you see people hiding info because the other bounty hunters might use it to get ahead.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You could achieve the same level of motivation by a Karma system, works here doesn't it. :-), but seriously, people would be happy just to see some credit given even if its in terms of silly awards or fun titles.
"Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time."
You've gotta pay people to work on deadlines sometimes. I've done volunteer work which has led to paying work, driven by nessecity. Most volunteers have day jobs, and aren't extremely wealthy. If they're being asked to put in a lot of hours, it's only fair to compensate them for the time they can't spend working at their normal job, be it freelancing, a normal desk job, or whatever.
Done.
Next question please.
Gotta say, the speed at which we're developing software makes the Debian "notoriously slow release cycle" a non-starter for doing interesting stuff with the latest tools.
With cash to spare, I'd put significant money into support for keeping all the apps in stable updated on weekly and monthly horizons, not bi-annual.
What are the chances that behind Dunc-Tank is a company such as Microsoft? Offer money to some Debian volunteers but not others, then stand back and watch them turn against each other. Quite a poisoned apple. And you end up crippling one of the most important Linux distributions around, one of the oldest, one that stands at the forefront of many things that Linux also stands for, such as proof that an open, decentralized system is viable. And all that for crumbs as far as money goes. I don't know, it's so insidious it's almost beautiful.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Well... so close that it doesn't matter.
I know some of the people behind dunc-tank and they are not the kind of person MS or any other puppet-master would have much success with.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Because I Ted Ts'o. Appologies in retreat.
God spoke to me.
What may not be so obvious is the way they return the effort (Utnubu was pleasing to see).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Your: "Your grammar skills leave much to be desired."
You're: "You're a dumb-ass for not checking your post for grammatical errors when correcting someones spelling."
Karma is overrated. Sure you can get a buzz to know your software is being used all over the world by hundreds of thousands of people, but it's far easier to get a buzz out of knowing that while you're driving around in a nifty new car paid for by your earnings.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If the primary motivators were money, than there would be no Debian. Businesses who spend money will eventually (at least on the long run) try to get more and more influence untill the point they explicitly want bang for their buck and slowly forget the power of the open source community. I think that open source is more about that people create what they think is missing in some piece of software. Most of the people who want to spent their free time don't like the idea of a business telling them something to do.
For the developers who spend so much time they have little time left to make a decent living for themselves: those precious people have forgot to set the priorities in life. Money is not the answer, personal basic priorities are. I think the success of a open source product is more related to the community than dependence on individuals or companies.
What would be realistic expectations when you spend some developtime in some product? Not money, only some functionalit and if lucky also a developer community. Expecting money is unrealistic for the open source developer, nor does it contribute to a better community. If people tease with cash ans start complaining about the slow development of Debian, they should start using another product.
Actually, Andreas Barth and Steve Langasek are competent developers and release managers -- which is _why_ they deserve such grants.
70 to 80% of OpenSource developpers are in fact paid to do so by the company they work for... that's according to an article i read yesterday (sorry, no time to retrieve the link but it should't be too hard to find it) So the issue would only be for a small percentage of the OSS developpers... Maybe the money should go only to those that have no alternate funding... Sure there's potential for abuse in such a system, but i'm not aware of any system that isn't prone to being abused. Money isn't (shouldn't be) the main incentive to write OSS programs & i don't think giving a bonus to those who already have a pay would really make any difference.
In college I volunteered at the Atlanta Kids Science Museum.
About a month in, I realized all the other workers were not volunteers, they were getting paid. For doing the same stuff I was doing.
That really destroyed my motivation. Why give away your time for free when others that are less motivated and less qualified are getting paid?
Ok, so we have motivated Debian developers who have a job and as such can't spend the time Debian needs. And paying them will help to overcome this problem. I say bogus.
If I have a job and real-life business to deal with how will some instance who is willing to pay me - for a limited time - going to help speed this up? Depending on my job (it seems many have important ones) a manager really won't like to see someone saying "Gee Boss, I need to skip one day at work for the upcoming 4 weeks" since it'll take a lot of administration. Or do you expect them to take up a vacation? Once more: I know better things to do in my vacation then performing a paid job.
So, while "Paying them to overcome loss in pay from work" sounds nice but I think there is a lot more to it than most people are willing to realize.
They have to have real jobs to cover what they sit on so screw it if someone is a big enough fan of debian to DONATE money for them to make sure they get it out on time let them do it. Hell, might even get the best release yet as those programmers are doing nothing but focusing on debian.
I never noticed how much of a soap operah OSS is. They could make an ongoing tv show will all of these stories...
:)
I bet commercial softare isn't nearly this interesting.
Even Linus accepts money in return for his contributions to OSS and I don't see kernel devlopment slowing down because he gets paid for it other kernel hackers don't. Debian sees their problem and have come up with a good solution for it, perhaps this is a sign that some of the other things at Debian that move at glacial speeds will be reworked and made more dynamic.
Change can be good people, and it's not like this will be a perminate paying job. It's just for the next 2 months.
no
Linus Torvalds started to build a Unix-like kernel "just for fun" and his fun project soon attracted contibutions even though Linus never offered any bounty or payment. So what's the difference between Work and Play? The former often sucks all the fun out of doing things while the latter usually encourages people to contribute simply because it's fun.
Raising funds to employ one or two release managers for a short period of time just before the "etch" release may actually be a very good idea but I hope that the people behind this "Dunc-Tank" idea keep in their mind that fun and play will always be much more powerful motivators than money in a volunteer project like Debian. A crash course into understanding why this should be so can be found in the second chapter of "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/74/74-h/p1.htm#c2"For one, I can hire someone and claim 100% rights over their work."
And not gain any of the benefits of open source. The reason to use open source on a project is to gain the benefits of that approach. If your gaining benefits than it should not be such a stretch for you to pay to maintain those benefits as long as the cost/benefit ratio is in your favor.
You could hire an in house tech to work on some secret version of Debian for you alone or you could just pay the foundation to get things done quicker in the trunk. It should be readily apparent why the latter option would be preferable.
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
"It's called the Tragedy Of The Commons."
Except that the scenario with OSS is a bit different in that the grazing lands of the commons were not covered under the GPL nor was there a vast array of individuals and businesses making boatloads of money off of a common resource that is not depleatable.
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
I was under the impression that Dell only trains their employees for the distros they actually sell. Time = money, and with a company like Dell based on finding "innovative" ways to save money, Dell would probably not support any other distro (until it is economically viable, and it's not) regardless of any "pressure" from any other organization.
I've got it!
We'll give all the volunteers $5 off their next purchase of Debian.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Try paying for the OS by packaging it in the back of a nice, clear, four-color manual. Techies routinely pay $50 for O'Reilly books. Why not pay that, or even less, for a manual that comes straight from the developers?
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Having a trust fund doesn't make you not care about money. I like to eat, so try to get paid for work.
Have existing documentation companies like O'Reilly help fund core developers on the technologies they document, with the understanding that O'Reilly (or whoever) gets precedence on the developer's time whenever they want something explained.
This would be especially mutually beneficial on *new* projects which, if developed, would need a new O'Reilly book.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Have paid developers work on high-quality closed-source Linux-only games, or maybe only *partially* open like Quake, then use proceeds to help fund the OS on which they run. Games are non-essential, and therefore, I think, do not break the spirit of the GPL ideology when they're sold closed-source.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
"enormous "regular" developers,"
I resemble that remark!
"It is supposed to be free". No matter the value, people have a problem paying for stuff that they think should be free and feel screwed when they are asked to pay for it. I have tried to convince a company that I work with that they should make voluntary contributions to the FSF. This company doesn't blink about paying hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat for Microsoft development tools licenses or much more for some other embedded tools, but won't even consider making a $100 per seat donation for all the gcc seats it uses.
"I won't pay to help my competitors". Even though your taxes are helping to build the roads your competitors use.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Its amazing that you can make a distinction WITHIN distros between different versions (such as Enterprise, Desktop.....etc) in terms of support and quality and that you can't make the same distinctions BETWEEN distros. You may think you've avoided becoming a second or lower class citizen by sticking with Debian, but while Debian might have been a leading edge distro at some point it has become the laggard. You are now using THE Quintessential second class distribution of Linux itself. Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Mandriva have all passed it by. The only distro Debian seems to hold its own with in terms of being up today on its "stable" edition is Slackware.
The proposal of paying developers is a possible solution to this. Provide developers with the time and means to develop and perhaps Debian will have releases more often than once a epoch. Why you think this is a bad idea, I can't figure out.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Obviously it varies for different people, but just because someone's being paid doesn't mean they're any less motivated. Ideally, you'd want to pick out the most motivated people and give them a salary so they can completely devote themselves (instead of 50% of their time), but it doesn't mean that there's no benefit from still getting help from others. I can think of several examples, but to mention a couple:
In both of these cases, there's a clear combination of money being paid, and volunteers, and it's working great.
Quite often, you can hire your own programmers who can quite easily use OSS code -- this is (one of) key GPL v2 vs. GPL v3 difference(s), to site an obvious example. This is especially true if you don't distribute the result, which is rapidly becoming the norm.
I've known at least dozens of top-quality programmers who did exactly this, for years.