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.'"

Comments

the office

[macadamia_harold]

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.

Re:the office

[ex-geek]

I think you misunderstood Nussbaum. I believe he was trying to say that once some volunteers are paid, the other volunteers lose interest. I've witnessed this first hand in an originally volunteer based NPO.

Microsoft already stole the best Debian devs

[also-rr]

Why do you think Vista's release cycle is so long already?

How is this any different

[aliscool]

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.

Re:How is this any different

[QuantumG]

No-one actually collects those bounties. It's a failed experiment.

Re:How is this any different

[Saxophonist]

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.

Some open-source projects have seemed to operate almost entirely on this principle. Take, for instance, LilyPond. Development for some time seemed to be done almost entirely by core developers who seemed to be getting paid for custom features. Spending time on these custom features, though, meant that other, more basic features were sometimes missing or lacking. (I wish I could give examples, but it has been a few months since I have used LilyPond.)

Now, the LilyPond site seems to emphasize the involvement of other developers, documentation writers, etc. There is a FAQ item that leads to a page about sponsoring features, but I wonder if the focus has shifted more toward getting other volunteer contributors. The "call-for-help" page cites these reasons for wanting help:

Hopefully, together we can address problems in the LilyPond development process, among others

* Stable releases don't happen often enough.
* Development is too much centralized.
* The learning curve is too steep.

I would say only the first reason really applies to Debian, but it is interesting that LilyPond seems to be taking the opposite approach to solving the problem.

Re:How is this any different

[Rogerborg]

Not different, but not necessarily good.

I don't see how it can work without resulting in:

1. Duplicated effort.
2. Sooner rather than better.

Have you ever worked with any of the big Korean or Malaysian software developers? They run their operations like battery chicken farms, with developers crowded in elbow-to-elbow. Time to market is everything, and so they deliberately duplicate effort by promoting internal competition, with individuals and teams rushing to hammer out code before someone else beats them to it. It makes them a real nightmare to work with, and the standard of their code is appalling. They get code that gets the job done, but then they have to throw it away and start over. They actually, and I know this from bitter experience, obfuscate their code to make it harder for anyone else to work on it, so that they can win the next round of competitive completion. Yuk.

I have a dreadful suspicion that software bounties will engender the same type-type-done-next school of development among Free software projects, and it's not something that I look forward to. My further suspicion is that Joe Bounty will lash something together to claim the money, and then Sally Tidyup will have to come along later and unpick the mess. Poor Sally.

Re:How is this any different

[jtwronski]

I've been thinking of posting a bounty on Ubuntu for a good vpn front-end. What do you mean that nobody collects them? Somehow, you got modded +5 without qualifying your opinion.

Not trying to troll here, but am very curious as to why its failed. Do folks post bounties and then not pay up when they get their features added? If so, then Ubuntu/Drupal/whoever should look into taking the cash first, and putting it into some sort of escrow. Say, $100 in escrow for 60 days until the feature gets added, or you get your money back.

Re:How is this any different

[QuantumG]

$100 is exactly the problem. I can earn $100 in an hour, what makes you think I can write a vpn frontend in an hour? People are not willing to pay market price for their bounties, so no-one bothers collecting them. Now, if you actually started writing a vpn frontend (even if that means just firing up the GIMP and putting together some mockups) and told people what you would doing, you would find you receive a lot of offers for help from people who also want that.

generalities and specificity

[macadamia_harold]

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.

Money isn't Everything...

[denmarkw00t]

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.

Re:Money isn't Everything...

[Rogerborg]

The code I write at home for my own enjoyment is far higher quality than what I write to satisfy the terms of my employment contract. End of anecdote.

What happened?

[Frogbert]

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.

Re:What happened?

[glwtta]

There does seem to be a lot of actual development activity as well. I wonder if the people bitching and the people doing work are, as usual, different people?

Re:No no no

[nine-times]

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.

So wait-- you seem to be saying that you like using Debian because there aren't any other organizations who are taking Debian, altering it, and using it as a base for their own distro...?

I'm not saying that you can't like Debian or think it has a better philosophy or something, but complaining about Fedora/OpenSuSE on the grounds that it's used as a base for another distro-- I don't get it. Isn't Debian used as the base of Ubuntu, Linspire, and Xandros (to name a few)?

Nonsense

[EmbeddedJanitor]

You speak of things you don't understand.

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.

Re:Nonsense

[Monkelectric]

You are right, but I would like to add a management perspective (although I am not a manager), I have worked on at least one very large OSS project. When you bring money into the equation -- you have to make a judgement call about who is most important, and who deserves money the most, and that inevitably pisses people off. There really is no fair way to distribute money in an OS project. So you loose people, and the project goes slower.

Re:Nonsense

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Or people don't have the time to devote to the project, so the project goes slower anyway....

I don't think payment is a solution to all developer problems, but it would allow some **key** developers to be able to do their OSS stuff fulltime instead of just part time. If you have a full-time job + family, then you can only spend x hours per week on OSS before you get fired or the wife kicks you out or whatever.

Re:Nonsense

[QuantumG]

Hopefully at some stage people start **paying** for stuff that is valuable to them. Unfortunately people grab what they can get for free.

You're the one handing it out for free, what do you expect?

Re:Nonsense

[Kjella]

You're the one handing it out for free, what do you expect?

Imagine for a moment, that you were working on an extremely specialized OSS project that only one company could profit from (absurd, I know). Since the code is free, they needn't pay you anything. However, you tell them that you need to put food on the table, and that to do any future work he will need pay. What can you expect of pay? If the expected value of having that developer work on that project is worth $X to the company, they should rationally be willing to donate up to $X voluntarily (ignoring some details like risk premiums). Why? Because the return on investment is good. Obviously in this case it'd be easier to hire him as an employee or contractor and make it an internal instead of OSS project, but that's not the point.

Now instead imagine that there's a million people who each would get $1 of value if that developer kept developing. For a modest $50k salary, that means a ROI on 1900%. Sure you could not pay, but it'd be stupid. However, here's where it breaks down: Imagine one person doesn't want to pay. You now have 999,999 people to share the costs, which means it's still profitable (expected value > investment), but it is far more profitable to the one not paying at all. Repeat that 950,000 times and it's no longer profitable. And the last 50,000 will go "Why should we be paying for everyone else?" and not pay either.

Basicly, it's the mass version of the prisoner's dilemma. They could have gotten a very good value for their money, but because everyone is acting egoistically, the result is that they don't.

Re:Nonsense

[Tim C]

I'm not sure you get the OP's point. Take me, for example - I have a 9-5:30 job, an hour long commute either way, and a family. Between that and the need to eat, sleep and do chores, etc, I get maybe 2 hours per night to myself. That I have to split between everything I want to do - code, watch TV, socialise, etc. I imagine that most working family people are in the same position.

If I were coding on an OSS project, they'd get maybe a handful of hours per week out of me. Perhaps that's enough, perhaps it isn't. If I were being paid to work on it, and paid enough to do it full time, suddenly that goes from maybe 10 hours/week to 40 or 50.

It's not a question of interest, it's a question of time - there are only a certain number of hours available, and when you have a fulltime job and a family, you "lose" almost all of them to those commitments.

He's not saying that any given person should be paid because they deserve it, just that if people were to be paid, they could devote much more time to it.

Re:Nonsense

[QuantumG]

Basicly, it's the mass version of the prisoner's dilemma.

It's called the Tragedy Of The Commons.

Re:Nonsense

[tacocat]

Perhaps a solution can start with a simple process something like:

1. Development community identifies who they consider to be the top contributors. Perhaps Debians popularity contest software can help weigh in on what's most often installed on machines.
2. Users are given the opportunity to make donations (eg: via paypal) to the community in a general fund.
3. top contributors are given a strict percentage of the general fund (adding up to 100% of course)
4. Additionally, you can opt-in for specific projects/products/packages to get their contributions directly. In case you really like a specific project -- frozen bubbles!!

Probably not enough there to retire on. Probably some will feel they deserve more than the next guy. But the advantages are:

• It's better than not getting anything at all
• You know the rules before you begin -- everyone gets the same percentage.
• Who gets the percentage is collectively determined and user installation base can be a factor.
• Even if you aren't top dog on the porch, there is still a mechanism for you to get some contributions.

I have no doubt that it isn't going to be perfect. But it's an organized way of saying thank you to the developers and helping them to see the benefits. For most companies it would be far cheaper for them to simply make an annual donation to a tax deductable organization than it would to manage the contracts or employee benefits.

Re:Nonsense

[ericlondaits]

I really don't get any of these arguments. I don't understand why OSS should be:

- Developed ad-honorem.
- Developed by individuals and not by companies.
- All developers considered equals.
- Fun to develop.
- Not a job to develop.

OSS is about Open Source... and all that implies. If some large OSS projects are handled like any other commercial software projects, more power to them... it's the "open" that matters. As long as the sources are open, volunteer groups will be able to apply a completely different approach and work philosophy to any commercially developed OSS product they want.

Re:Nonsense

[gmack]

This has already been proven to be completely untrue. If I hire my own programmer that programmer has to start from scratch (can't use OSS code) and duplicate thousands of hours of work already done or that programmer needs to spend a large amount of time synching with the lastest release of whatever software is being used as a base so it doesn't get left behind. It's actually much easier to hire a single developer to work officially on the project and then everyone benefits.

Many companies hire OSS deveopers to improve performance and add features critical to their buisness. A large number of Linux kernel developers are actually payed to work full time on the kernel. IBM is a notable example, so are adaptech, SGI, namesys, SuSE and Redhat. For companies that can't afford a full dev they often donate to OSDL instead.

Pay for the boring stuff

[Qwavel]

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.

Be careful with bounties

[EmbeddedJanitor]

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.

Re:Be careful with bounties

[MrNaz]

You commie pig! How dare you badmouth competition like that?! You'll hang for this!

Why pay?

[dragonquest]

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.

No problem

[atokata]

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.

Agile Vs Debian

[drDugan]

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.

Re:Agile Vs Debian

[marcello_dl]

I want the apps in debian stable to be bug fixed not updated to the latest versions. And debian does that already. I don't want a newer version to ship with modified configuration files and option and having all the debian servers require to edit the configuration files just because the new config has a different default value. There's nothing more agile than debian stable updates when it comes to upgrading. Security updates often run as a cron job if one is not concerned with testing them before deploying. If you want agility as in frequent updates go the debian unstable route, it's not like the box will crash often. I use unstable for a xen hosted server and it never went down unless the whole host did, so it's either very stable or is capable of taking down the host: both things seem very impressive to me :D. You need to know a lil about apt upgrade vs. dist-upgrade to do so. I also don't get how other distro which ship big updates like fedora and IIRC ubuntu, are more agile than an unstable distro which has 100 mb of updates a week to be kept current, and updating is painless 999 out of 1000 times.

you're

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Volunteering

[gatzke]

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?

Re:Volunteering

[eraserewind]

That really destroyed my motivation. Why give away your time for free when others that are less motivated and less qualified are getting paid?

Same reason you volunteered in the first place?

But everyone is doing it

[Uteck]

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.

The difference between Work and Play

[Respect_my_Authority]

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

You don't get it

[xeno-cat]

"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.

What, no employee discount?

[Kadin2048]

I've got it!

We'll give all the volunteers $5 off their next purchase of Debian.

Or free OS supported by unfree games!!

[Peter Trepan]

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.

Other forms of motivation

[jesterzog]

That really destroyed my motivation. Why give away your time for free when others that are less motivated and less qualified are getting paid?

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:

• At our local astronomical observatory, some staff are paid whereas others are volunteers. It doesn't really put off people wanting to volunteer, though. There's a severe lack of funding for the facility, and everyone involved realises that while some paid staff are needed to keep the place going from day to day, it'll be better overall if volunteers also help out. It's also pretty obvious that when the observatory is hiring from time to time, the volunteers will the the first people they'll go to. It's much easier to hire from a people you know you can already work well with. I'm sure the management would love to pay all the volunteers, but if it did then there wouldn't be an observatory, and everyone knows that. The staff and management at the observatory put a lot of effort into returning the favours, though, among other things by working a lot with the local societies, offering use of facilities, and so on.
• In New Zealand (where I live), the national government's Department of Conservation maintains approximately 1,000 back-country huts, which are scattered around all sorts of places and are a real help for people who want to walk to and see some of the remotest areas. The department flies them into all sorts of remote places for use by hunters and trampers (that's NZ's word for hiking), which makes a lot of the back-country a lot more accessible for people who are fit and able enough to get there. There's a token fee for staying the night at huts which helps to pay for some of the maintenance (not heavily enforced, and people are exempt when there are safety issues), but there's no way this could ever be done if it wasn't for the cooperation of all the tramping clubs, hunters, and pretty much all people who use them. Tramping club volunteers act as good citizens and help out, some even adopt particular huts and shelters in the back-country, and send out voluntary work parties to help keep the tracks maintained. In return, they get to use the services, and DOC makes a lot of concessions to the clubs in return. (eg. Substantial discounts on actually using the huts.)

In both of these cases, there's a clear combination of money being paid, and volunteers, and it's working great.