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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.'"
Why do you think Vista's release cycle is so long already?
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
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.
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.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
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.
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.