Paying Debian contributors (Was Re: Advantages/Disadvantages of Open Source Software)
Hello,
On Wed, Sep 14, 2022 at 10:04:48PM -0400, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
> I am not against giving maintainers like Steve just compensation for the
> work they do fixing bugs, and by compensation I mean money.
It's a very tricky subject to propose to start paying (some?) people
in what was always a volunteer project, to do the same work that
others do voluntarily. It has been proposed before, and it did not
go down well. Search for "dunc tank debian" to read about that.
More recently (since 2014), the Debian LTS effort started paying
people to upload fixed Debian packages past the end of the normal
release lifetime. This is organised by private company Freexian who
accept sponsorship funds and pay developers to do this work for
Debian, not out of Debian's own funds.
https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/FAQ
They do LTS, ELTS and some other limited scope efforts.
If you do use Debian LTS maybe you could consider contributing to
this? Though I would point out:
- It's not going to give you the right to tell people what to work
on, how to do it, govern their timescales etc. Sponsors are paying
for a certain amount of developer time per month, but Freexian and
those developers decide what to work on and how to do it.
- At the moment the minimum contribution is €255/year.
It could also be interesting to explore individual packaging teams
within Debian having Patreon and/or ko-fi accounts or similar.
Broadly though, none of these small scale funding ideas are ever
going to give you the kind of service you apparently seem to want:
to be able to force the developers to work on what you want them to
work on, in the way you want them to work on it. I can only ever see
that happening in situations where you pay much much more for a
bespoke solution.
Cheers,
Andy
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