Madcoder decided to quote some bits of an IRC conversation held on #debian-devel-fr and (of course, given his current frustration) he munges the meaning of my quote.
I was explaining that for me dunc-tank was definitely not perfect but that it was a first step in a global direction that I’d like to explore. I explained my long term project with dunc-tank in a french blog entry and I also explained it to Bruce Byfield who interviewed me as a member of dunc-tank.
My long term project always involved that decision-making of what to fund would be shared between the donors and all Debian developers. I sincerly hope to avoid many of the current criticism with this infrastructure but I can’t be sure. In the mean time, the current experiment is not run because it’s perfect and ready for generalization but because we want to see if it’s possible to get enough funding, and if it’s actually worth to invest more time in developing something more acceptable to everybody. (And also because we would really love to have etch release in december)
This is my opinion: I’m not speaking for dunc-tank although I have the feeling that others members of the board are there for similar reasons.
Update: following sam’s bad interpretation I fixed my wording to say “…decision-making of what to fund would be shared…”.
Compare
« My long term project always involved that decision-making would be shared between the donors and all Debian developers. »
and
« My long term project always involved that decision-making of what to fund would be shared between the donors and all Debian developers. »
I do not think that the difference is so big and I do not think Sam’s interpretation is so bad.
Really I do not think that Debian developpers should share decision about the project with “donors” (which power is relative to their money mass)
I do not either think that “donors” will let other people share their decision-power of what to do with *their* money.
> Really I do not think that Debian developpers should share decision about the project with “donors”
For me the difference is substantial because the structure will fund only projects proposed by Debian developers and the donors won’t lead Debian. They will simply have the possibility to boost the development in some specific area. And in any case, a funded project has no guaranty of integration in Debian if the project itself is not accepted by the other developers concerned.
To speak with concrete examples: a donor will never be able to change the Debian policy, he won’t influence the social contrat, won’t change the result of any general resolution. However, I have a big list of gforge improvements than I want to do for alioth.debian.org… and here I want to give the possibility to donors to choose which project to fund. It can be win-win situation in many cases: the donor might be an alioth.debian.org user which is annoyed by the lack of a given feature and he wants to encourage us improving a specific part. Or the donor can be a company using Debian and gforge for their internal use.
> I do not either think that “donors” will let other people share their decision-power of what to do with their money.
Of course, Debian developers can’t dictate what other people have to do with their money, but donors who are “simple supporters” will more likely fund projects which have the preference/priority of Debian developers than other projects.
Hello, I think dunc-tank is very good, and sadly I read only 447 USD donated at the moment (from https://www.pubsoft.org/pubsoft.py/project?proj=Dunc-Tank-etch-rm)
I hope the amount will increase soon.
I would even say that perhaps the european people would not send money to an US foundation, but they would send to an european foundation, or association, if that was possible.
My 2 cents