Freexian’s second report about Debian Long Term Support

Like last month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In September 2014, 3 contributors have been paid for 11h each. Here are their individual reports:

Evolution of the situation

Compared to last month, we have gained 5 new sponsors, that’s great. We’re now at almost 25% of a full-time position. But we’re not done yet. We believe that we would need at least twice as many sponsored hours to do a reasonable work with at least the most used packages, and possibly four times as much to be able to cover the full archive.

We’re now at 39 packages that need an update in Squeeze (+9 compared to last month), and the contributors paid by Freexian did handle 11 during last month (this gives an approximate rate of 3 hours per update, CVE triage included).

Open questions

Dear readers, what can we do to convince more companies to join the effort?

The list of sponsors contains almost exclusively companies from Europe. It’s true that Freexian’s offer is in Euro but the economy is world-wide and it’s common to have international invoices. When Ivan Kohler asked if having an offer in dollar would help convince other companies, we got zero feedback.

What are the main obstacles that you face when you try to convince your managers to get the company to contribute?

By the way, we prefer that companies take small sponsorship commitments that they can afford over multiple years over granting lots of money now and then not being able to afford it for another year.