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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

Bit of a weird headline as the article says Debian org has $900k in the bank but that is not spent on the devs; they are volunteers. If they would offer, let’s say, 2k/mo (the article says they need good people who like though problems; 2k is nothing for those types however, many people would like do it because of love for Debian; they do not do it now as they need at least a little food on the table) per full time contributor, there would be plenty of devs joining. But for their goals to be met, they would be also immediately broke. So in fact they do not have plenty of money to achieve what they want, unless people work for free.

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I am currently unemployed/independently-wealthy/thrifter/bumming around the bay area. I love debian, and I sometimes joke that if there was such a thing as a minimum wage dev job, I would gladly take it to get out of having to pass another technical interview :/

It would be neat if they could split the difference between free and real job, but I wonder if part of the reason they don't is that they want people who care unreservedly about values and code quality rather than people who need $500 a week?

It is of course one of the problems a Federal Job Guarantee would solve.

Clearly working full time on Debian is of value to society, a good use of time and clearly verifiable by committed contributions.

Definitely worth the living wage.

Agreed that Debian provides (a lot of) value to society. The big question is why don't they have money to fund development? Disregarding the 900k mentioned, because it's not enough to pay everyone and it would be spent soon. In my opinion public infrastructure would ideally be maintained by states, not individuals or private companies.

I may be jumping to conclusions here, but my first impression was you were suggesting that Debian is a public infrastructure, and that therefore in your opinion it would ideally be maintained by the state.

I have a rather strong emotional reaction to this because to me a major reason for FOSS is to break the problem of perverse incentives that arise in corporate -and- government work. Governments want to control their populace. The NSA, for example, has made algorithm suggestions that would give them an easier time listening in on the world. And the US has prominent figures arguing for encryption backdoors that supposedly only the "good guys" would have the keys to. Which is to say nothing of governments that outright ban encryption. So I would be very skeptical of FOSS officially maintained by a government (though I suppose its open source nature would still be a point in its favor for the transparency).

I understand the strong negative reaction; it's common. Thanks for taking the time to formulate a response.

I thinks it's two different problems: maintenance and cleptocracy. For example, should the government maintain roads and bridges? It falls within the common good (public infrastructure) so using taxes for that makes sense.

But, if the government has authority over the bridges, how to stop them from performing obligatory cavity searches (or some other bad thing) on people who use them? That's not a question of what the responsibilities or objectives of a government should be. The question is how to reform a hostile, cleptocratic government.

I won't presume what context you're coming from, but I've noticed that in some cultures it's normal to think of the government as "them". For me it's "us". While someone from the former group might say "government does that", I'm inclined to say "we do that". My outlook seems to be more common in Europe than in US, I think.

For me, using the government is the most direct and efficient way of maintaining FOSS, or doing anything that should be done by "us", as opposed to by "somebody". I see that as the purpose of governments.

These FOSS projects spanning many borders makes things slightly harder, but that's just because we're not used to that kind of cooperation. In principle there's no reason multinational programmes for financing these things can't exist.

Alternatively, make it difficult for states to use non-FOSS software. That way you'd redirect all that money being wasted on closed source.

Funding digital infrastructure through state sponsorship is hard. Because the industry moves fast and politics does not.. nor is politics particularly efficient, they just can't be experts on everything.

Sponsoring large research projects might go along way though.

> Governments want to control their populace.

That's a pretty broad statement :)

In my country we have free speech, and the state/government protects freedom of speech.

Similarly, my government tend to promote human rights. I think that can still be said about the US too.

No governments aren't perfect, but control is not their major concern.

> In my opinion public infrastructure would ideally be maintained by states

There's no government layer at the level Debian operates. As pretty much everything internet based, its users ( and contributors) are international - which I think is the main reason why we don't see public alternative services to social networks, search engines, etc.

China is a special case, since they explicitly would rather keep the userbase restricted to Chinese citizens.

NSF, NIH

There are tons of federal agencies that could sponsor FOSS.

https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/

I'd love to see a program where FOSS devs could get say 2k-4k tax free per month depending on part or full time work. A billion a year would pay for just under 21k developer years or close to 42k part time devs.

Federal, state and local governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount every year on proprietary, closed source software.

> governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount

probably not an integer, more likely an irrational number

Surely it's an actual currency amount, so it's not irrational. I'll accept it's unlikely to be an integer, but it should be a rational non-integer.

But, perhaps you were joking and it's an 'irrational' amount?

I don't know for sure how much the US government / DOD spends on RHEL licenses, but I've worked at plenty of contractors who were using it (and CentOS). I would be surprised if a significant amount of RHEL's revenues weren't from the federal government.

Its good that there is no Government layer in Debian. If they did, it would quickly dissipate into just another disaster.

>clearly verifiable by committed contributions

I'm afraid of this part gaining significance over other and its side-effects becoming main effects.

Ugh, federal job guarantees don't work. Nothing in life is gauranteed.

> Federal Job Guarantee

Job Guarantee isn't as good of an idea as you'd expect: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...

It's the only idea that works from the point of view of those growing and making your food and shelter.

There is no magic porridge pot. Somebody has to make the stuff you want to buy, and they ain't going to waste their life making stuff for you if you're not doing anything in return. Why should they?

Maybe the FreeBSD Foundation is something for you, they Sponsor you so you can implement wanted stuff into FreeBSD (just an option not opinionated)

Thanks for the tip!

Where can I read more about this?

https://freebsdfoundation.org/get-involved/project-proposal-...

You'd probably be interested in part-time contracting. Set your own hours and rates. Often there's a small paid project in lieu of an interview. Lots of interesting projects are willing to shell out for a contractor that aren't willing to hire a full time employee.

I don't know Debian's specific history, but having participated in volunteer organizations, getting everyone to agree on how to spend money can be tricky.

Personally I'd love to be making more open source contributions as well, and I've been thinking off and on about taking a sabbatical to make time for it, though that probably won't happen.

I might be able to help find dev work for you that doesn't involve technical interviews, though it may not necessarily be a "job".

One model that is between a free and a real job would be a collective where housing, food, and internet is provided but not much else. Hacker spaces are also similar to this but in my experience rarely ever focus on system development, but instead more on hardware and hardware art.

Mmm. A million dollars isn't a lot of money these days. That is something like 5 to 18 full time devs, for 1 year. Good luck running the Debian project at market rates.

I have some spare time and I'd love to work on Debian, but I got offered $500 to work on another open source project.

The person who made me the offer was very apologetic - as she said, it's not even my day rate - but as I said, I'd probably do it for nothing, no one's making a penny out of the software, it's really useful, and $500 isn't nothing.

I think they could get plenty of people to work on Debian for 10 hours a week for $10k a year, as a hobby.

There are thousands of people working opensource for nothing. Why do you or anybody care about market rates when those people (me included) would do it for minimum wage?

I'd happily code all day long on stuff I really care about for minimum wage. And when I day minimum, I don't mean the penance described by the law that forces you to have multiple minimum wage jobs to get by. No, I mean one single job that pays enough to get by.

This is very true, i think the guy you're responding to is thinking more in terms of when there are more jobs then devs, not the other way around.

Even if that becomes the case, since this stuff goes though phases, a lot of college students or kids right out of high school would still jump at the chance to gain this sort of experience, alongside people like you, who just want their needs taken care of, a bit of spending money, and a job where they can focus on what they enjoy without too much demanding or stress. Same for older people with a lot of expertise, but who again want something less demanding but still enough to support them until they retire, or give them a purpose after they do so.

Like my dad, he's a network engineer, in a job like I described. He and my mom are a little over retirement age and plan to retire soon, but he's not one to just sit around the house all day. I think that's one reason he keeps saying he'll retire in 2 - 3 years, but says that year after year.

> i think the guy you're responding to is thinking more in terms of when there are more jobs then devs, not the other way around.

No, I'm thinking if you pay peanuts you'll get monkeys. It is rare for a situation to stay the same after money gets involved. People make decisions based on money.

Stability is a thing though; a younger version of me would've gladly opted for 2k/month if there was the likelihood of that continuing for 20+ years. Open source projects tend to run for very long times and the solid ones keep growing (in every way) so it's not a naive assumption.

And that’s not even accounting for benefits, which often add a huge amount of cost above and beyond the listed salary.

I'm in the InfoSec field, and bug bounties are a huge thing now (well, for years but it seems to keep gaining steam) for app security. There are people who make a living, or at least generate secondary income off it, or others do bug hunting as a hobby and to help out and don't mind a little bit of reward when it's there.

Maybe it's because I'm not big into the development side of things, but I cannot recall any programs that'd be similar to bug bounties but focus on someone building code or fixing the bugs and submitting that in a freelance type capacity.

Granted, my limited knowledge of development may just mean I don't see obvious reasons it's not done or widely known about, and there would be a few different things thatd need to happen vs how bug hunting works, but its similar to your idea to attract more talent to work on small bits, without going out and hiring full time developers.

If you pay some of the volunteers does that not basically spit in the face of those not being paid? It would really annoy the hell out of me if I’d been making Debian better for 20 years for free while training up someone being paid to get involved.

The big difference is subordination.

A volunteer gets to choose what he wants to work on and if he wants to work at all. An employee/contractor does what his boss/customer wants him to do and get compensated (i.e. paid) for it.

There are many reasons why you may want to pay someone. The obvious one is to do things no one wants to do for free.

But maybe you also want a proper contract, to make sure some essential job is done fully. Volunteers who work on they spare time will stop working for you once they stop having spare time, and there is not much you can do about it, both legally and ethically.

Sometimes you also need certifications. I don't know how it applies to Debian but certified people usually don't work for free. The certification process can be expensive and they can have legal responsibilities. Even if people can offer their time and skills for free, legal responsibilities are usually off limits.

As an example, I volunteered to staff a few events. None of the regular staff and organizers were paid. However, security was paid. While we had a few burly guys, no one wanted to take responsibility, and probably couldn't anyways.

Depends. There are a lot of tedious things that the volunteers know need to be done but don't want to do. Paying to get that done is helpful. (Note that what is tedious varies between personalities...) There are also cases where the volunteer knows he is overloaded and will welcome help.

I'm not sure how Jonathan is defining "enough" developers. It's very easy to come up with a definition that says Debian doesn't have enough developers: just say Debian should package every piece of software out there.

But that makes no sense. In reality, there has to be some sort of decision mechanism over what packages are included and what aren't. If that decision isn't made pro-actively, it will be forced upon you - via the man power problem. Debian is at its heart a do-ocracy, which boils down to something happens only if some individual can raise the energy to make it happen. So a package dies when no Debian member can make (unpaid) time to save it. It's not like there is someone who can order someone else to save it - Debian is a purely volunteer organisation.

It's easy to paint that as having a man power problem, but curating the packages is essential task that must be undertaken. Doing it isn't "a problem", it's essential to survival.

It's also easy to criticise the way this decision is made. Just leaving it to the individual decision making of 1k volunteers sounds so unorganised. But the flip side is if you have paid engineers you are doing the reverse, you are giving someone the power to order other developers around. In an organisation like Debian that attracts membership through it strong egalitarian principles, that's going to be an anathema to most of it's members.

As an side, despite all the whinging here while it's difficult to introduce a new package to Debian, it is not difficult to step up to support an existing package. You don't have to be a developer or a maintainer, and there are any number of existing developers and maintainers who will upload your work if you do it. So if a package dies, it's not too far from a stretch to say it was because no-one on the planet with the skills was that interested in doing the work.

Yeah I’m also confused by this. Debian has an opportunity to reiterate that free software isn’t just a pipe dream volunteer effort but rather that there is business being software authorities without the baggage of a slew of software patents and terms and license agreements. Perhaps if they paid core maintainers it would ostracize other contributors who didn't make the cut? Perhaps they don’t want to become a Canonical and have to answer to steak holders? There’s value in being frugal but you also meed to know your own value or others will take advantage of you.

Some Debian developers tried to get funding to finish the Etch release, but it was met with a lot of hostility:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/10/msg00260.htm...

That doesn't mean that it cannot be done. E.g. the FreeBSD Foundation pays developers for specific projects that are important to the future of FreeBSD:

https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/projects/

It can be done, but culturally the projects are too different.

There were valid reasons for the hostility. Bringing money into the equation completely changes the dynamics of an all-volunteer project, and splits the developers into the gilded minority and the plebs who slave away for free. Plenty of volunteer organisations have been torn apart by the resentment and infighting that can result.

* Which developers are eligible for funding, and which are not?

* The organisation is no longer flat; some people are effectively profiting off the backs of the majority

* The meritocracy is lost; do the "paid staff" have more of a say than the "unpaid volunteers"

* Are "paid staff" even volunteers any more?

The vast majority of Debian developers work full time on their day jobs, and contribute to Debian as a labour of love in their spare time, or as part of their work for situations where organisations sanction Debian work.

I used to work 8 hours, and then come home and regularly work 4-8 hours on Debian. Every day for nearly a decade. Totally unsustainable, and I'm no longer an active contributor. But for people who are contributing that much, for free, you can see why there would be concerns over the effect of a paid class of contributor to the organisation as a whole.

None of that is to say it can't work. FreeBSD is smaller, more tightly-focused, and has a culture of corporate contribution. Paying people to write specific features delivers results on a schedule. I donate to the FreeBSD foundation for that reason. The developer culture seems to be much more tolerant of this (though I'm not a FreeBSD insider, so don't know all the details).

FreeBSD is vastly simpler to contribute to, so I can participate with vastly less commitment. Contributing a new port or an updated port or bugfix is simply a matter of attaching a patch to a bugzilla ticket. Maybe it's not so much of an issue because there's already a clear separation of core devs vs casual contributors. And that's OK.

> The meritocracy is lost; do the "paid staff" have more of a say than the "unpaid volunteers"

Is it a meritocracy if only developers who can afford to work for free participates?

Err, yes. Yes it is.

Debian is an all-volunteer organisation. Those are the terms for participation and they apply equally to all. If you want to be paid for writing free software, then get a job with a company that does that. Debian is not a company.

> Err, yes. Yes it is.

So people who are wealthy enough to not have to worry about getting paid for their work have more merit than those who need to make rent?

This seems like a very Jane Austin-era view of meritocracy.

It's a orthogonal concern and isn't relevant to the discussion at hand. "Merit" in this context is based upon technical considerations and is unrelated to contributors' personal finances and employment status. Contributors range from highly-paid consultants, through to academics, students, etc..

Debian contributors are volunteers. They volunteer their time, personal resources such as compute hardware, bandwidth etc. Some pay out of their pocket for running mirrors, compute resources and other infrastructure. Other parts are paid for by donations and infrastructure provision by sponsors. But far from all of it.

So at a personal level, individuals must be able to support themselves sufficiently to be able to contribute. That's no different from working in any other volunteer organisation which requires a commitment of free time and other resources to participate. That's life. Nothing comes totally for free. The bottom line is that participation at a minimum requires you to donate some of your free time. You're a volunteer, not an employee. What more do you really expect here?

This is true, but I don't think it's relevant. Those who can't afford the table stakes aren't represented, and while that's a bad thing in general, it doesn't cause the specific internal resentment within the project that the earlier post was talking about. I think "meritocracy" in this case was used to refer to the internal social dynamics of this system, not the generalised ones that apply across the whole population.

In other words, I think this reply shifts the context from "will paying volunteers harm the project?" to "is paying volunteers morally right because it enables wider participation?"

Do you think a bounty system would work? Leadership decides payouts for different contributions. Possibly exclude leadership from bounty access so that the core ethos is still volunteer driven. Everyone else has access to bounties so there’s no resentment. Contributions could range from code patches to release management & announcements.

I'd like to say yes, but I really don't think that would work. It changes an organisation where everyone contributes for free to one where a subset of the developers are all chasing after bounties. "Equal access" doesn't mean no resentment. There's going to be competition due to the limited funding, and there will be losers. There will be questions and recrimination over how fair the selection process is (whether true or not). But getting the bounty also means a commitment to providing some deliverables within a defined period, compared to the commitment being imposed primarily due to one's dedication to the project.

Overall, I can see it working for some organisations. But I don't see Debian as one of them.

The Monero cryptocurrency's developers are all funded via the community via bounties. I think it works really well.

https://ccs.getmonero.org/ (new system) https://forum.getmonero.org/22/completed-tasks (old system)

Instead of paying volunteers would contracting critical tasks to an FOSS friendly software consulting firm be less controversial for Debian (although that might not be an option due to expense)?

Just curious

It's an interesting question. Like bounties, I think it would not work, for similar reasons.

Work you contract out is effectively saying: none of you volunteers are up to the task. We'll have to get someone better than you to do it. That's not great for the psyche of the project.

And this has already happened from a certain perspective. (I'm biased here, for the record.) Look at the systemd debate and fallout. At its core, this was effectively contracting out the maintenance of the whole base system to a third party organisation, and telling the Debian developers that they weren't allowed to touch it in all but the most superficial way. This isn't about the technical merits of the decision, by the way. It's about how the organisation went from being an independent technical leader with development driven by its own people, who were highly regarded in their own right, to being a follower being told what to do by others. It took away the primary driver of Debian's independent existence and the agency of its developers to drive change at that level. (It was a minor contributing factor behind my leaving the project.)

And like bounties, there are concerns over who gets the money. Is it subject to favouritism, influence, or other factors.

As I said in the original post, I think it could (and does) work for other organisations. What makes Debian unique is that its origins were a 100% volunteer-driven self-sufficient effort, and that essentially defines the project's culture to this day. Every bit of internal infrastructure and tooling was originally self-developed. I used to maintain some of it myself. Other organisations would have no political issues with paying a contractor to "get x done". But being a volunteer effort, actually "doing x" is as important to the volunteers as the end goal.

I think volunteer work is at the core of their culture. Paying a few core full time contributors seems like a good idea - i assume it's happening already.

The only payments Debian does to contributors are to Outreachy interns:

https://www.outreachy.org/

> they need good people who like though problems; 2k is nothing for those types however

Many people of that type work at universities for comparable compensations. E.g. 50% E13 position at TU Berlin gives you monthly 2k pre tax. If you spend lots of your time to improve the public good, you'll still need something to put food on your table (unless you are financially independent of course, but many people aren't).

basically, if they would offer 50/50-jobs in partnership with public services, where the public service guarantees job security and the Debian project guarantees some oldfashioned hacker-spirit, people would fly at these (or at least I would. People could spend 50% of the time for Debian and push OSS adoption in the public service and develop the basic CRUD in the remaining time.

But.... sadly this is not going to fill the coffers of politicians and consultants alike, so things like these will just be daydreaming until a majority of people is fed up with corruption and not braindamaged enough to believe extremist bullshit.

The 50% E13 positions in German universities, actually expect you to work for 100%. Source: Me

I know. but generally these are only temps and so give you no job security. Go look around at the administration and check, how they are doing it ;)

2k/mo would pay for 37 devs for a year. Rather than that do micropayments for contributions (approved packages, finished tasks). A project such as Debian only needs a few core members or people working on important projects paid full time. It works for FreeBSD.

I really like Debian but volunteers are probably better off packaging for other distros such as Arch or Alpine with simpler packaging/better tooling and less strict rules. One thing to improve would be tooling to make packages.

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