Distributions quote of the week

I am neither pro team maintenance nor anti team maintenance. I am in favor of doing the things that make it more rewarding to volunteer to work on Debian. For some people, particularly new contributors, that means having easy onboarding, a robust team of people who can teach you how to do things and answer your questions, and a place to contribute where you can feel useful quickly. We should therefore have lots of those opportunities. For some people, the reward in Debian comes from going off to quietly work in one's corner or think hard about a problem and solve it the way that you want to solve it while minimizing the coordination that one has to do with other people. So we should also provide appropriate opportunities to do that.

In other words, if we want more volunteers, we should try to maximize volunteer payment. We pay our volunteers not in money, but with mission and purpose, community, and collaboration, but also autonomy, control, and independence. Different types of compensation matter more to different people.

Sometimes we have to force a particular way of doing things in Debian because we have a serious problem and we don't have another way of solving it. In those cases, we have to suck it up and live with the consequences, which may include losing volunteers. But we should do that carefully and selectively. I'm not sure pushing universal team maintenance on people who don't want it qualifies as careful or selective.