Paying (some) Debian developers

In an offshoot of the Debian discussion we looked at last week, the Debian project has been discussing the idea of paying developers to work on the distribution. There is some history behind the idea, going back to the controversial Dunc-Tank initiative in 2006, but some think attitudes toward funding developers may have changed—or that a new approach might be better accepted. While it is playing out with regard to Debian right now, it is a topic that other projects have struggled with along the way—and surely will again.

The discussion on the debian-devel mailing list about possibly recommending dh for building packages that we covered headed into a bit of a tangent on "difficult packaging practices" that might be preventing new people from contributing. From there, Andreas Tille brought up the longstanding idea of creating some kind of Debian equivalent to the Ubuntu personal package archives (PPAs). Raphaël Hertzog suggested that it might be worth using some of the money in the Debian bank account to fund the development of such a feature. That began the debate.

Inevitably, the Dunc-Tank episode was raised, but Hertzog thinks that attitudes may have changed over the 13 years since then:

He noted that some developers are being paid now to work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) project under the auspices of Freexian, which is a company that he founded to provide Debian services to companies. Based on that, "with appropriate rules, the social impact of the use of money is acceptable", he said. So he thought it might be time to create some kind of framework within Debian to fund projects that are important to the project but are not progressing via volunteer efforts.

But others were not so sure that the example of the reaction to the LTS initiative is quite as sweeping as Hertzog said. Holger Levsen said that the LTS project is set up quite differently than the Dunc-Tank was; in particular, all of the money that goes to developers on the LTS project is handled completely outside of the Debian project. That makes a big difference, he said. Paul Wise also thought that there was a much wider range of reactions to the LTS project than "acceptance" as Hertzog said. Wise had some concerns about how Freexian operated the project, and its relationship with Debian, but naturally Hertzog disagreed with many. Debian project leader (DPL) Sam Hartman thought that many of the concerns Wise raised could be handled in a straightforward manner on an as-needed basis.

At that point, Hartman moved the discussion to the debian-project mailing list ("where it belongs") and asked for a volunteer to help "guide a discussion of the Money issues Martin [Michlmayr] brought up in his campaign". Michlmayr was another DPL candidate in the election that Hartman won; Michlmayr raised the issue in his platform, some of which we covered back in March.

Hartman asked for a rundown on the Dunc-Tank initiative in order to try to understand its ramifications. Though Ian Jackson was not thrilled about rehashing old history, he did provide a summary of how it played out; essentially, it was controversial because it tried to straddle the line between being a Debian project and being one that was outside of the project's purview. Levsen concurred with Jackson's recounting.

In his message moving the thread, Hartman mentioned two separate $300,000 donations to the project in the last year, one of which was earmarked for hardware upgrades as part of the project infrastructure that is overseen by the Debian system administration (DSA) team. That upgrade might overrun the earmark as it may require as much as $400,000. But that still leaves up to $200,000 that could potentially be used for funding something.

Adrian Bunk is looking for more detailed financial information: "it is impossible to start the budgetary discussion you are asking for without the status quo of the Debian finances as a basis". Hartman agreed that there was a need for that kind of report, but someone would need to volunteer to do it. Meanwhile, though, he thinks the high-level discussion about paying people to work on Debian could still be had.

But Bunk thinks that figuring out how to fund any work needs to proceed before getting to the other stuff, because he considers that to be the most controversial part. Russ Allbery disagreed, though; he thinks the most controversial piece is likely to be which projects and developers to fund (or not fund).

There are also considerations regarding having to "fire" a developer who does not perform or encountering quality problems in the code that they produce, he said. For an effort like LTS, where the project does not hold the purse strings, that all works much more smoothly; someone could be "fired" from Debian LTS work and still continue working on Debian as whole. Beyond that, LTS is focused in an area that Debian had decided not to pursue on a purely volunteer basis. Allbery continued:

Ximin Luo noted that there are already some who are paid to work on Debian full time, though not by the project; he wondered if it made sense to broaden that:

Turning it over to a "democratic mandate" has a certain appeal at a philosophical level, Allbery said, but there are still a lot of problems to work through, including the inequalities in the cost of living in various places—and the expected compensation levels that engenders. In addition, money makes things complicated: "Money ranks right up there with politics and religion as likely to cause the most drama, the most hard feelings, and the most misunderstandings."

Luo acknowledged that there are problems to be worked out, but "progress isn't made by worrying about all the things that could possibly go wrong". Figuring out a way to organize a large-scale work effort via democratic principles "would have lots of benefits far beyond this project". There are risks, he said, but maybe a 25-year old project that has stayed roughly static in terms of developer numbers for the last ten years might be the right place to inject some risk.

While Allbery does not think developer funding is the right approach for Debian, he does admit that he might be wrong about that—and it is a worthy problem to solve, as Luo pointed out. Allbery worries that the Debian community is fragile, but the larger issue is a potent one:

Ondřej Surý suggested looking at the way the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) handles funding (in particular, RFC 4071) as a potential model for Debian. Hartman said he had worked with the IETF along the way; he described some of the kinds of positions that are funded by that organization and mapped them to Debian roles. He agreed with many of Allbery's concerns but thought that fixed tasks that are not part of the core of what Debian does (e.g. revamping the web site) might make good candidates.

Bunk said that he believes the right kind of work for the project to fund would fall under the category of work that most will not do unless they are paid. "My personal experience with real-life self-organizing projects is that the hardest part is usually finding volunteers who clean the toilets daily." Allbery agreed that janitorial work might make a reasonable choice for tasks to fund, and alleviate many of his concerns, but he also elaborated some on his earlier point about corporate influence on Debian's direction:

No real conclusions were reached, though there was common ground here and there. In Debian terms, perhaps that really means that "further discussion" is required. The issues are certainly complex and there are, mostly, only guesses as to the impact any particular path might have. If there were a clear and obvious target project, with a well-defined scope, it might be possible to see Debian funding it (somehow through the general resolution process), but nothing of that sort has (yet) been proposed it seems.

Bunk's point about financial transparency is also salient; it would be hard for some to vote for any kind of funding proposal without having a clear view of what its impact on the project's cash reserves would be. But how to fund free-software projects is an open question these days, as Allbery pointed out. Should Debian find a way forward, it would certainly be a boon for the rest of the community as well.