LWN: Comments on "Paying (some) Debian developers"

Paying (some) Debian developers

sumanah — Sun, 14 Jul 2019 18:08:43 +0000

Thanks for the roundup. Looking forward to seeing this progress.

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.

I'm curious what the well-scoped Debian TODOs are (maybe something having to do with the Python 3 migration?). I wonder whether some funders could potentially find an infrastructure software project to fund (as Canonical did with GNOME's bugtracker).

Paying (some) Debian developers

ovitters — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 09:29:33 +0000

I think internships is a good way to attract long term. It's not a easy thing to do for a project; you need mentors and these mentors need to have a lot of free time.

Paying (some) Debian developers

shiftee — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 08:29:23 +0000

I think a nice option for spending money in FOSS projects would be to sponsor internships similar to GSOC.

It's not a recurring expense and brings in new contributors

Paying (some) Debian developers

amworsley — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 05:34:29 +0000

There are a lot of bug bounty programs these days.
Besides finding bugs - perhaps as part of new development work/tasks can be put
forward and if there are no volunteers after a certain time point bids could be invited?

Non DDs may be invited to bid with DDs reviewing and evaluating the work.

The idea being it is just an additional option to the current system rather than trying to replace existing procedures. It could open up the Debian development
work to many other non DD developers. Such work would lead to more people
skilled in DD and perhaps to more DDs as a side benefit.

Then again perhaps such work could be run through the debian mentors as volunteer
work as well?

https://mentors.debian.net/

I doubt it would ever get so far as forming a DD career path though. :-)