Re: [gentoo-project] Fundraising for incremental service level

[Michał Górny]

On Fri, 2020-07-17 at 02:04 +0100, Andrey Utkin wrote:
> Summary:
> Could we please look for the possibilities to deliver more, given extra reward
> from users interested in that happening?
>
>
> There are many good motivations to contribute to FOSS, and the fact that
> somebody contributes means some motivation is in place. But given stable
> motivation and real life arrangements, the level of effort would stay in some
> predictable range - there is some optimum, where contributing either more or
> less hurts some needs of the contributor.
>
> But what if contributing more than usual would be rewarded more than usual?
> For example, a person with a flexible job schedule may be willing to switch to
> 4 workdays week and spend one full day each week contributing, given reasonable
> remuneration - not necessarily equal to their employer's rates, but not peanuts.

Three grumpy notes for a start:

1. So far 'more than usual' tends to get punished.  There are developers
who believe that if you manage more time to contribute than he does, you
get unfair advantage at shaping the distribution over him.  You gotta
convince them for a start.

2. Are developers hired to work full-time on Gentoo going to qualify for
the extra money too?

3. Ideas like this tend to get rejected because people are concerned
about some people arbitrarily deciding who gets the money, and who
doesn't, and other people disagreeing with their decisions.  Just think
of the one developer who used to do a lot of work, and then people had
to spend twice as much time fixing it.

> I think if we find such possibilities - the levels of service quality which
> we're not going to meet given the status quo, but which we're going to meet
> fairly confidently given funding - some of these would be interesting enough to
> wide users community to fund them.

I'm sorry but I have no clue what this means.  Could you translate it
from marketing to English?

>
> The idea of crowdfunding major projects has been brought up in 2015, and
> unfortunately it hasn't turned into action:
> https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/0f35aba409bc64e539a88895bfe6cc42
>
> If you are a member of some projects within Gentoo:
>
> Do you know some specific promises, or service level or quality criteria which
> it makes sense to meet but which you don't consistently achieve because of
> resource constraints?

We could start with thousands of bugs that get ignored.  With
the recent effort by ago, I don't manage to fix even trivial issues
immediately (as I used to) and instead do a few recent dev-python/ bugs
every day.

> Do you believe the goals of your project really matter for quality of life of
> real users so that they'd give non-zero amount of money for this criteria to be
> consistently met (as opposed to current inferior quality)?
>
> If yes, why not try fundraising to ensure that such a higher quality bar is
> met, say, throughout the next year?

Could you elaborate a bit on what kind of fundraising do you mean?  Are
you talking of asking for donations earmarked for a specific project,
and distributed by Foundation afterwards?  Or dedicated to specific
developers?

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny