On Sat, Apr 04, 2015 at 12:30:29PM -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
Hi Felipe,
this is a long reply. Thanks for posting the link.
On Sat, 2015-04-04 at 08:06 -0300, Felipe Sanches wrote:
Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects Benjamin Mako Hill
I've got massive respect for Mako, we used to hang out at Grendel's back when he was here in Boston. But his above treatise is one sided. It goes to great lengths to explain why the organisational structures of projects should stay volunteer based (which I do agree with) but doesn't make it clear the difference between inderviduals, companies or the stratification of organisation as projects interact.
There's some good observations in there - of particular note:
Another related model is to pay programmers to do work that participants recognize that no volunteer can do... Features that have remained on a todo-list and that are widely recognized as important are good candidates for strategic funding. Widely advertising feature requests and then only funding unimplemented requests can also be effective. However, each these suggestions can run the negative risk that people not fix a problem or address an important issue if they think that, eventually, they or someone else might get paid to do it.
In the Inkscape funded development model, we have a deliberate delay put in between when a proposal is made, and when it can be funded, for precisely this reason.
Nor does the work touch one two important factors that Free Software projects fail to address; one being the commercial vacuum left to be filled with less trustworthy and reputationally unstable organisations. Gnu and the FSF fall massively in this camp.
I'm starting to come around to this belief myself. There exist niches where Inkscape could play a huge role, but we don't have the resources to establish Inkscape there ourselves. This leaves a vacuum that can be exploited by hucksters and scammers to take advantage of people.
Bryce
And the one I'm most concerned with which is User Involvement.
We damn our users when we don't provide them with a meaningful way for their contributions to be effectively utilized in the project. Not only do we say that the majority of our users shouldn't help, but that they shouldn't really have any sort of say in how things are done. Because the only thing we're interested in is Time. If you've got time, then you've got a say. Inkscape is actually much better than a lot of projects when it comes to listening to users, it's just not yet the sort of project that connects with users.
So getting back to the original issues of paying volunteers. Paying someone changes their relationship, if I pay Bryce to do something, then our relationship changes somewhat. If Inkscape pays Bryce, then that relationship changes from volunteer to contractor or possibly employee. So the dangers are we can't have huge vendors employing everyone because that imparts control away from the project's volunteer leadership and we can't have InkscapeTheProject simply hiring or paying people without loosing that volunteer relationship.
The Project has wisely consented to spending money on events first. It's a good way to limit the amount of relationship changing effect it has.
But that doesn't mean we won't be looking for and exploring the many new methods of both raising money, involving users and spending it on people's labour. Because we do our Free Software industry no favours by not exploring the different mechanisms to improve how and /why/ we do these projects.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
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