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.
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. 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