On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 08:08:57PM -0800, ken keanon wrote: > 1. The volunteers decided that there should be some financial reward for > their work. They could accept an offer by a well established enterprise to > 'buy' over their work or they could collectively decide to form a > corporation.
I am not a Debian developer, but it appears from my user perspective that a good portion of the work is taking upstream packages (software maintained by non-Debian people) and passing bug reports along, submitting patches, and repackaging the source files for the Debian distribution. I'm guessing there's a fair number of Debian developers who also spend time on KDE, Gnome, Apache, SAMBA, etc, but I would be guessing that most of them don't. Therefore, "buying their work" would be buying their services as a repackager, bug manager, and patch manager, coordinating patches and bugs with the upstream developers. Once a package has been released and distributed under the GPL, I do not believe that the license can be changed. Or atleast not without the consent of every single developer who contributed some portion of the source code. That might take awhile with some packages. =) > 2. Volunteers dwindle to an ineffective few, preferring to spend their time > on work with more reward and recognition. This is more realistic. But I think this would be a catastrophic case somewhere down the road. The Work-Needing and Prospective Packages page gives you an example of packages that need adopting: http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/work_needing http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned Regarding support, Debian has backing from several big names in technology, including Sun, HP/Compaq, VA Software, and Progeny: http://www.debian.org/misc/equipment_donations http://www.debian.org/partners Jeremy -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
