[IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Am 17.05.2010 23:50, schrieb Jonas Smedegaard:
> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 12:43:19PM -0500, David Farning wrote:
>> One consideration is that these deployment specific issues are often
>> boring -- stuff like bug fixes.  As such we are paying the developers
>> the going rate rate for developers in their country or region.  This
>> brings three advantages:
>> 1. The deployment issues are fixed.
>> 2. These fixes are pushed upstream for inclusion into Sugar.
>> 3.  There is a growing pool of skilled developers, with knowledge of
>> how to work with the Sugar community, co-located with deployment
> 
> Another (quite related) consideration is the risk of discouraging
> similar volunteer efforts.  This brings (at least) two disadvantages:
>  1. Increasing the gap between developers and users.
>  2. Encumbering the project with (more) discrete communiction.

Luke raised similar concerns during the "Sugar Labs Budget" discussion
last April and I still stick to my reply from back then
(http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005028.html):

Quote from
http://mako.cc/writing/funding_volunteers/funding_volunteers.html:

"Done critically, creatively, and transparently, voluntary free software
projects can use money and paid labor to a tremendous benefit that only
magnifies their accomplishments."

I personally think this is something that Sugar Labs should be aiming for.

Also I think it's important to realize there's a difference between
paying development and paying developers. As a Sugar user I don't
particularly care about who commits the code or writes the documentation
as long as the job of fixing bugs and improving and advancing the
platform gets done.

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Derndorfer
co-editor, www.olpcnews.com
e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com