[Gnu-arch-users] andy and matthieu

[Thomas Lord]

Andy:

  That's cool (the $600/m on the table), and thanks, but we're still
  missing a vital ingredient: folk interested in/chartered
  to/incentivized for taking on the larger-grain hacking tasks.  To be
  clear, I'm not offering to go on a hacking jag for this -- I'm
  offering to architect, supervise, review, and advise.

  I'm suggesting realigning the incentive system from the dominant
  paradigm of ESR's CaTB.  In that paradigm, users and contributors
  barter political power and labor power for releases from a
  promiscuous maintainer.  User and contributor short-term needs are
  met in a cost effective way but to convert his acquired power to
  liquid capital the maintainer in that system has incentives at odds
  with the longer term interests of the users, contributors, FOSS
  community and, really, society at large.  It's an environmentally
  irresponsible way of doing business.

  I'm suggesting realigning the incentives system so that the project
  leadership role is more directly aimed at community, user, and
  contributor needs -- specifically, they pay directly for planning
  and coordination which directs labor they otherwise provide.

  So in that sense, it's a little off for you to offer payment for
  planning and coordination detached from the labor.

  I think it would make sense to restructure the offer/solicitation to
  more obviously sponsor someone to write, for example, the tagging
  tools taking into account the project management fees.  Canonical
  could have/can do(ne) something like that, saving money and obtaining 
  better results in the process.


Matthieu:

  > If you start redeveloping something now, then you have to realize
  > that you'll have to re-create a community. A community means
  > developers, co-operative users (people sending bug reports and
  > feature requests for example), and simply users.

  In a very abstract sense that's true but it doesn't have to mean
  the CaTB devil's bargain.  It is explicitly not my goal to extract
  political and labor power from the public at large.  I'd much rather
  just present, at some point, to the public at large an unambiguous
  gift of finished software that Just Works.   The CaTB observations
  about open source engineering techniques have some value in a
  strictly professional context but, aimed at the public, they are 
  a waste of time, and incitement towards bogus architecture, and a
  basis for classist exploitation and environmental destruction.
 

  > Today, people willing to contribute to a distributed RCS are
  > already contributors of, say, mercurial, bzr, git, monotone or
  > whatever. You'll have to convince them to swith from their project
  > to yours, which IMHO, you'll never manage to do.

  I only *have* to do that if my intention is to extract political
  and labor power from them for selfish personal gain.  I chose to
  not do so (although that's kind of moot when you've got Canonical
  spending tons of bucks to deprive me of the option to if I wanted 
  to).


-t