Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 14:34:13 +0100 (CET) From: Mikael Karpberg <karpen@ocean.campus.luth.se> To: jak@cetlink.net (John Kelly) Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Donations. Message-ID: <199803051334.OAA22226@ocean.campus.luth.se> In-Reply-To: <3505f27d.44276580@mail.cetlink.net> from John Kelly at "Mar 5, 98 00:38:07 am"
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According to John Kelly:
> I'm not asking volunteers to do anything. I'm proposing a model which
> may *possibly* attract enough money to create an organization which
> can affort to hire administrators to handle those chores, and pay the
> coders for what they do best.
>
> Think in terms of a $10,000,000 (or more) budget per year and you will
> begin to see the light.
Here's a few tips:
Jordan doesn't want more work.
Lots of people work on FreeBSD because they don't get paid. THey have no
boss that is breathing down their neck, or making them work on something
they don't want to.
FreeBSD is not a democracy. It's a kingdom with Jordan at the throne, and
a group of nobleties around him. They make the decissions on what
happens to the FreeBSD project and not. The thing happen to be that
there guys are mostly a very nice group of people who like people to
come and "live in their country". They tend to therefor listen to
the peasants, and they encourage attempts to improve the "kingdom".
No one of forced to stay, but people move in from everywhere because
they think it's a nice place. The powers that be are trusted and
supported, and tend to make very sane decissions. That's why I stay.
Your system has clearly been voted down, and it will not happen. Just
face it and move on. Please DO send you money, but don't expect them
to end up where YOU want them. Expect them to end up where ther are
most needed, for the FreeBSD in general.
So this is what you do: Start an organisation.
You make a nice webpage, and start a mailinglist for "members only".
You convince our beloved webmaster to add a link to your site from the
main FreeBSD webpage to attract more corporations to your page.
You charge something like $500 (or voluntarily more)/year for membership.
Members get a vote for thier $500, and get so be on the mailinglist.
For every time they double the money they give to the origanisation per
year, they get another vote.
You collect all the money, you handle the administration of that and the
voting.
Depending on the amount of money you raise, the top voted for projects
are funded. This is done by simply hiring one or more well known
FreeBSD hackers as consultants and making them carry out the coding,
after the usual discussion on the normal FreeBSD lists, and/or
discussions with the core team, so you don't end up making deadend
developments.
If stuff are rejected as is, discuss a way to get as much as possible
into the source, and keep the rest available as easy to install extra
patches that people that need them can download and use.
As projects are done, or partly done they are submitted the normal route
and very likely included in the FreeBSD main source.
Maybe you donate some of the funds with no strings attached to
FreeBSD, Inc.
Provide whatever else in extra-value that your member corporations wants.
And there... Your dream come true. And I'm sure you'd even be encouraged
by everyone using FreeBSD. If you pull this off, nothing will change from
the current state of things, except that eventually we will see large
chunks of code supplied from your little group of coders incorporated
as the core team sees fit into the main FreeBSD source, just like any
other patch. Hopefully you can attract corporations that today are not
giving anything in form of funds to the FreeBSD project and that could
very well be interested in a rather expensive membership in your
organisation to help further development in one of the products they use.
Maybe it would even help on the "how to name the bill so the management
stays happy"-problem for some.
Now, what are you waiting for?
/Mikael
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