Re: On gifts, clean money and dirty money

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Thu, 20 Nov 1997, Ian Jackson wrote:

> When we are given a gift of money from someone either in connection
> with CD sales or from someone else, should they generally expect some
> specific consideration from us, other than things we were going to do
> anyway ?
>
> I think that the answer is clearly no.  We should not allow donations
> of money to warp our aims and actions.

i agree.

it worries me that all these donations are going to create a
stress over money which didn't exist before...and when people start
doing free software things for money rather than fun/joy/love/whatever
then the quality of their work will suffer (many motivational studies
show that rewards actually destroy motivation and can turn a pleasant
pastime into an unpleasant chore).

another problem is that, in my experience, political problems within
*ANY* group magnify 10,000-fold whenever there is any money involved.
I've seen too many good groups go bad because the focus shifted from
"doing stuff we're interested in" to "who has control of the money?".
I say burn the stuff or give it all away to charity if that ever looks
like happening to debian. what debian does is far more important than a
few thousand $ in the bank (or even a few hundred thousand if it ever
comes to that).  debian should aim to get rid of any surplus money as
quickly as possible so that we don't attact the kind of people who home
in on it like flies to shit.

(i'm not anti-money, btw. i like having lots of the stuff. it's useful.
i just don't want to see debian corrupted by it)


two points i'd like to make:

1.  if there are any strings attached we should simply refuse to
    accept the money. while it would be tempting to just 'take the money
    and run', it is impossible to do that and retain the high moral
    ground.

    this would be bad for two main reasons. firstly, it would tarnish
    debian's reputation. more importantly, it would change the way we
    think about debian. if we start thinking about debian as a scam of
    any sort then it will *inevitably* BECOME a scam.  I'd rather that
    debian were flat broke and struggling even to come up with domain
    reg fees...

    remember, our focus is NOT on the money.  if people want to give
    money to debian that's very nice but should not *EVER* be allowed
    to influence debian in any way.

2.  with any grant money which debian gives out, we should be very careful
    to avoid destroying the motivation of developers by turning it into
    a reward of any kind.  

    it should be 'seeding money' used to buy infrastructure which can
    be shared by all developers on the project concerned. e.g. hardware
    (a bigger hard disk for the primary dev machine, sample hardware
    for device driver authors, etc) or services (internet connection,
    virtual hosting, mailing lists, etc)

    if debian ever gets seriously rich from donations then we may want
    to consider funding full-time or part-time programming jobs so that
    people can write free software without having to worry about paying
    their rent - but this is unlikely to be a problem for a long time.
    Personally, i hope it's an issue we never have to deal with.

    I think we need to write up some 'debian grant guidelines'.


craig



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