On 07/24/2013 11:35 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:

While I *am* pleased that you've given some real thought to this, I
think you may have missed the real point I was trying to make there,
which also ties back to the original purpose of that thread.

Fedora is hemorrhaging users to other distributions (and to
closed-source platforms). I tried to note that the people maintaining
the vast majority of the pieces that correspond to an "operating
system" in Fedora (loosely the Ring 0-2 pieces in that design) are
almost entirely Red Hatters. This information is based on admittedly
imperfect metrics (mostly dist-git commits), but even if it's off by a
15% margin of error, the contributions still have Red Hat in the vast
majority.

Hmm not following

On numerous occasion it has been stated that Red Hat employees are just like any other member of the Fedora community and should be treated as such with the only difference being that on their paycheck says Red Hat instead of <insert some other company ( so are you saying that is not the case?

And as such their in the case of the "bounty" donations would just be "bonus" to the existing salary as it might be for anyone else if that's what you are wondering.


The problem with crowdsourcing is that you have to have someone who
wants your product enough to pay money to see it happen.

That would be ourselves and user base as in our community and it's users but for something like this to work we cannot just copy/paste the concept as is and blindly apply to the project we need to adapt and adjust it to us.

 There are
definitely some pieces of your proposal that could be implemented
(I've been arguing for Bug/RFE bounties for the last five years, both
with Red Hat funding and later with crowdfunding). I'd really like to
see FESCo have the ability to set such bounties as a way to actually
influence direction in the project. So on this I agree wholeheartedly.

Unfortunately, the current Fedora user ecosystem *really* doesn't lend
itself to crowdfunding because the only significant community of
non-Red Hat contributors are those operating on the upper levels of
the stack (the application developers and the alternative desktop
developers, primarily). This tends to be a set of contributors that
are fickle in the platform they work on (especially since in many
cases, they are supporting multiple distributions already).

Here to me it's seems again that you implies that Red Hatters are "different" from other community members so it would be good if we can establish if that is the case or not.


In other words, if we switched to a crowdfunded model, the primary
contributions would *still* be coming directly or indirectly from Red
Hat. The only difference here is that now it would look like Red Hat
was taking a stealth role in Fedora's governance instead of standing
tall as its primary benefactor (and beneficiary).

I dont see how or why that has to be the case.

Are you implying in a such model we should keep our sponsor hidden instead of having something like a page with Platinum, Gold,Silver,Bronze for companies as is being done on flock and something similar as is being done on lwn as in "✭ supporter ✭" displayed next to our community members name everywhere where it's displayed in our infrastructure/web?


Also, you mention later in the thread about moving Fedora's name out
of the USA. Given the current US climate around "outsourcing", this
could be a significant legal hurdle and is probably not a fight worth
having right at this moment.

It has been mentioned to me privately in a mail and a on this thread that the us legal and tax system would be a stopper at least while Fedora was under the trademark.



tl;dr version: If we switched to a crowdfunding model, Red Hat would
still be the primary contributor and little would change.

Other for the fact that this would allow everyone to contribute to the project not just Red Hat which in turn would make us less depended on it ( or they spending money on us from their point of view ).

 I strongly
support opening up a donation program to support bug/rfe/design
bounties. I'd like to see that pool of money managed by FESCo.

Agreed although I'm unsure if FESCO should handle that process beside the obvious points of there might be conflicts of interest, they have enough on their plate as it seems so a special Financial SIG with representative from each sub-community ( with perhaps the exception of the service sub-communities which would just fall under whomever is in charge of the finance for the project ) might better fit.

 If
people want to donate to bounties for individual upstream projects,
it's probably better for them to do that directly.

I disagree we need to increase the number of contributors here within the project and sorry to say that but we cant do that if we forward everybody upstream ( which is one of the reason I have been so reluctant forward our QA community members directly upstream always ).

We also want to be the downstream distribution of chose for upstreams so we need to somehow make it attractive for them participate in the project and this could be one of those factors.

Bounty hunters they themselves could donate a portions of their bounty upstream themselves if they wanted to.

Ofcourse no bounty would be paid out until it has been accepted by upstream

JBG