Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 07/23/2013 09:50 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> Earlier this evening I was asked how I expected Fedora to function
> in any way similarly to how it does now without the backing of one
> or more organizations like Red Hat.
> 
> I gave the quick answer  "through donations" since I was not in
> mood to give the detailed answers ( and taint that thread even
> further ) however I'm about do it here to certain extent since the
> questioner probably did not expect me to have actually given this
> any thought which I actually have although I have not chiselled it
> into stone, making it the concrete proposal the community demands
> since it's just a small fraction of a larger idea or rather vision
> I have but I have decide it be the correct time to share that part
> of that vision of mine with the rest of the community to gather
> feedback.
> 


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.

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

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).

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.


tl;dr version: If we switched to a crowdfunding model, Red Hat would
still be the primary contributor and little would change. 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. If
people want to donate to bounties for individual upstream projects,
it's probably better for them to do that directly. That would probably
be a better experience on both sides (and lends itself to forging a
closer relationship between the two projects).
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