Tue, 18 Oct 2005
Hrm, I’m going a bit single issue; I should fix that. But not right now.
So it’s been a couple of weeks since I first posted about my little market experiment, which seems as good a time as any to take a look at how it’s working out. On the one hand it’s going fairly well; it’s pleasing to finally have tiffani done, and I’m pretty satisfied with how usercategories have turned out, and Joey Hess has started using them for the copious bugs the debian-boot team have to deal with, providing both an archfirst ordering and a categorised ordering for the by-maintainer views.
Of course, creating those views didn’t turn out as straightforward as it should have, and ended up involving fixing quite a few bugs in my initial implementation of usercategories (and, happily, coming up with a more pleasant algorithm for handling the ordering specification in request@ mails). There were a few bugs introduced for people who didn’t use usercategories that turned up as a result of their implementation which also needed fixing.
To me, though, the striking difference between taking a “volunteer” attitude to Debian and a “professional” was in how long it took usercategories and tiffani to go from conception to implementation. I don’t think they’re terribly different in complexity; there’s a mental leap in working out what you want to do (people have been thinking about making Packages files faster to download for years, and using ed diffs isn’t particularly obvious; likewise I’ve been thinking about generalising the categories the BTS shows you since I started playing with debbugs in ‘99 or so, but usercategories didn’t really come together even as an idea until debconf this year), but given that, the actual implementation for both ideas requires a little care, but doesn’t have all that many twists and turns. The result? tiffani, the amateur project, took three and a half years to do; usercategories, the amateur project treated professionally, took two months.
So on that score, this still seems completely worth doing. On the other side of the scale, there’s been people’s interest in actually contributing. Which seems as good a place as any for a fold.
Tue, 04 Oct 2005
Where to begin?
One of the things that’s most struck me about Ubuntu is how far it’s progressed with little more than Debian as a base, some reasonable cash to cover a professional level of work, and some dedication to promoting itself and community building.
As an experiment, in July, August and September I tried doing something similar with debbugs – ie, actually committing myself to spend some real time on it as a professional (which I guess ended up being a day or two a week on average, but was still fairly irregular unfortunately), and promoting it both by giving a talk about it at debconf, and involving more people in its development and trying to get some of the feature requests that’d been hanging around finished with so we could move on to new stuff.
I think that’s actually had pretty impressive results – there’s a lot more interest, some fairly serious improvements in both its look an functionality, and for a project that’s been essentially moribund for half a decade, it’s even gained a little momentum. If I hadn’t already been amazed by how well Ubuntu’s done with relatively little effort, I’d’ve been utterly shocked, and heck, maybe I am even so.
Of course, the problem with this is that it really does rely on some real, professional-level commitment; it’s hard to be enthusiastic and active if you’ve just had a stressful day doing paying work, and it’s hard to be responsive if your Debian time doesn’t have any set schedule, and ends up competing against other hobbies, like sleep. But on the other hand, dedicating 40% of your potential income to free software isn’t really something that’s that easy to justify on an ongoing basis, unless perhaps you’re already ridiculously wealthy, or comfortably retired. Even Richard Stallman has a couple of awards worth a few hundred thousand each, to justify his time spent.
Adding this and my relatively recent fascination with market dynamics, I’ve been pondering over the last few weeks whether it’s not worth taking my longstanding amenability to bribes a little more seriously, and trying to construct a real justification for treating Debian work as a professional venture rather than an entertaining hobby that lets me see the world, both virtually, and occassionally for real.
Hence, the AJ market.
The idea is I dedicate some real time to work on free software, and you contribute money to tell me what’s worth working on.
I think it makes sense from both a “free software” point of view, and an “economics” point of view. On the free software side, it avoids getting entangled with proprietary software, promotes development, and provides an easy way to ensures my “users” are actually my priority without giving up my judgement on what’s actually a sensible way of doing things. On the economics side of things, for the time being at least the supply side’s okay, since at worst, I’m willing to throw away some time to see how this works out, and on the demand side, there seem to be enough people who think I should be doing more work on one area or another, that some of them might think that’s worth more than just talking about it. In theory, one or two hundred folks liked what I do for Debian enough to vote for me as DPL, I guess it’ll be interesting to see if that translates to cash rewards. :)
Anyway, that’s the theory. There’re a reasonable number of links from the market page to explanatory stuff, but if that’s too complicated I guess the simple summary is something like this: work on debbugs makes fixing bugs in Debian easier; work on dak makes organising Debian easier; work on britney makes releasing Debian easier; work on debootstrap makes installing Debian easier; work on ifupdown makes networking Debian machines easier.
I’ve also added a little chart on my blog, for those of you who don’t get this via RSS. No more Google ads or paypal buttons.