Re: [Linux-aus] Grant Scheme: libferris, evolution and libxml

[Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>]

Jeff Waugh wrote:
> [ My opinion: I think LA should avoid "writing code" grants, unless such a
> grant would directly benefit the Australian FOSS community in some way.  So
> it would exclude "writing random feature" grants, while leaving room for LA
> related code projects (memberdb, stuff like that) and the more obvious
> facilitation grants (hardware, travel, subscriptions to journals, etc). ]

Personally, I think that's pretty entirely backwards: sending someone to 
a conference, or getting twelve issues of Linux Journal, or having a 
voting system seems a lot less valuable to the Australian FOSS community 
than having an additional couple of Australians doing some serious 
hacking on some useful free software and getting paid for it.

Encouraging people in Australia to hack on free software in general, and 
for personal gain, seems entirely within LA's charter. Certainly the 
whole idea warrants some care -- try to pay what people deserve, and the 
money'd be gone in five seconds; try to pay current market rates, and, 
well, the money just continues to sit there and Canonical gets to keep 
employing cheap offshore labour whose specific skills aren't in much 
demand. :) Likewise there needs to be some balance between giving out 
chunks of cash for code no one will ever use anyway, versus sending all 
the money to Linus and Tridge.

The folks behind Google's Summer of Code, LinuxFund, bounty-hacker.org, 
the Gnome Bounties, the Ubuntu Bounties all seem to agree with the 
general concept too.

Cheers,
aj