6 ms·

Handshake Donates $300k to Debian

192 points by edward 8y ago

whotheffknows 8y ago
Blockstack was also awarded equity. docs.blockstack.com
abhinai 8y ago
I think we all owe a lot to Debian. I know there are a lot of high quality distros out there but most silicon valley companies I know use either Debian or Ubuntu which is ultimately based on Debian. It is just that one never consciously thinks about Debian and Ubuntu as non-profit services they've been using unlike for example Wikipedia. We should change that!
- Operyl 8y ago
  Eh .. while Debian is non profit Canonical most definitely is not. While they reinvest a ton of their profits back into Ubuntu, as far as I know they’re still in it to make money.
  - magpi3 8y ago
    Debian is a non-profit, but it is also a volunteer run organization and many of those volunteers work at companies (Ubuntu being one of them) that are for profit and depend on the development of Linux for that profit.
  - tormeh 8y ago
    Kind of. I think Canonical is losing money on purpose, because Shuttleworth really likes the desktop Linux dream.
    - Operyl 8y ago
      They ended up turning a profit year after they dropped Unity and the team involved, I believe. But otherwise, Shuttleworth definitely does reinvest most of the profits.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
stdcli 8y ago
https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt <-- is good to read. Blockstack is in there. Handshake's security audit was also done by Zcash. If you look in the project info, they list all the info there.
metaphor 8y ago
Supposing there was such a thing, what would a Debian developer's hypothetical "billing rate" be? US$300k seems like it'll fund roughly 1 proper man-year while covering indirect costs and effectively zero profit margin.
- cerberusss 8y ago
  If you live in the US in a HCOL area, sure. Edit: after thinking about it, my comment is unfounded and probably nonsense.
  - metaphor 8y ago
    Might I ask how you came to that conclusion? My remarks assumed a rough US national average. The enterprise billing rate for top SV talent certainly exceeds ~$144/hr.
    - cerberusss 8y ago
      I made a guesstimate based on the rate of a US freelancer I employed in the past. However, I just checked his most recent bill, then multiplying that by ~1800 hours (1 year), indeed it almost hits the 300k. So I have to admit my comment doesn't make much sense.
      - metaphor 8y ago
        Thanks for the clarification. My estimate was based on 2080 hrs/yr; indirect costs such as insurance coverage, paid annual/sick leave, 401(k) matching, and operating costs that one might associate with a large software distribution. Probably worth noting that the average freelancer bills a lot lower than typical for-profit enterprise.
  - chronogram 8y ago
    You misunderstood. It’s the billing rate, not the salary that was asked about. Like when you call a plumber.
AdamGibbins 8y ago
There is a section on Handshakes site concerning this: https://handshake.org/faq#grants https://handshake.org/faq#grants
airnomad 8y ago
How we ended up here? Many of us make $100K+ per year yet important projects we use every day get little to no funding. It's Debian! And I'm as guilty as the next guy for not donating.
- toxicFork 8y ago
  There is one easy way to get rid of that guilt now. Have you donated yet?
  - maimeowmeow 8y ago
    He'd gonna hard pressed to find anything left over from a 100k salary lol. Sure you could give a few dollars here, and there but when the shit hits the fan, hes gonna wish he had those dollars over of eating the family pet, or leather accessories.
- alxlaz 8y ago
  I found out that a good way to make this easier is to donate when I get my annual bonus. It's not a lot, but then again, I'm a single person, and I'm a developer, not a company owner. I depend on open source projects to do my job, but I don't buy yachts with the money I make off FOSS software. I donate to a couple of projects that are helpful for me and to a few that I consider important on principle. It's a time of the year when I find it somewhat easier to part with a few hundred bucks -- plus it's bonus money, which I always leave out of any financial calculations, since you can't be 100% sure you're getting it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- black-tea 8y ago
  Just your standard human greed and selfishness. We're all trying to get more at the expense of other people. It's how we evolved.
runn1ng 8y ago
I am sad that the biggest donation to Debian is... a DNS-but-on-blockchain, in Javascript. (And with their own coin, of course.)
- ajvs 8y ago
  You're leaving out the fact that this eliminates the security mess that is the current DNS system which is so easily compromised by hacker groups and state actors. Blockchain is the perfect protocol for DNS since it's totally transparent and establishes consensus without blind trust.
  - lapinot 8y ago
    There is in fact blind trust in blockchains. It's blind trust in stone-written legislature that has the aim of being universal. You can't change what trust means, it's a highly complex concept which already has a meaning for individuals and groups, prior to any techno-financial objective/essential/analytic metric you map to it. BGP has understood that, SCP too. ssl/tls PKI also works that way although big corps effectively control the policy using large CAs and browser bundles. On the "dns" side, there is the gnunet name system which goes that way too [1]. Names and identities are always relative to a (tree of) policy and decentralization of control means that ultimately the root is you. Blockchains (quite well-defined by handshake actually, as crypto-financially incentivized strong consensus) take the incompatible route of making statements public and permanent (instead of gated and amendable) and conflating abstract protocol with concrete network (eg imposing a distinguished core policy). Blockchains may be participatory but they are totalitarian and authoritarian, they deny the possibility of local independence. It's "either you are us or you don't exist". It's authoritarian in the same way android permissions are (or were, i don't recall the specifics): either you accept all we ask or you don't install. There is no room for negotiation since the whole thing works as a monolithic black box and treats you as an outsider/client/consumer. I believe a core property for a decentralized naming protocol should be to stop trying to construct trust anchors and concrete network. Fluctuations and definitions of these trust anchors cannot be governed by tech, they will come out of meetings, social circles, interests, beliefs. As such the system should encourage that out-of-band behavior and make it easy to have the system controlled by the real-life status of these anchors and the scope of the networks. [1] A Censorship-Resistant, Privacy-Enhancing and Fully Decentralized Name System. Matthias Wachs, Martin Schanzenbach, Christian Grothoff.

192 points by edward 8y ago

Blockstack was also awarded equity. docs.blockstack.com

I think we all owe a lot to Debian. I know there are a lot of high quality distros out there but most silicon valley companies I know use either Debian or Ubuntu which is ultimately based on Debian. It is just that one never consciously thinks about Debian and Ubuntu as non-profit services they've been using unlike for example Wikipedia. We should change that!

Operyl 8y ago
Eh .. while Debian is non profit Canonical most definitely is not. While they reinvest a ton of their profits back into Ubuntu, as far as I know they’re still in it to make money.
- magpi3 8y ago
  Debian is a non-profit, but it is also a volunteer run organization and many of those volunteers work at companies (Ubuntu being one of them) that are for profit and depend on the development of Linux for that profit.
- tormeh 8y ago
  Kind of. I think Canonical is losing money on purpose, because Shuttleworth really likes the desktop Linux dream.
  - Operyl 8y ago
    They ended up turning a profit year after they dropped Unity and the team involved, I believe. But otherwise, Shuttleworth definitely does reinvest most of the profits.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

stdcli 8y ago

https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt <-- is good to read. Blockstack is in there. Handshake's security audit was also done by Zcash. If you look in the project info, they list all the info there.

metaphor 8y ago

Supposing there was such a thing, what would a Debian developer's hypothetical "billing rate" be? US$300k seems like it'll fund roughly 1 proper man-year while covering indirect costs and effectively zero profit margin.

cerberusss 8y ago
If you live in the US in a HCOL area, sure. Edit: after thinking about it, my comment is unfounded and probably nonsense.
- metaphor 8y ago
  Might I ask how you came to that conclusion? My remarks assumed a rough US national average. The enterprise billing rate for top SV talent certainly exceeds ~$144/hr.
  - cerberusss 8y ago
    I made a guesstimate based on the rate of a US freelancer I employed in the past. However, I just checked his most recent bill, then multiplying that by ~1800 hours (1 year), indeed it almost hits the 300k. So I have to admit my comment doesn't make much sense.
    - metaphor 8y ago
      Thanks for the clarification. My estimate was based on 2080 hrs/yr; indirect costs such as insurance coverage, paid annual/sick leave, 401(k) matching, and operating costs that one might associate with a large software distribution. Probably worth noting that the average freelancer bills a lot lower than typical for-profit enterprise.
- chronogram 8y ago
  You misunderstood. It’s the billing rate, not the salary that was asked about. Like when you call a plumber.

AdamGibbins 8y ago

There is a section on Handshakes site concerning this: https://handshake.org/faq#grants https://handshake.org/faq#grants

airnomad 8y ago

How we ended up here? Many of us make $100K+ per year yet important projects we use every day get little to no funding. It's Debian! And I'm as guilty as the next guy for not donating.

toxicFork 8y ago
There is one easy way to get rid of that guilt now. Have you donated yet?
- maimeowmeow 8y ago
  He'd gonna hard pressed to find anything left over from a 100k salary lol. Sure you could give a few dollars here, and there but when the shit hits the fan, hes gonna wish he had those dollars over of eating the family pet, or leather accessories.
alxlaz 8y ago
I found out that a good way to make this easier is to donate when I get my annual bonus. It's not a lot, but then again, I'm a single person, and I'm a developer, not a company owner. I depend on open source projects to do my job, but I don't buy yachts with the money I make off FOSS software. I donate to a couple of projects that are helpful for me and to a few that I consider important on principle. It's a time of the year when I find it somewhat easier to part with a few hundred bucks -- plus it's bonus money, which I always leave out of any financial calculations, since you can't be 100% sure you're getting it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
black-tea 8y ago
Just your standard human greed and selfishness. We're all trying to get more at the expense of other people. It's how we evolved.

runn1ng 8y ago

I am sad that the biggest donation to Debian is... a DNS-but-on-blockchain, in Javascript. (And with their own coin, of course.)

ajvs 8y ago
You're leaving out the fact that this eliminates the security mess that is the current DNS system which is so easily compromised by hacker groups and state actors. Blockchain is the perfect protocol for DNS since it's totally transparent and establishes consensus without blind trust.
- lapinot 8y ago
  There is in fact blind trust in blockchains. It's blind trust in stone-written legislature that has the aim of being universal. You can't change what trust means, it's a highly complex concept which already has a meaning for individuals and groups, prior to any techno-financial objective/essential/analytic metric you map to it. BGP has understood that, SCP too. ssl/tls PKI also works that way although big corps effectively control the policy using large CAs and browser bundles. On the "dns" side, there is the gnunet name system which goes that way too [1]. Names and identities are always relative to a (tree of) policy and decentralization of control means that ultimately the root is you. Blockchains (quite well-defined by handshake actually, as crypto-financially incentivized strong consensus) take the incompatible route of making statements public and permanent (instead of gated and amendable) and conflating abstract protocol with concrete network (eg imposing a distinguished core policy). Blockchains may be participatory but they are totalitarian and authoritarian, they deny the possibility of local independence. It's "either you are us or you don't exist". It's authoritarian in the same way android permissions are (or were, i don't recall the specifics): either you accept all we ask or you don't install. There is no room for negotiation since the whole thing works as a monolithic black box and treats you as an outsider/client/consumer. I believe a core property for a decentralized naming protocol should be to stop trying to construct trust anchors and concrete network. Fluctuations and definitions of these trust anchors cannot be governed by tech, they will come out of meetings, social circles, interests, beliefs. As such the system should encourage that out-of-band behavior and make it easy to have the system controlled by the real-life status of these anchors and the scope of the networks. [1] A Censorship-Resistant, Privacy-Enhancing and Fully Decentralized Name System. Matthias Wachs, Martin Schanzenbach, Christian Grothoff.