5 ms·

I am currently unemployed/independently-wealthy/thrifter/bumming around the bay area. I love debian, and I sometimes joke that if there was such a thing as a mi

I am currently unemployed/independently-wealthy/thrifter/bumming around the bay area. I love debian, and I sometimes joke that if there was such a thing as a minimum wage dev job, I would gladly take it to get out of having to pass another technical interview :/ It would be neat if they could split the difference between free and real job, but I wonder if part of the reason they don't is that they want people who care unreservedly about values and code quality rather than people who need $500 a week?

neilwilson 6y ago
It is of course one of the problems a Federal Job Guarantee would solve. Clearly working full time on Debian is of value to society, a good use of time and clearly verifiable by committed contributions. Definitely worth the living wage.
- dmos62 6y ago
  Agreed that Debian provides (a lot of) value to society. The big question is why don't they have money to fund development? Disregarding the 900k mentioned, because it's not enough to pay everyone and it would be spent soon. In my opinion public infrastructure would ideally be maintained by states, not individuals or private companies.
  - indigochill 6y ago
    I may be jumping to conclusions here, but my first impression was you were suggesting that Debian is a public infrastructure, and that therefore in your opinion it would ideally be maintained by the state. I have a rather strong emotional reaction to this because to me a major reason for FOSS is to break the problem of perverse incentives that arise in corporate -and- government work. Governments want to control their populace. The NSA, for example, has made algorithm suggestions that would give them an easier time listening in on the world. And the US has prominent figures arguing for encryption backdoors that supposedly only the "good guys" would have the keys to. Which is to say nothing of governments that outright ban encryption. So I would be very skeptical of FOSS officially maintained by a government (though I suppose its open source nature would still be a point in its favor for the transparency).
    - dmos62 6y ago
      I understand the strong negative reaction; it's common. Thanks for taking the time to formulate a response. I thinks it's two different problems: maintenance and cleptocracy. For example, should the government maintain roads and bridges? It falls within the common good (public infrastructure) so using taxes for that makes sense. But, if the government has authority over the bridges, how to stop them from performing obligatory cavity searches (or some other bad thing) on people who use them? That's not a question of what the responsibilities or objectives of a government should be. The question is how to reform a hostile, cleptocratic government. I won't presume what context you're coming from, but I've noticed that in some cultures it's normal to think of the government as "them". For me it's "us". While someone from the former group might say "government does that", I'm inclined to say "we do that". My outlook seems to be more common in Europe than in US, I think. For me, using the government is the most direct and efficient way of maintaining FOSS, or doing anything that should be done by "us", as opposed to by "somebody". I see that as the purpose of governments. These FOSS projects spanning many borders makes things slightly harder, but that's just because we're not used to that kind of cooperation. In principle there's no reason multinational programmes for financing these things can't exist. Alternatively, make it difficult for states to use non-FOSS software. That way you'd redirect all that money being wasted on closed source.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - jopsen 6y ago
      Funding digital infrastructure through state sponsorship is hard. Because the industry moves fast and politics does not.. nor is politics particularly efficient, they just can't be experts on everything. Sponsoring large research projects might go along way though. > Governments want to control their populace. That's a pretty broad statement :) In my country we have free speech, and the state/government protects freedom of speech. Similarly, my government tend to promote human rights. I think that can still be said about the US too. No governments aren't perfect, but control is not their major concern.
  - kace91 6y ago
    > In my opinion public infrastructure would ideally be maintained by states There's no government layer at the level Debian operates. As pretty much everything internet based, its users ( and contributors) are international - which I think is the main reason why we don't see public alternative services to social networks, search engines, etc. China is a special case, since they explicitly would rather keep the userbase restricted to Chinese citizens.
    - sitkack 6y ago
      NSF, NIH There are tons of federal agencies that could sponsor FOSS. https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/ https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/ I'd love to see a program where FOSS devs could get say 2k-4k tax free per month depending on part or full time work. A billion a year would pay for just under 21k developer years or close to 42k part time devs. Federal, state and local governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount every year on proprietary, closed source software.
      - Matumio 6y ago
        > governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount probably not an integer, more likely an irrational number
        pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        Surely it's an actual currency amount, so it's not irrational. I'll accept it's unlikely to be an integer, but it should be a rational non-integer. But, perhaps you were joking and it's an 'irrational' amount?
      - hiram112 6y ago
        I don't know for sure how much the US government / DOD spends on RHEL licenses, but I've worked at plenty of contractors who were using it (and CentOS). I would be surprised if a significant amount of RHEL's revenues weren't from the federal government.
    - user99099 6y ago
- tennineeight 6y ago
  >clearly verifiable by committed contributions I'm afraid of this part gaining significance over other and its side-effects becoming main effects.
- reactormonk 6y ago
  > Federal Job Guarantee Job Guarantee isn't as good of an idea as you'd expect: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic-jobs-against-hijacking-utopia/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...
  - neilwilson 6y ago
    It's the only idea that works from the point of view of those growing and making your food and shelter. There is no magic porridge pot. Somebody has to make the stuff you want to buy, and they ain't going to waste their life making stuff for you if you're not doing anything in return. Why should they?
- throwawayinfo 6y ago
  Ugh, federal job guarantees don't work. Nothing in life is gauranteed.
belorn 6y ago
One model that is between a free and a real job would be a collective where housing, food, and internet is provided but not much else. Hacker spaces are also similar to this but in my experience rarely ever focus on system development, but instead more on hardware and hardware art.
ahelwer 6y ago
You'd probably be interested in part-time contracting. Set your own hours and rates. Often there's a small paid project in lieu of an interview. Lots of interesting projects are willing to shell out for a contractor that aren't willing to hire a full time employee.
nix23 6y ago
Maybe the FreeBSD Foundation is something for you, they Sponsor you so you can implement wanted stuff into FreeBSD (just an option not opinionated)
- trenchgun 6y ago
  Where can I read more about this?
  - nix23 6y ago
    https://freebsdfoundation.org/get-involved/project-proposal-overview/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/get-involved/project-proposal-...
- elipsey 6y ago
  Thanks for the tip!
sn 6y ago
I don't know Debian's specific history, but having participated in volunteer organizations, getting everyone to agree on how to spend money can be tricky. Personally I'd love to be making more open source contributions as well, and I've been thinking off and on about taking a sabbatical to make time for it, though that probably won't happen. I might be able to help find dev work for you that doesn't involve technical interviews, though it may not necessarily be a "job".

neilwilson 6y ago

It is of course one of the problems a Federal Job Guarantee would solve. Clearly working full time on Debian is of value to society, a good use of time and clearly verifiable by committed contributions. Definitely worth the living wage.

dmos62 6y ago
Agreed that Debian provides (a lot of) value to society. The big question is why don't they have money to fund development? Disregarding the 900k mentioned, because it's not enough to pay everyone and it would be spent soon. In my opinion public infrastructure would ideally be maintained by states, not individuals or private companies.
- indigochill 6y ago
  I may be jumping to conclusions here, but my first impression was you were suggesting that Debian is a public infrastructure, and that therefore in your opinion it would ideally be maintained by the state. I have a rather strong emotional reaction to this because to me a major reason for FOSS is to break the problem of perverse incentives that arise in corporate -and- government work. Governments want to control their populace. The NSA, for example, has made algorithm suggestions that would give them an easier time listening in on the world. And the US has prominent figures arguing for encryption backdoors that supposedly only the "good guys" would have the keys to. Which is to say nothing of governments that outright ban encryption. So I would be very skeptical of FOSS officially maintained by a government (though I suppose its open source nature would still be a point in its favor for the transparency).
  - dmos62 6y ago
    I understand the strong negative reaction; it's common. Thanks for taking the time to formulate a response. I thinks it's two different problems: maintenance and cleptocracy. For example, should the government maintain roads and bridges? It falls within the common good (public infrastructure) so using taxes for that makes sense. But, if the government has authority over the bridges, how to stop them from performing obligatory cavity searches (or some other bad thing) on people who use them? That's not a question of what the responsibilities or objectives of a government should be. The question is how to reform a hostile, cleptocratic government. I won't presume what context you're coming from, but I've noticed that in some cultures it's normal to think of the government as "them". For me it's "us". While someone from the former group might say "government does that", I'm inclined to say "we do that". My outlook seems to be more common in Europe than in US, I think. For me, using the government is the most direct and efficient way of maintaining FOSS, or doing anything that should be done by "us", as opposed to by "somebody". I see that as the purpose of governments. These FOSS projects spanning many borders makes things slightly harder, but that's just because we're not used to that kind of cooperation. In principle there's no reason multinational programmes for financing these things can't exist. Alternatively, make it difficult for states to use non-FOSS software. That way you'd redirect all that money being wasted on closed source.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jopsen 6y ago
    Funding digital infrastructure through state sponsorship is hard. Because the industry moves fast and politics does not.. nor is politics particularly efficient, they just can't be experts on everything. Sponsoring large research projects might go along way though. > Governments want to control their populace. That's a pretty broad statement :) In my country we have free speech, and the state/government protects freedom of speech. Similarly, my government tend to promote human rights. I think that can still be said about the US too. No governments aren't perfect, but control is not their major concern.
- kace91 6y ago
  > In my opinion public infrastructure would ideally be maintained by states There's no government layer at the level Debian operates. As pretty much everything internet based, its users ( and contributors) are international - which I think is the main reason why we don't see public alternative services to social networks, search engines, etc. China is a special case, since they explicitly would rather keep the userbase restricted to Chinese citizens.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    NSF, NIH There are tons of federal agencies that could sponsor FOSS. https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/ https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/ I'd love to see a program where FOSS devs could get say 2k-4k tax free per month depending on part or full time work. A billion a year would pay for just under 21k developer years or close to 42k part time devs. Federal, state and local governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount every year on proprietary, closed source software.
    - Matumio 6y ago
      > governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount probably not an integer, more likely an irrational number
      - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        Surely it's an actual currency amount, so it's not irrational. I'll accept it's unlikely to be an integer, but it should be a rational non-integer. But, perhaps you were joking and it's an 'irrational' amount?
    - hiram112 6y ago
      I don't know for sure how much the US government / DOD spends on RHEL licenses, but I've worked at plenty of contractors who were using it (and CentOS). I would be surprised if a significant amount of RHEL's revenues weren't from the federal government.
  - user99099 6y ago
tennineeight 6y ago
>clearly verifiable by committed contributions I'm afraid of this part gaining significance over other and its side-effects becoming main effects.
reactormonk 6y ago
> Federal Job Guarantee Job Guarantee isn't as good of an idea as you'd expect: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic-jobs-against-hijacking-utopia/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...
- neilwilson 6y ago
  It's the only idea that works from the point of view of those growing and making your food and shelter. There is no magic porridge pot. Somebody has to make the stuff you want to buy, and they ain't going to waste their life making stuff for you if you're not doing anything in return. Why should they?
throwawayinfo 6y ago
Ugh, federal job guarantees don't work. Nothing in life is gauranteed.

belorn 6y ago

One model that is between a free and a real job would be a collective where housing, food, and internet is provided but not much else. Hacker spaces are also similar to this but in my experience rarely ever focus on system development, but instead more on hardware and hardware art.

ahelwer 6y ago

You'd probably be interested in part-time contracting. Set your own hours and rates. Often there's a small paid project in lieu of an interview. Lots of interesting projects are willing to shell out for a contractor that aren't willing to hire a full time employee.

nix23 6y ago

Maybe the FreeBSD Foundation is something for you, they Sponsor you so you can implement wanted stuff into FreeBSD (just an option not opinionated)

trenchgun 6y ago
Where can I read more about this?
- nix23 6y ago
  https://freebsdfoundation.org/get-involved/project-proposal-overview/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/get-involved/project-proposal-...
elipsey 6y ago
Thanks for the tip!

sn 6y ago

I don't know Debian's specific history, but having participated in volunteer organizations, getting everyone to agree on how to spend money can be tricky. Personally I'd love to be making more open source contributions as well, and I've been thinking off and on about taking a sabbatical to make time for it, though that probably won't happen. I might be able to help find dev work for you that doesn't involve technical interviews, though it may not necessarily be a "job".