inamerrata

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.

I’ve added a list of both contributions and deductions to the market page, and as of the time of writing there’s been six contributions. The first was my initial “virtual” $50 to try and provide some scale to the donations, and so I wouldn’t have to worry about division by zero, either literally or figuratively. The first couple of days say a $2 donation (devalued to $1.63 thanks to Paypal’s handling fees), and the next week saw a $5 donation (devalued to $4.53 thanks again to Paypal). So about $3.08 a day, unless I want to actually get at the money, which would attract another $1 in fees. Mmm, the world of high low finance. (My understanding is that moneybookers is supposed to do a better job than paypal; the fees above would’ve been 7c instead of 84c for the transfers, and $2.89 instead of $1 for the withdrawal, though, so for amounts in that range, it’s not that much better)

That wasn’t entirely unsurprising; given I’d already seen the three eurocents offering in relation to Martin Krafft’s Debian book, or that there’s probably more interest in having me be a camchicken than work on backend Debian stuff (and that’s just continuing the fine tradition begun by the very same Michael’s dunk tank last year). The free beer element of free software tends to be more fundamental than people like to admit, and even in essays about how to put money into free software there’s usually a strong focus on making it clear we’re not talking about too much money.

Given that sort of expectations, those results aren’t too disappointing but they’re not enough to make the concept self-sustaining either, so on the weekend I decided I’d set a floor of $15 and if that wasn’t reached, just work on darcs hacking which (the way I do it, anyway) is a fun mix of free software and proofs involving set-theory. Sadly, or not, that floor’s already been beaten for this week, with a couple of donations of $10, appropriately modified by currency conversions and Paypal fees.

I’m not quite sure what “self-sustaining” actually is. I’m particularly interested in both markets and Debian, so putting the two together makes me overly inclined to be like the Playboy photographer of jest: “$500 a day, you say? How about $450 and I bring my own camera?” My guess is that $100 a week for a day/week’s work is probably the point at which there’d be some evidence of viability; though comparing that to either the $3 per week so far, or the amount “real” IT work pays, that might be a bit off — either being implausibly high, or still too low to really say anything.

Either way, we’ll see what it looks like in another couple of weeks, especially since this week’ll lift the average quite significantly. By that point, by the looks of things, I’ll have done a bit more work on dak. My top three items there are (a) get our revision control working again”, (b) do up a prototype “dak” super-script, so that you can say things like “dak ls” instead of “madison”, “dak process-unchecked” instead of jennifer, “dak gen-diffs” instead of “tiffani” and so on, and (c) implement SCC, ie the mirror split that’ll make it plausible to substantially increase the size of the complete Debian archive. Both the first two should be fairly easy, but the third is a fair bit more complicated. In particular, while we’ve got a fairly good general idea of what SCC involves, the particulars haven’t ever really been nutted out, and once that’s done and the appropriate scripts are finished and integrated, there’s intended to be a few weeks to allow mirror operators to work out what they want to mirror and, if necessary, reconfigure their scripts so they don’t end up running out of disk.

What that likely means is that once cvs and dak(1) are fixed up, SCC will remain on the dak list on an ongoing basis as it gradually gets put in place, rather than being crossed off as soon as I get to it. that’s something I’ve been trying to avoid to date, and it’s putting a little bit more pressure on the whole “market dynamic” thing than I’m entirely comfortable with while the market’s so small. Hence, I’m not sure how that’ll actually work out, but hey, the whole point of experiments is to find that out, no? So we’ll see what happens.

It would, of course, be particularly helpful if more folks would contribute. But then, I would think that, wouldn’t I? Feedback would probably be helpful too (and there’re even comment fields for both Moneybookers and Paypal in which to provide it! ;)