The heated Dunc debate

Creating Dunc-Tank has not been without heated exchange within the Debian Project.

"The idea of trying to fund Steve and Andi has been discussed on debian-private (our developer only list) for just under a month now. It's been pretty controversial, attracting both some strong support and some strong objections," said Towns.

Some of that conjecture has been about it ruining the volunteer nature of the Debian project.

Towns disagreed. He said Dunc-Tank is a very new project and also quite small whereas Debian is well-entrenched and very strong.

"It might turn out that Dunc-Tank is incompatible with Debian, and that's one of the reasons it's been quarantined into a separate group rather than being run as an experiment within Debian, but I personally don't think it will."

But if pledges of money are an indication, then support is pretty sound for the Debian experiment.

Towns said a number of the people who supported the Dunc idea as discussed on the debian-private list have pledged money.

However, he said he was unsure of the amount of money needed in order for etch to be released on time.

"The answer might be that no money is needed -- we are already doing very well at meeting etch's deadline, and it might be enough to just keep doing what we have been [doing]," he said.

"I think that having our release managers available essentially full time over [the] final two months should be a major benefit, but we'll need to keep evaluating that as we proceed.

"From the interest amongst existing developers we've had enough pledged for Steve to be able to commit to giving the idea a try."

Incidentally, as the Debian project is an association of individuals and not a for-profit organisation, there is no formal association with Dunc-Tank. Consequently, Dunc is not endorsed by Debian. However, Dunc consists entirely of Debian users who all share the common goal of bettering the distribution.

This is also not the first time developers have been paid to work on Debian. Towns said Debian founder Ian Murdock's initial efforts was sponsored by the Free Software Foundation. HP has also sponsored much of the work done to include the ia64 and hppa ports in Debian, while students were recently funded by the Google Summer of Code to contribute to Debian.