LĂ©opold Baillard leobaillard@fsfe.org
Maybe you've heard about Hugo Roy's wonderful initiative: Terms of Service - Didn't Read that he launched recently with Michiel de Jong and Jan-Christoph Borchardt. Their project aims at making you aware of what you agree to when you click without thinking on the "I accept the terms of service" on all the websites on which you have created an account. By rating them from A (good) to E (very bad), they help every one of us to actually now about what we are getting into.
Here is the website: http://tos-dr.info/.
I don't see much about free software on there. Some free software is mentioned briefly, under "No Class Yet".
The site itself claims to be free software (I have my doubts because it looks like a derived work of other peoples' terms of service, so wouldn't it be covered by their licences too? Which would probably be AGPL-incompatible, leaving an undistributable mess), but doesn't it mainly promote use of non-free software like Twitter at the moment?
These three people have lives and they do not allow them to contribute as much as they'd like to the project. That's why they want to raise money to be able to hire someone to help them.
"Hire someone" or "pay part-time and full-time expert curators". What's the business model? Where will the money go?
If they reach the 10k (euros or dollars - it varies depending where you look), that's a basic living wage for about 33 people-weeks. Even that's ignoring the costs of hiring people. So say they pay 3 curators, where one is full-time and two are 0.5-time. That's 16 weeks at most - and then what happens? Another begging bowl?
It's a great project in some ways, but I'd like to know there's a plan beyond burning 10k in maybe three months, else I feel there are better projects for the money.
Regards,