In September, the project leader, Anthony Towns, and a few other senior developers, decided to raise funds to pay volunteers who work on the project in order that the targeted release date of December 4 would not be missed.

Debian produces a quality distribution but has never managed to meet its own targets for release, except once in its 12-year existence. The last release, Sarge, took almost three years.

The fund raising was done under the name Dunc, which Towns told me then was "an acronym for 'Development Under Numismatic Control' - which could equally be called 'coin-operated coding'."

The Dunc proposal came up for discussion on various Debian mailing lists and some developers had strong objections. Led in the main by Joerg Jaspert, their main objection was about who would be paid and who would not. However, the project voted to let the proposal go ahead and Dunc was born. Standing behind it were Towns, Steve McIntyre, one of the founders of the Debian UK Society, Ted Ts'o, a founding member of the Free Standards Group and its current chairman, Joey Hess, a major Debian contributor for most of the 13 years of the project, and Raphael Hertzog, who has been a major part of the project's quality assurance efforts.

A decision was made to pay two people, Steve Langasek and Andreas Barth, to act as release managers for version 4.0. Each was to be paid a sum of $US6000. Now it appears that the delay in releasing version 4.0, codenamed Etch, is because some developers have adopted a go-slow. Barth wrote in his blog recently: "...there was a large disadvantage of the whole experiment: Some people who used to do good work reduced their involvement drastically. There was nothing I could do about, (sic) and that happened way before I started full-time on release, but on the global picture that still counts. So, as a first summary, I am happy with my own involvement, but that doesn't necessarily apply to the full experiment."