"The idea of trying to fund Steve and Andi has been being 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.