Thanks for the responses!
So if we wanted to test the waters with this, lets look at ~80-ish hour reserve for a year and see how it goes.
Let’s go this route as a first step, then adjust the hours required.
Bugfix releases should be somehow “included” in the RM work for major/minors, however due to the nature of our upmerge strategy that all following bugfix releases of higher minor versions will also include bugfix releases of the lower maintained versions, we could argue that we add 1/3rd of bugfix release spending to the work of each major/minor release.
So a major would come at an expense of 40 + 40/3 ~ 54 hours and each minor at 16 + 40/3 ~ 30 hours.
So what rate would be applied?
100€ sounds ok for me.
Should we fund the whole effort or only partially?
So that would mean full - as in the the full estimated effort. RMs decide how to split the reimbursable effort.
What if a release turns out to be specifically complicated?
Additional effort necessary beyond the estimates could be requested on a per case basis and decided on.
That leaves the other, more philosophical questions:
What will be the effects? RM optimizing for small releases to stay below the granted blanket effort hours, pushing features to next release? Will this put more pressure on new people, because they get payed for doing something they feel insecure about?
I’d settle with good faith, which is our fundamental believe, on the first one, but the second one I’m unsure about.