[Members] Re: disconnect from board to active developers

[Egbert Eich]

Alex Deucher writes:
 > 
 > I haven't seen the budget numbers so I don't know how realistic this
 > would be, but would Xorg ever consider directly funding the
 > development of new drivers or significant infrastructual updates?  For
 > example xrandr++ or a real FB manager may have happened years ago if
 > it had been funded.  I don't want to take away from individual
 > contributors, but most of us only work on X in our spare time so it
 > often takes a big ouside contribution or a long period to time for
 > major needed changes to happen.

Hi Alex,

If you talk to some of the old guys they will explain to you that
funding development in a free software project has caused things
to deteriorate in the X Consortium.
I'm sure Jim Gettys can give you more input here.
The problem here is that it will create a two class society. The
ones who are directly paid for the work they do, and those who do 
it either on somebody elses funds or in their spare time.
If X.Org sponsors a certain development it would want to see its
work included. Therefore there would be a great push for this work
taking precedence over a competing solution or some other work
that is incompatible. 
The contributions from the community would be second class, the
focus would be on what's paid for.
What would happen? The community would not accept this and start 
to run away. In the case of X.Org people wouldn't even have to run 
far - everything is hosted on freedesktop.org already.
This is different when some work is contributed by somebody from
outside. The 'battle' would be carried out between two sides
which contribute. At some point the commuity of the developers would
decide among themselves.
Therefore it has been policy of X.Org to stay away from funding 
development work itself - although this issue has been brought up
to the Board before.

This however does not mean that X.Org should not fund any work that
would aid the communtiy but for which nobody has volunteered if the
goal and the steps achieving this goal could be well defined and 
after a consensus about this is reached.
One such thing that Jim Gettys is advocating is the conversion of
the many - sometimes strange - documentation formats we can find
in the source tree to one modern documentation format which can
serve as a basis for preparing documentation for different purposes
and devices.

Cheers,
	Egbert.