[Members] Re: disconnect from board to active developers

[Keith Whitwell]

Daniel Stone wrote:
> Hi Alex,
> 
> On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 04:12:21PM -0400, Alex Deucher wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Personally, I'd be extremely wary of anything like this.  To avoid the
> perception of just giving money to your mates (even if it's completely
> above-board, it does set a precedent that could be abused later), it
> would need to be:
>   - not a full-time stipend,
>   - covered by a mound of paperwork, including regular status work,
>   - subject to regular overview,
>   - something the community unanimously agrees on.
> 
> However, there are some very important projects that just don't get the
> attention we need; the corporate body of support is quite narrow, as
> opposed to the extremely broad attention that projects like GNOME get,
> and we don't have enough hackers to have a kernel-like system either.
> 
> So getting some of the talented community hackers working on projects
> through part-time funding certainly isn't the worst idea ever.  But it
> would take quite a lot to win me over at this stage.
> 
> If you have a good idea, please submit a convincing proposal to the
> board.  It would, however, require strong support from the board, and
> basically unanimous support from the active community members, so we
> don't fall into the pit of favouritism/nepotism/whatever.
> 
> I do sympathise with you, though; it's extremely frustrating to see some
> very promising projects drop away because the authors didn't have time,
> or because the company has changed priorities, or something similar.
> Unfortunately the bounty programs that were run in GNOME, Debian and
> Ubuntu (among others) a while back seem to have basically been an abject
> failure[0], because being able to pay small amounts of money (generally
> less than €500) to see important work done is a great idea.
> 
> Cheers,
> Daniel
> 
> [0]: Because I think it's fundamentally the wrong model.  Most people
>      aren't drive-by hackers: either they will write on it anyway, or
>      need money to live on so they can give up their part-time job
>      that's getting them through uni, or whatever.  Bounties don't
>      provide enough money, but they do unfortunately get a lot of people
>      interested who can't follow through.  The failure rate was
>      extremely high.
> 
>      I was funded by LinuxFund to do the modularisation work between
>      January and July 2004.  It wasn't a massive salary, and I certainly
>      worked more than the 20 hours a week, but having only that and uni
>      to take care of -- no other job -- was invaluable, and it certainly
>      wouldn't have been done that quickly if it wasn't for LF's support.
> 
>      Unfortunately LinuxFund have now tanked quite badly.

Maybe the approach should be to make more of an effort with Summer of Code?

I wonder if it would be possible for X.org to sheild itself from charges 
of nepotism by actually putting money *into* SoC, and having those guys 
decide which (X.org related obviously) projects it gets spent on?

Keith