[Members] Re: disconnect from board to active developers

[Daniel Stone]

On Mon, Oct 23, 2006 at 02:32:35PM -0400, Alex Deucher wrote:
> Generally all forms of paid development have their problems.  There is
> always room for abuse.  When it comes down to it, what's really the
> difference if Xorg contracts the development of feature X vs
> Intel/HP/IBM/whoever contracting the development of feature X and then
> donating it to Xorg.  The resulting code would still have to go
> through approval by the maintainers/primary developers before applying
> anyway.  Theoretically there may even be more transparency if Xorg
> contracted the work because it could stipulate the level of
> transparency.  The "correct" solution is often more easily developed
> in the kernel because there are LOTS of paid and unpaid developers
> working on the kernel.   X is unfortunately full of "short term
> solutions" because we have limited developers with limited time so
> horrible hacks often become the standard.  Why is paid development ok
> in kernel land but problematic in X land?

The difference is whether or not the governing body does it.  Arguably
OSDL is pretty close, but Linus retains fierce independence, as does
Andrew.  At the moment, Nokia, Novell, Red Hat, Intel, Tungsten, AST,
NVidia, SCO, IBM, Sun, and more pay people to work on X (to varying
degrees).  In the past, DEC/Compaq/HP and many others did.  Canonical at
least is currently looking to hire an X person also, though I don't know
how much hacking is involved.  Oh, and AMD/ATI also has someone working
on X.

Point is, a lot of people are being paid to hack on X.  But there's
little conflict of interest there, and at least the diversity of
employers ensures that no-one can push their 'solutions' to the
detriment of others.  For instance (and I'm not suggesting this would
happen), Red Hat arguably provide a counterbalance against any shoddy
Novell-pushed solutions, and vice versa.

The danger is in a single dominating commercial interest (XC, TOG).

Cheers,
Daniel

(Disclosure of bias: Maybe I'm just trying to justify my full-time job
 hacking on the X server.)
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