[Members] Re: disconnect from board to active developers

[Egbert Eich]

Alex Deucher writes:
 > 
 > 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?
 > 
 Alex -

I think you have actually identified the problem: in the linux kernel
entire subsystems get rewritten more often than you blink your eyes.
There are simply enough people to do this. So we should work towards 
this goal in this project. 

Paid development in the kernel to my knowledge works differently:
there is no organization around the kernel like X.Org. There are
individual vendors and there are also 'interest groups' sponsored
by  groups of vendors. 
In contrast X.Org currently is a community driven group which - 
if you look at the bylaws - has taken on some 'stewardship' over 
the X Window System and it's development which is a neutral role.

However if we start throwing money at every problem we may achieve 
exactly the opposite. We scare away people and at the end money will
have to solve everything.
I definitely share your frustration. But I'm afraid we are not going
to solve this with money. Well, that's my personal take.

Cheers,
	Egbert.