[Members] Xorg BoD

[Egbert Eich]

Hi Peter!

... second part.

Peter Winston writes:
 > 
 > 3)  What about sponsors, Sponsorship $ has dropped precipitously  since
 > X.org was reformed. Do you think that X.org should have  sponsors anymore?
 > Why/why not. If your company is not a sponsor why should anyone be. 

Yes, X.Org should continue to receive support from the 
industry.
There are different forms of support however:
Sponsorship can either be:

* support of individual activeties of the Foundation 
  both financially or with manpower
* giving financial support to the Foundation unconditionally
  placing trust on the organization's governance to make 
  good use of the funds.
All these require money and thus should be considered 
equally.
Also there is one sponsor who does both: SUN. 
SUN has assigned several developers to cooperate with
X.Org.
Stuart Kreitman has managed to steer SUN's contribution 
to X.Org past numerous bean counters and thru rough seas 
of corporate reorganizations.

Your question refers to the latter one.
I strongly believe that this organization needs to identify
worthwhile causes to spend this money on and be able to prove 
to existing and prospected sponsors that their investment 
will be used well.
Without you can send our secretary can to as many LWEs and
other trade shows as you like: it will be difficult to
convince sponsors that money given to this Foundation is
worthwhile spent.
This year we have just spent a little over ten percent of 
our budget. The interest we collect on our funds during one
year almost exeeds our annual expenses.
I happily admit that my marketing skills are not sufficient
to convincingly sell this to a prospected sponsor.

Please don't interpret me wrong: I value the contributions
made by our present sponsors very much!
I'm interested in a constructive exchange with our sponsors
about the use of our funds.

I had wished our sponsors would have insisted more on the 
Board to draft concrete plans to make what  we have budgeted 
for this year to become reality and provide evidence that
the funds were worthwhile spent.

Spending funds to raise more funds as an end in itself to 
me doesn't quailify for this.
Instead I strongly believe that this organization needs to
find out what it would like to spend funds on and how much
it needs. It can then adjust its fund raising activeties 
accordingly and determine who to address as potential 
sponsors.

As a resumee and direct answer to your: a lot of 'our' 
organizations already fund X.Org in one of the ways 
listed above. 
However to convince our organizations to invest in one of
the other forms of funding would require a compelling
reason. Presently I see nothing that would qualify as
such.

 > 
 > also I wish someone could explain to me, why  company(s) donating and
 > pooling  money to solve a particular problem causes a problem,  while a
 > single company doing the engineering does not cause a problem.  -and how can
 > small companies contribute if they can't afford full time staff.
 > 

Part of the answer already lies in the questions:
It looks like you have 'an itch to scratch'. But as a small 
company cannot afford to scratch it by yourself. So you are 
looking for others to pool your money with and convince them 
to scratch together.

This goes far beyond what we have discussed on this list so 
far: development funding was discussed in the light of 
overcoming the lack of volunteers in areas wherea broad 
consensus exists on work to be done.
What you suggest sounds very much like an industry special 
interest group - a consortium where you pool to agree upon 
and work towards a common goal operated on a pay-for-say 
basis, the more you put in the higher the weight of your 
vote.
I think it is perfectly fine if such an organization exists - 
it is just *not* what the X.Org Foundation is. 
Instead the X.Org Foundation has taken on the role of an 
overseer and steward of the X Window System. As such it needs 
to maintain a neutral and broad consus based role as far as 
steering the direction of the technology.

You can be either one or the other - but not both. You cannot 
be the benevolent overseer and at the same time a group that 
tries to push a certain piece of technology.
That's what the old X.Org group at TOG tried to be. And 
- as you may remember - it failed horribly.
It is not that that group did not realize the fact that it
could not fill in both roles: it would have liked to pass on 
some: it made several attempts to turn the stewardship over 
the sample implementation over to XFree86. Still it demanded 
to retain control: it asked for guarantees that the code 
provided by that group or its members will be integrated 
into the tree. David Dawes fircely and rightfully objected 
for XFree86.

In the X.Org Foundation - as in contrast to its predecessor -
there is very little guarantee that you will find  consensus
on your particular itches so if you are interested to pool your
money to fund their scratching you are probably not looking
at the right organization. However if you are able to convince
enough people of your ideas that there is a broad consensus
you will probably find enough community support that you will
have to throw a lot less or even no money at your itch.

On the other hand, in my opinion it would be perfectly all 
right if such an industry consortium existed - outside of 
the X.Org Foundation. 

However one thing needs to be remembered: there is no guarantee 
that the code you produce or have produced will find its way 
into the de-facto sample implementation. 
One prerequisite would be a strong community supporting your
idea even beyond X.Org as you can see by the fate of the 
MAS project whose development was funded by our predecessor 
organization. 
This technology was abandoned even by those companies who 
supported it as members of the predecessor organization and
were interested in adopting it. They realized that the technology
had no support by desktop projects or vendors. This situation
has not changed until today despite of Leon's tireless effords
to advertise this technology on X.Org Group and later Foundation
booths on trade shows to find further funding for it.
I have tried to outline the reason for this failure in previous
postings.
The stong advocay of large scale funded development here 
indicates that history may repeat itself and poses a strong 
barrier for new sponsors to join this organization.

Now let me answer the other part of the question - why I
don't see a problem if companies donate work:
Ut is not a single company that's contributing work - 
there are several. This will  maintain a balance. 
Any such donated code will find its way into the tree 
thru the same processes - like any other code done by
volunteers. No one code is more equal as there exists
an expectancy that it has to go in, there is no pressure
to agree on a solution before it has been proven to work.
The incentive to deliver good design and a decend 
implementation is high as this will increase the acceptance.

Cheers,
	Egbert.