On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 10:10 +0200, Xavier Bestel wrote: > On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 09:06 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote: > > > So, right now, the Board is not considering the option of hiring people > > > to hack/do technical things. I'm not saying "we'll never do this", but > > > doing this has a lot of implications (managing the employees wouldn't be > > > easy, people could start thinking that there's no need to contribute to > > > GTK+ since the GNOME Foundation has developers for this, etc.), and we'd > > > prefer to explore other ways to fix the issue first. > > > > I doubt that. > > > > Imendio (among other companies) have slowly been putting more resources > > into GTK+, is there any evidence that shows people are contributing any > > less? > > I think that's what he says: hiring GTK+ hackers by the board => bad, > but hiring GTK+ hackers by companies => good.
I dont want to start a shouting match so lets try our best not to restate the obvious... I have these points I think should be taken into consideration: - If a company were to devote a hacker to gtk+; o would that hacker be a key player on that companies's dev team ? o that hacker would nevertheless need to be chaperoned by someone experienced o would that company possibly decide at a later point that they need that developer back for some other project ? (and then where did that chaperone time go ?) - If the foundation were to hire a hacker for the GNOME core platform libraries: o that hacker would have his/her interests strictly/exactly where we as a community need them to be o that hacker would probably be a more suitable candidate to be a core maintainer, companies in general are great for contributing code as it helps the interests of all - core maintainers OTOH need to protect the interests of the product as a whole from the aggressive impact of incomming patches/contributions (sometimes the codebase really suffers from hasty addition of features). - Imendio is really a special case from what I understand, its a company based on offering developmental services with expertise on GNOME software - they have an obvious interest in supporting GNOME - and its also probably safe to say that they are in for the long haul. I'm trying to recognize GNOME as having its own identity and not just being a pile of FOSS software developed at the whim of alot of corporate giants, I realize that hiring a developer(s) from the board directly would have a huge impact and I'm sure I havent considered all the possible impacts it could have, it would definitly be an aggressive step for GNOME/FOSS to take in this competitive age. I just implore that the board please take these points into consideration. Kindest regards, -Tristan _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list