My 2 cents about the foundation-stuff.
You don't need a foundation for a large opensource project. For example,
Fedora doesn't have a foundation. But it does have a very large
community. They are administered by the 'Project Board', and the
different projects, like for example Fedora Extra's have their own
steering committee's. (FESCO for extra's)
The ppl in those committees and the Board are chosen by elections. And
this all without any foundation.
Also Fedora doesn't have any money. But what they do get is people.
Redhat has lots of people who are working on Fedora. But they all get
paid by Redhat. Further Redhat maintains the Fedora-buildfarm. (well,
they provide the hardware and such. Plus the people to maintain it)
(And there is the Chairman of the board, who is not elected but
appointed by redhat and he has a veto-right)
What does this have to do with fpc/lazarus?
What they need is people. They (we?) don't need a foundation to make a
better website, but we need someone to make a better website. Obviously
the core developers don't care much about that. They have other
interests.
A foundation is only of uses if it raises enough money to hire people.
But it's not likely that that's gonna happen soon.
But what we can do, is doing linke Michael Hess does: he provides the
webservers for Lazarus. And the company of Michael van Canneyt provides
bandwith for fpc, just like Coraxnetworks and Tony Maro with the
mirrors...
Just like Redhat does with the buildsystem for Fedora...
And for JohnF and Marco Ramirez. They would like to see that they pay
some money, so that the developers can solve their problems...
Marco says that he doesn't have time for that. So why doesn't he hire
some programmer himself, to do the job? Just like Redhat does?
If you have a software-development company, and you need something in
Lazarus/FPC, you can just develop it yourself, instead of giving money.
If you're using Delphi, you can't do it yourself, so you'll have to give
money to Borland. But in the Lazarus case you have everything in your
own hands.
And if you don't have enough programmers, provide a secretary - to scan
the bug-reports. Or someone who can translate things or write some
documentation.
That way someone else can do the other work...
So if you want to donate some money to fpc/lazarus, donate some time
instead. That's far more usefull.
Unless you have more then about 50.000 to spend, offcourse...
Joost.
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