On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 05:26:46PM -0600, David Nicol wrote: > It seems that the X bylaws allow for outsider participation,
Yeah, they do. > perhaps > to provide oversight to mitigate developer-driven coolitis (not as bad > a malady as featuritis, but still suboptimal), and that has attracted > me. The X.Org Foundation not only lacks a technical direction role, but very explicitly does not have one. It is, in a sense, the court of last arbitration, and is concerned with the health of X.Org (as distinct from the Foundation) as a whole, but does _not_ have any form of day-to-day technical oversight. I don't expect this to change any time soon. > That and the fact that you do Borda counting. Er. :) > Aside from the hopefully redundant role of focus maintainer, If you want to maintain focus, the lists are the place to do so, rather than through the Foundation. > Aside from hoping that any Tools For Organzations I bring will be > useful, and hoping that my sense of focus will be helpful, I also > bring a desire to see a general world-wide bounty clearinghouse set up > for adding features to open-source projects. I think that X might be a > good place to start by establishing a general-purpose bounty system > for X development projects that do not carry either sufficient > intrinsic amusement value to attract volunteer developers or > sufficient business value to trigger deployment of professionals. > That's not general purpose, that's special purpose, but by creating a > bounty system with a more general vision, the system may spill over > into other realms, much as Orkut is now widely used in South America > and India, surprising those who launched it originally. To be honest, I'm incredibly skeptical of bounty systems after seeing them fail quite spectacularly for both GNOME and Ubuntu in 2004 -- noting also that GNOME and Ubuntu have very large casual ('opportunistic' seems to be the current buzzword) development communities, which bounties are generally targeted at, whereas X.Org has a very small base of casual contributors. This is something that has been very rapidly improving and definitely needs to continue improving, but I don't think bounties would be a good idea right now. Perhaps it's worth talking to some of the people involved in the original bounty craze in free software a few years ago; I think at least of the GNOME guys even posted somewhat of a post-mortem for the bounty program online somewhere. But yeah, our problem seems to be much more lack of time (combined with a high barrier to entry for casual contributions), rather than lack of financial incentive. (If people want to get paid for hacking X, just mention it and you'll have quite a few companies beating down your door ...) Cheers, Daniel
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