Re: when companies join over free software projects

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore helixcode com>]

>     Darin> This is a surprising allegation. I'm not aware of any games
>     Darin> played with the VFS and file manager. Could you be more
>     Darin> specific about this?
> 
> The person originally developing VFS and the file manager was doing it
> as a volunteer project.  When Helix Code employed him, they agreed in
> private discussions with Eazel that Eazel would work on those parts of
> GNOME.  The decisions was made by management at the two companies.

Since that would be me :-), I'd like to make it clear that it was
largely my decision to give up maintainership of gnome-fm.

I had some discussions with Miguel and Nat, I had some face-to-face
discussions with Eazel, we agreed on some important technical issues,
and then I finally decided that letting Eazel take over what I had done
so far was the right thing to do, for a number of reasons.

It did hurt a bit as it was my lovely pet project of the time, but what
convinced me to give up was the future of the GNOME project, and not
really corporate pressure. Neither Eazel nor Helix Code really forced me
to leave the project. Actually, Eazel encouraged me more than once to
have a role in the development, and initially Helix Code allocated a
considerable part of my time to GNOME VFS and Nautilus hacking.

-- 
Ettore