Re: Meeting Minutes Published - March 29th, 2011

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Fri, 2011-04-15 at 11:39 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> On 12/04/11 03:00, Brian Cameron wrote:
> >
> > The meeting minutes for the March 29th GNOME Foundation board
> > meeting is now published. Refer here:
> >
> > http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110329
> >
> > Other past board meetings are archived here:
> >
> > http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes
> >
> > -- text of the latest minutes follows --
> >
> > Minutes for Meeting of March 29th, 2011
> 
> Thank you for the minutes Brian.
> 
> > * Johannes Schmid informed the board that at the Toronto hackfest
> > that they discussed about an organization that decided to use Qt
> > instead of GTK+ mainly because they were able to get a support
> > contract for Qt. Therefore we thought it might be a good idea to
> > give interested companies a chance to present themselves as
> > commercial support options on developer.gnome.org. Perhaps via
> > some "Get support" link. Do we have any response?
> > o ACTION: Andreas - Will discuss with Ryan Lortie providing
> > support contracts for GTK+.
> 
> Can I ask why the ACTION above says you will discuss with Ryan about
> providing support contracts for GTK+? Why not a mailing list with
> companies that have GTK+ or GLib core maintainers (perhaps GNOME in
> general even)?

We wanted to discuss with someone involved in that space what our
options were. It's an informal chat about what could be done. Andreas
took on the action item, and chose to talk with Ryan because he knows
Ryan well.

If I had taken on the action item, I'd probably have asked Robert
McQueen or Murray Cumming because I know them well, and have had plenty
of interaction with them.

> How this looks to us and potentially other companies involved in GTK+:
> 
> 1. Ryan is not representative of all companies out there offering
> services around the GTK+ stack and it is a conflict of interest to
> involve just him (what of Collabora, Openismus, Igalia, Lanedo and
> perhaps even others)?

We wanted opinion on how we could have the Foundaton provide what some
third-party developers were asking for. Andreas chose to talk to Ryan
about it. It's informal, and an information gathering exercise. Ryan
won't be the one making decisions in the end, the Board will be.

<snip>
> We told Stormy last year at GUADEC that we really need a forum or way
> for potential customers to contact businesses around GNOME and get
> support for the GNOME stack. We have seen first hand how companies have
> offered services when they don't have the expertise and subsequently
> frightened off larger corporations as a result. We want to avoid this too.

That would be a problem here, especially if the list was filled in by
the companies themselves.

> Please can we have some open forum about this instead of expecting one
> person in the community who isn't representative of all companies with
> maintainers in those areas, being contacted?

He's not representing anyone, and he won't be a decision maker in the
process. The representatives would be contacted once we have a more
accomplished idea about this.

But, at the end of the day, you can also help yourself by providing us
with your feedback, or better, stepping up to the plate and do the work
to fill those needs and help us help you.

Ranting and raving about how we want to have an informal chat with
someone about a topic you might be interested is counter-productive.

Returning to the topic at hand. Do any of the companies you mentioned
provide developer support for GTK+? I've had the experience of providing
developer support for Red Hat (that did include fixing Motif bugs...),
and most of the questions were about:
- migration from one platform to another
- best practices when needing to change the implementation
- (possible) bugs found in underlying libraries that (might) need
fixing, usually caused by bad or lacking documentation, or actual bugs.

All of this is quite a different proposition from providing a turn-key
finished application, especially with the depth of the stack we provide.

I'm waiting to hear about your ideas on this.

Cheers