Re: question for candidates

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 10:32 +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
> On 05/21/2014 05:17 AM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> > Now regarding foundation and these other projects. I've long thought 
> > that need to find a way to support these projects.  I have a proposal 
> > in the works that will suggest that the Foundation will help pay for 
> > hackfests that does not benefit GNOME the product (e.g. the desktop) 
> > but does benefit GNOME the eco-system.  The idea is that in exchange 
> > for the money, that everyone would participate in working in the lower 
> > levels of the stack and not necessarily the design.  This is 
> > controversial because of using our finances, but there are questions 
> > on whether this will dilute the brand. But that is a separate discussion.
>
> This is very interesting, considering projects like Mate and Elementary 
> OS have donation systems by themselves and I assume income from that [1] 
> [2]. The other thing is that the foundation have limited funds as it is.
> I would love to hear other candidates view on this matter. It would be a 
> deal breaker for me.

In the past, we would try to sponsor GNOME folks for hackfests that are
wider than GNOME itself, and in some cases, important people in the
community around those building blocks.

For example, the location hackfest, built around work on Geoclue2, has
plenty of non-GNOME attendees:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Location2014

I believe it also happened for the Color management hackfest:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/ColorManagement2012

Obviously, it's better when the contributor's home organisation can pay
for costs rather than GNOME. It might not always be the case however.