[gedit-list] Thoughts on being paid to work on the gedit stack

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

Hi,

After reading pvanhoof's blog post:
http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2014/05/23/lets-make-things-better

"I think software developers in general will be more attracted to 
(working on) the GNOME platform when we have better development tools.  
That includes woman. I think focus, time and money is better spent on 
improving the tools than on outreach programs."

I think he's right. But currently almost nobody is paid to work on the 
gedit stack. There are some bounties at Bountysource:
https://www.bountysource.com/trackers/379571-gtksourceview
https://www.bountysource.com/trackers/385842-gedit

I'm working on one of them, but it currently lacks a review:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354587

One of my dream is to be paid to work on free software. I haven't 
applied yet to the companies working on GNOME, as my English is not good 
enough (understanding someone on the phone is really difficult, for 
example). So another solution is to launch a fundraising campaign, like 
Pitivi. Or it can be a fundraising campaign like for the accessibility 
and security launched by the GNOME Foundation, with a call for bid after 
that (even if I'm not taken, it would benefit to the GNOME developer 
experience).

Of course if a company is interested to hire a developer to improve the 
GNOME development tools, I'm available. (And I'm willing to learn 
correctly English, of course).

As a parenthesis, these months I was also thinking about a way to earn 
money with LaTeXila, the LaTeX editor that I created. For example the 
technique of Sublime Text seems to work. Obviously with LaTeXila it 
wouldn't work as well as Sublime Text, since there are most probably 
several orders of magnitude less users. But I can try (but the idea is 
to first make latexila a killer-app for LaTeX, which is not easy :-) ).

Another thing, since I'm the only developer of latexila, I'm more 
productive. The review process is a bottleneck for GtkSourceView, 
GtkTextView, gedit. Of course reviews are better for the quality of the 
code and APIs produced. But I'm a bit discouraged by the time that it 
sometimes takes to get a review. I understand that you don't have a lot 
of time, you have a full-time job, etc. But it would be a pity, there is 
a possibility to improve significantly the gedit stack. I'm a bit 
worried about this bottleneck, all I want is to improve our software. 
Maybe we should find another model of development. I already push some 
commits without reviews, if it doesn't touch the API and is trivial 
enough. In this case a post-review is obsiously preferable, if you have 
the time.  But when it touches the API, having at least one other 
opinion is necessary I think.

What do you think? Are there other developers interested to be paid to 
work on the GNOME text editor stack, nacho, Jesse, pbor, ...? If I'm the 
only one interested, and if it works, what to do about the reviews?

--
Sébastien