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

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 11:09:24AM +0200, Paolo Borelli wrote:
>      first of all let me apologize for my lack of feedback on your work.
> The usual list of excuses applies (work, travel, life, etc), but the bottom
> line is that if I will not find more time for proper review and feedback
> I'll pass on my maintainer duties and give you more freedom to go ahead
> with changes.

Normally I'll not introduce ugly hacks or workarounds in the code, and I 
try to do my best for the API design ;-)

> However you also started off by citing Philip's blog post and honestly I
> found that post wrong and disturbing, especially since it mentions some of
> the projects we work on and that over the last years, had many great
> contributions both from the OPW and GSOC programs.

Yes, GSoC and OPW are useful. The money spent on GSoC is outside GNOME 
(Google pays). But the money for GNOME OPW is spent by GNOME companies 
(mainly or only Red Hat if I follow correctly). This money is spent on 
outreach. What Philip says is that this money, for the outreach, can be 
better spent by improving our development tools. Do you prefer 20 (or 
even 50) more women involved in GNOME, or do you prefer 10.000 more 
developers working with GNOME technologies?

And I'm not talking about women having equal chances to be accepted for 
a GSoC. Nor the privilege that women have to be able to be paid to work 
on other things than programming (doc, translations, design, ...). This 
latter thing is a little disturbing for me. But when someone dares to 
criticize that, he is not well seen, because GNOME has invested lots of 
efforts into OPW.

> > 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).
>
> I understand your feelings, and I really hope you'll find a good
> opportunity. For what is worth I can certainly vouch for you.

Probably the best thing to do for me is a language study trip during 
several months.

> I am not sure about this, crowdfunding is a lot more work than it seems and
> to be successful it needs to target a large group of interest and propose
> something compelling, concrete and well defined. I am surely open to pursue
> this idea, but I am not sure that a generic "let's improve the developer
> tools" campaign would raise a lot of funding and even if it did it would be
> difficult to define how to use them.

Yes, I can propose the idea to the GNOME foundation, but doing our own 
fundraising campaign like Pititi is a lot of work, indeed.

> As mentioned at the beginning of this post I can only apologize about the
> lack of timely feedback. I do not have a magic solution to this: I'll try
> to do better at review and/or give you more space about pushing things
> forward.

Thanks. If it can assure you, I don't have secret plans for gedit ;) If 
one day I'm paid to work on gedit/gsv, gedit will still remain a good 
text editor. And for big decisions, I'll ask you and the other gedit 
developers your opinions, obviously.

> Making a living by working on something you are passionate about sounds
> great, however I am fortunate enough to have a job I like and enjoy and I
> think there are very good sides about the fact that such job is not
> directly related to gnome: among other things it forces me to learn
> different things and face different challenges and at the same time it
> ensures that working on gedit and gnome remains something I can fully enjoy
> without the stress and pressure of deadlines, customers, features requested
> by the sales department etc ;-)

Makes sense. RMS wouldn't have the same opinion though ;-)

--
Sébastien