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

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

I'll follow up for review and patches in bugzilla, irc, etc but I want to reply to some of the things in your mail.

This is getting OT for gedit-list, so maybe we can further discuss this elsewhere...

On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 4:28 PM, Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org> wrote:

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.

This question does not make much sense to be honest. The budget for outreach programs is made available because organizations (and no, it is not only RH, there is also linux foundation, mozilla and many others) think it is a worthwhile goal, that money would *not* be available to the foundation for other uses. Thinking that RH (or someone else) would reallocate the same budget for funding development of some specific project is simply naive. If they want some projects done they would allocate engineering resources to it, but I can assure that it would be a completely orthogonal issue and the funding of one thing does not influence or exclude the other.

Beside also making a distinction between "google pays" and "someone else pays" is wrong: we are fortunate enough to have a budget for outreach. Our responsibility is to make sure that it is spent in the best way by selecting strong candidates and projects.

 

Do you prefer 20 (or
even 50) more women involved in GNOME, or do you prefer 10.000 more
developers working with GNOME technologies?

For sure I prefer 20 actively involved contributors (men and women) to thousands of uncontributing users. But once again, the question does not make sense because the two things are not in alternative. As a matter of fact I am very convinced that one thing helps the other.

 

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.

Once again I strongly disagree. Non-programming tasks are part of GSOC as much as they are part of OPW and in the past we had some absolutely amazing non programming tasks that achieved incredible results (the work done on fonts come to mind).

If the problem is that different projects (both on GSOC and in OPW) have widely different workloads, different difficulty, and different acceptance criteria to be considered successful that is maybe something that should be raised and discussed to *improve* these programs and not as an argument to consider them unsuccessful.

Paolo