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

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 05:48:05PM +0200, Paolo Borelli wrote:
> This is getting OT for gedit-list, so maybe we can further discuss this
> elsewhere...

I'll maybe write a blog post, but I want to know one thing, are some 
developers paid to work on gnome development tools? glade maybe? devhelp 
I don't think so, Anjuta neither. gnome-terminal I don't know. 
MonoDevelop yes, by Xamarin, but it's more for C#/.NET development with 
Mono. And some paid developers work on kdbus/application sandboxing, 
etc.

> 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.

What I wanted to say is that the thing in common between the two things 
is outreach. The companies supporting financially OPW can also spend 
this money differently to achieve outreach too. And since those 
companies have scarce resources, it makes sense for me to spend this 
money more efficiently.

> 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.

Yes, I agree.

> 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.

> From the thousands new developers, I hope that a small percentage will 
contribute upstream. And it is our job to tell new developers to do so.

> Non-programming tasks are part of GSOC as
> much as they are part of OPW

No, a GSoC project must primarily be a programming project, and this 
includes code and user documentation.

> and in the past we had some absolutely amazing
> non programming tasks that achieved incredible results (the work done on
> fonts come to mind).

Yes, I don't say that non-programming tasks are bad, quite the contrary.

--
Sébastien