Re: GTK+ maintenance

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 10:10 +0200, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 09:06 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:
> > > So, right now, the Board is not considering the option of hiring people
> > > to hack/do technical things. I'm not saying "we'll never do this", but
> > > doing this has a lot of implications (managing the employees wouldn't be
> > > easy, people could start thinking that there's no need to contribute to
> > > GTK+ since the GNOME Foundation has developers for this, etc.), and we'd
> > > prefer to explore other ways to fix the issue first.
> > 
> > I doubt that.
> > 
> > Imendio (among other companies) have slowly been putting more resources
> > into GTK+, is there any evidence that shows people are contributing any
> > less?
> 
> I think that's what he says: hiring GTK+ hackers by the board => bad,
> but hiring GTK+ hackers by companies => good.

I dont want to start a shouting match so lets try our best not to
restate the obvious...

I have these points I think should be taken into consideration:

 - If a company were to devote a hacker to gtk+;
    o would that hacker be a key player on that companies's dev team ?
    o that hacker would nevertheless need to be chaperoned by
      someone experienced
    o would that company possibly decide at a later point that
      they need that developer back for some other project ?
      (and then where did that chaperone time go ?)

 - If the foundation were to hire a hacker for the GNOME core
   platform libraries:
    o that hacker would have his/her interests strictly/exactly 
      where we as a community need them to be
    o that hacker would probably be a more suitable candidate
      to be a core maintainer, companies in general are great for
      contributing code as it helps the interests of all - core
      maintainers OTOH need to protect the interests of the product 
      as a whole from the aggressive impact of incomming
      patches/contributions (sometimes the codebase really suffers
      from hasty addition of features).

 - Imendio is really a special case from what I understand, its a
   company based on offering developmental services with expertise
   on GNOME software - they have an obvious interest in supporting
   GNOME - and its also probably safe to say that they are in for
   the long haul.

I'm trying to recognize GNOME as having its own identity and not
just being a pile of FOSS software developed at the whim of alot
of corporate giants, I realize that hiring a developer(s) from the
board directly would have a huge impact and I'm sure I havent considered
all the possible impacts it could have, it would definitly be an
aggressive step for GNOME/FOSS to take in this competitive age.

I just implore that the board please take these points into
consideration.

Kindest regards,
                 -Tristan