Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] How is the rhythmbox project funded

[Sean McNamara <smcnam gmail com>]

Hello,

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Karthik Peri <u4660876 anu edu au> wrote:
> Hi Guys
>
> I am karthik, and am translating rhythmbox as a project in my FOSS course. I
> just wanted to get some information about the project.
>
> I would like to know how the project is funded, i.e. how is paying money for
> the developers to write code??

As for the project infrastructure, which is mostly the GNOME FTP and
live.gnome.org website, that is hosted on Red Hat servers. So the
internet-facing resources that allow the project to be publicly
viewable are funded by a major Linux distributor, who in turn is
funded largely by governments and big corporations who buy licenses to
Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Of course, it could probably be hosted for
free on other sites like Sourceforge, but since GNOME already has
hosting from Red Hat, it makes sense to use it.

As for the developers -- since you're taking a FOSS course, you should
really know how the FOSS development model works. If they don't
explain it to you, well, then I'd say it's a bad course. ;)

I imagine some of the people who contribute more heavily to Rhythmbox
have been paid, at some point in time, either as a consultant, or as a
full-time employee of a company that stands to gain from distributing
a better Rhythmbox (for instance, Red Hat).

That said, there is no guarantee that someone contributing to
Rhythmbox will ever make any money from their work. In fact, a lot of
people work that way. That is the nature of FOSS. For instance, I have
developed a plugin for Rhythmbox, but it has not (and never will)
earned me any money.

The only "guaranteed" personal benefit of significant work on
Rhythmbox (or any other FOSS project) is that you can add your
contributions to your portfolio of work, CV, or resume. That means you
are more likely to be hired by companies looking for experienced
developers, because they can see your code. That ignores, of course,
that working on features you yourself will benefit from is useful; and
since you are the original developer, you will probably make the best
possible use out of your own software. It also ignores the
unmeasurable benefit to the public interest of making FOSS available.

I've noticed that you have submitted quite a few separate threads to
the mailing list; if you have a lot of general questions like this
about Rhythmbox, ask them all in a single email, so you don't have to
keep restating that you're in a class on FOSS. It also improves the
SNR of the mailing list. To that end, I'm going to try and answer the
other two questions you asked here as well:

"As a part of my project I am translating rhythmbox in hindi and would
like to know its next release date so that I can try to finish it
before that date."

Empirically, a stable release of the 0.12 series has happened about
every two months, give or take a week or two. This has been consistent
since about a year ago. Rhythmbox 0.12.8 was released on March 28. I'm
not a release manager, so don't take this as authoritative, but I
would guess that the next release would be somewhere around the week
of June 1. Sometimes Jonathan Matthew, the maintainer, will send a
message a little while before release, to give contributors a heads'
up that it's time to get any last minutes changes reviewed and
committed. Keep an eye out for such an email.

"I am doing the traslation work of rhythmbox and would like to know
when and why the rhythmbox moved from SVN to GIT."

The migration from SVN to Git for Rhythmbox was, as far as I know,
done as part of the wider GNOME migration from SVN to Git. Rhythmbox
is a significant GNOME application, in that it's well-integrated with
the GNOME desktop, and also generally follows GNOME's centralized
policies. More info about the GNOME migration from SVN to git is here:
http://live.gnome.org/GitMigration

Finally, a large chunk of what you've asked here applies to the GNOME
project as a whole, and maybe even to the broader "Free Desktop"
community of FOSS desktop-oriented operating systems like Ubuntu,
Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc. I'd have expected that you would learn most of
this in class, especially the part about how the development is funded
(i.e., it isn't).

Disclaimer: Most of this email is just observations from my own
personal experience, so it's very likely that other project
contributors will disagree with me on some points if their experiences
differ.

HTH,

Sean

>
> Please reply
>
> Thanking you
> Karthik
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