[Members] Re: disconnect from board to active developers

[Egbert Eich]

Hi Alex,

Alex Deucher writes:
 > 
 > The SoC is a good tool, but it focuses more on learning than on the
 > end product which is fine as that's it's goal.  The kind of things I
 > was talking about are major architectural changes that would require
 > experienced developers familiar with the code.  Perhaps the membership
 > could vote on these sort of things and then we could take proposals
 > from developers/development companies and vote to award contracts.

In my eyes this calls for trouble.
If this happens people will soon sit back and wait for 
someone to get hired to do the job. If this project hires 
out the interesting architecutral things I don't think 
people will stick around for long any more.
The fact that the xrandr++ changes haven't happened before by 
no means explains that our community developers wouldn't be 
capable of doing such a job.
This organization has been around for a little over 2 years.
Most of last year was devoted to modularization effords which
held back a lot of projects.
I personally don't want to work on a project where major 
architectural design is done by people hired specifically 
for this job by the project.
I devoted a lot of my spare time on hacking for XFree86 at
the time before I was hired by a company to continue this
work. Had XFree86 hired people (or even companies) for 
architectural work I would have never gotten that far.
Companies have the tendency to do everything to make them
indespensable as they are interested in follow up contracts.

I'm not sure if dealing with this is in the scope of part 
time Board members (or in the skill set of the present 
candidates). 
So the next thing that is likely to happen then is that X.Org 
hires a CEO to deal with these things.

Do we actually know any precedence where a free project employes
hired people to do development work - together with contributors
from the community?


 > OTOH, that may be more trouble/cost than it's worth and it's still not
 > without the potential for controversy.
 > 

Yeah, I'm afraid it will. 
We may want to explore the bounty model some more instead.

Cheers,
	Egbert.