[Members] Xorg BoD

[Alan Coopersmith]

Peter Winston wrote:
> 3)  What about sponsors, Sponsorship $ has dropped precipitously  since
> X.org was reformed. 

That is just continuing the trend that the old X.Org was facing.   The
highest level of sponsors were dwindling, both due to industry consolidation
(DEC/Compaq -> HP) and due to the premier sponsors mainly being the old
Unix workstation vendors, who other than Sun, have mostly gotten out of
the Unix workstation business and now sell their Unixes mainly on servers
and rely on third parties for their workstation OS (either Microsoft or
Red Hat or SuSE/Novell).

Before the X.Org reformation, I remember conversations with then X.Org chair
Steve Swales about what to do about this and how to get more sponsors - either
getting the other OS vendors (Linux distros, Apple, etc.) or card vendors or
toolkit vendors (TrollTech) or other companies interested.   In a sense, the
X.Org reformation succeeded partially here by getting at least the main Linux
distros to contribute labor, if not actual cash.

For the sponsors other than the Unix vendors, what are we really doing to
serve them?   Should we be holding Connectathon style interoperability testing
at our next developer gatherings to make sure xcb-based clients work well with
XWin-32, Exceed, etc?

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering