X.Org BoD meeting minutes 2016-08-18

[Luc Verhaegen]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 11:52:23PM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> ## Items discussed
> 
> ITEM: travel sponsoring
> Travel for Sebastion just for golem.de coverage denied. Board will reconsider
> once the paper committee has made a decision whether to accept Sebastian's talk
> or not (since it's not on a traditional XDC topic). Board also discussed the
> travel sponsoring policy and clarified that an accepted talk is needed. There's
> an exception for lwn-like in-depth coverage of the talks, since those are
> essentially the XDC proceeedings.
> ACTIONS: Daniel to reply to Samuel&Sebastian
> ACTIONS: Bryce to clarify our travel sponsoring policy per the discussion.
> STATUS: Pending

I'm sorry, but I thought we were finally, slowly, moving away from the 
rampant nepotism that is the post-xfree86 fork X.org.

The above his highly arbitrary and anti-competitive, and smells like 
some serious favouritism..

The lwn coverage for 2015 was the following:
1) "An update on libinput", dated 20150923 
(https://lwn.net/Articles/658052/), which only covers Peters talk.
2) "Pitfalls in graphics benchmarking", dated 20150930 
(https://lwn.net/Articles/658740/), covering Martins talk.
3) "Debugging tools for input devices", dated 20151007 
(https://lwn.net/Articles/658948/), covering Benjamins talk.
4) "Status updates for three graphics drivers", dated 20151007 
(https://lwn.net/Articles/659391/), covering 3 separate graphics driver 
talks.

This is by no means comprehensive, and a far cry from "essentially the 
XDC proceeedings". On top of that, each of the above links has a 
subscription reminder on top, and i bet that each of them was subscriber 
only for a whole week. Is that what X.org foundation sponsorship buys?

Sebastian at least would've gone through the trouble of holding a talk 
himself (which tbh, would've interested me), and who of the board knows 
exactly what type of coverage he would've given this event? Whereas we 
know that LWN will only cover 4-5 talks, at best.

And how about Phoronix? Michael Larabel usually does an article on every 
single talk, (even though it might not be as in depth as the handful of 
topics that lwn usually covers), and then does more articles when 
videos/slides happen. This buys XDC and the Xorg foundation way more 
coverage given the syndication that phoronix has. Plus, he actually 
organized an XDC once. What excuse would you find to refuse that one?

Luc Verhaegen.