X.Org BoD meeting minutes 2016-08-18

[Luc Verhaegen]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 07:31:40PM +0200, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> 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),

Thanks for configming this before i actually wrote this email.
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/2016-August/003546.html

> 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.

Another topic of this board meeting was that donations are now possible. 
How on earth is the board going to convince anyone that the money 
donated to the X.org Foundation is going to be used fiarly and 
effectively, when favouritism and nepotism still are this prevalent?

Luc Verhaegen.