[Members] Re: disconnect from board to active developers

[Egbert Eich]

Peter -

peter winston writes:
 > 
 >  
 > 
 > The X consortium and the MIT X consortium, come to mind. 
 > 
 > >Do we actually know any precedence where a free project employes
 > >hired people to do development work - together with contributors
 > >from the community?


Right.

These actually showed how hiring people to do development
on volunteers' projects could kill volunteer effords and
turn the project into a pay-for-say organization.
The X Consortium and later the X.Org Group at TOG were  
such organizations. The weight of a vote was determined 
by the size of the check. A lot of poor decisions happened 
at that time.
XFree86 as a free project was stonewalled when it tried to
join the X Consortium. Later on when the user base of XFree86
started to outnumber the user base of all commercial X 
implementations combined the X.Org Group reconsidered and
made XFree86 an 'honorary member'.
However at that time great advancements in the X development
were not really high up on the agenda of most commercial 
vendors any more. The had pretty much dropped the ball on
the U*nix desktop.
It wasn't until the free and open source desktop was more 
than just a small star on the horizon that the X.Org Group
started to reconsider their structure and - when the XFree86
Project started to falter - moved to join forces with those
who were loosing their home to form this organization.
But at that time the major vendors who were Members of the
old X.Org Group - such as SUN, HP and IBM - had identified 
Linux and in some cases even the free and open source desktop 
as a business opportunity. 

Cheers,	      
	Egbert.