[Members] Re: disconnect from board to active developers

[Matthew Rubenstein]

	Maybe the Foundation should make a project to publicly collaborate on a
history of the organization. X.org is clearly either at, or just past, a
crossroads (of many), in an unusually positive sense. Now would be a
good time to commit it, while so many people who were part of that
history are still involved. Maybe just targeting a Wikipedia page, which
is mirrored at X.org. That kind of community memory is one of the most
important sources of info for new members. It contains not just
technical info, but maybe actual wisdom (or its sources).


On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 09:57 +0200, Egbert Eich wrote:
> 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.
> 
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-- 

(C) Matthew Rubenstein