Re: Discussing issues

Rich Murphey wrote:
>>And what I mean by my comment is slightly different. XFree86 
>>consists of a lot of people who are working on XFree86 for 
>>their own personal gain, for the gain of their company, or 
>>for other similar reasons, not just out of random charity. 
>>XFree86 works rather better for that I suspect than if it didn't.
> 
> Who works on XFree86 for their personal gain, or company gain?

I do.  Contributing patches to XFree86 to make changes Sun has made in
our Xserver keeps our code closer to XFree86, reducing the cost of
merging XFree86 changes back into our servers, and allowing us to
benefit from the bug fixing & feature enhancements made in XFree86
for much less than doing the work ourselves.  (In Sun's case, we're
just getting started here, but pretty much every Linux vendor has
been doing exactly the same thing, getting the same benefits, for
years.  After all, that's pretty much the main business case for
any commercial vendor participation in any open source project.)

The question here shouldn't really be who has vested interests,
as others have pointed out, many people do, and it's a good thing,
since it helps motivate them to contribute to XFree86.  (I know I
wouldn't be able to spend as much time on it if my managers didn't
consider it in Sun's best interest to have me spend part of the
time they pay me for to work on it.)  The concern with vested
interests is how much influence they have on people's decisions
regarding the project, and whether or not they would cause someone
to make a decision that benefits their vested interests but is
detrimental to the project as a whole.  So far, I've seen nothing
to indicate that has happened or is in danger of happening.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-      [email protected]
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc.   -   Sun Software Group
	 Quality, Integration, & Customer Success (QICS)
	 Platform Globalization Engin. - X11 Engineering