Re: communication

On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 03:52:14PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 07:08:52PM +0000, Alan Hourihane wrote: 
>> So RedHat paying someone to be interested/able to write the code might
>> be useful ?
>> 
>
>Sure it would be useful. (And we do pay a large number of open source
>developers.) However, this can't be the answer to everything that
>needs doing, or even most things.
>
>FWIW, XFree86 is the only project I've noticed where developers
>frequently make this suggestion; "why doesn't someone fund bugzilla,"
>"we can't do such-and-such unless someone pays us" - I won't try to
>speculate on why or what it means.

It could be because we as volunteers keep getting people (and
companies) telling us what we should do.  Actually, "pressuring"
would be more accurate.  Since you mention the bugzilla example,
by far the largest pressure for that came from the likes of Red
Hat, not from the developers who will have to use it.  I don't see
why a response like "if you want it so badly, why don't you do
something to make it happen" is unreasonable.  The spirit of Open
Source seems to have gotten lost somewhere.  Open Source != slave
labour.  I realise that the mix of volunteers, business and Open
Source and the different motivations, priorities and requirements
is a difficult issue to handle to everyone's satisfaction.  I think
that IBM has set some examples of how cooperation between these
elements can work, with their investment in areas of the Linux
kernel.

David
--
David Dawes
Release Engineer/President                      The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes