Re: project status

On Sat, Jan 15, 2005 at 08:18:13PM -0500, David Longo wrote:
> OK no offense, but why in the world would you not want profit.  Don't
> get me wrong, I am all about socialistic, open-source, non-greedy
> whatever, but like you said, profit goes to infastructure.  More
> profit = more money for testing hardware = faster connections =
> whatever.  Actually that's a good idea...maybe I'll do the CFLAGS
> thing to learn pyGTK...

Because we don't want Gentoo limited to people who can or are willing to buy
stuff. It complicates things. It makes enemies from who were friends before.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with funding, but it is how you
receive the funding that is important. Funding through merchandise,
contributions, shipments, ... but not through limiting the availability of a
distribution as powerful as Gentoo.

Have you read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"? One of the many reasons listed
herein regarding open source development is that a good product starts with
a personal, developer's itch. The guys in the installer project have a
vision on what they want to achieve, and they work on it. And because they
are very motivated, even with all the i-hate-installer-nonsense they have to
digest daily, I know that their end result will be good.

Users ask for many things, and most of their requests are valid. But not all
these valid requests are possible. Try investigating all the existing
graphical configuration tools. They're all limited in features and every
single one of them has flaws. 

Check out all the possible directives in a xorg.conf file. Check out the
history of these directives - how frequently are directives changed, added
or removed in upstream? All and every single graphical front-end for the
xorg.conf file that I have seen limits itself to certain directives of which
it assumes they won't change and are sufficient for 80% of the users. That's
not what a user wants, a user wants 100% coverage. And until now that has
always been proven impossible. 

That's also why there are little developers working on such an application.
They know that they will receive bugreports and feedback about insufficient
measures and they know that they will have to return a WONTFIX or CANTFIX on
a regular basis. 

And for a developer, there is nothing more hatefull than to say that he
won't or can't fix a bug.

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

-- 
  Documentation & PR project leader

  The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>

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