Request: please consider clarifying the project's position on Spins

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Freitag, den 03.12.2010, 06:48 -0500 schrieb Josh Boyer: 
> On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 5:34 AM, Christoph Wickert
> <christoph.wickert at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> [...]
> 
> > All of these examples are ether policy decisions that are in the end
> > made by the board or they are lack of manpower, but FWIW the bottle
> > necks were always people who were paid to work on Fedora.
> 
> The rest of your post is fairly accurate, however I entirely disagree
> with your assertion that only people paid to work on Fedora were the
> bottleneck.  I certainly was part of a number of the discussions above
> and I have never been paid to work on Fedora.  

There is nothing wrong with discussions. I consider them not as a
bottleneck but as absolutely necessary. The delay usually happens after
the discussions when *nothing* happens. One has to nag again and again
and go all the way up to our community architecture team lead or the
FPL. I'm sure we can make these processes more lightweight and more
effective.

> Also, the design team
> has several members that are not paid to work on Fedora.

Sure, and two of these persons picked up the ticket later, but before it
was assigned to somebody who gets paid for weeks. 

> Lack of manpower has nothing to do with who gets paid and everything
> to do with who is willing to be part of that particular group and put
> forth time and effort to solve problems, paid or not.  You cannot
> place blame only at the feet of those paid simply because they are
> paid.  It has to fall to the whole group.

I'm not blaming somebody for being paid. I have the privilege to be paid
for working on FOSS full time, too and I very much enjoy it.

When I blame people who get paid, I blame them for the following
reasons: 
      * When it comes to decision making it is mostly these people. The
        bottlenecks in infrastructure and rel-eng for example or the
        concerns about the multi desktop DVD. AFAICS it was not the
        community members blocking them with their concerns.
      * It's in the nature of things that developers working on Fedora
        full time influence the overall distribution very much. This
        means they have a special responsibility. Unfortunately these
        people happen to often break things outside of their scope (e.g.
        a change in GNOME breaks KDE, Xfce and LXDE).
      * Many of the paid developers are way more interested in
        development than in fixing bugs. When the bugzappers mass-closed
        my F12 ABRT bug recently I noticed that the paid developers were
        way more unresponsive than the community packagers.
      * People who get paid to work on Fedora sometimes set higher
        standards for people who are working voluntarily than for
        themselves. The opposite should be true, because volunteers
        cannot spend so much time on Fedora as paid employees.

I don't want to turn this thread into an US vs. THEM thing, I just
wanted to explain why I hold people who get paid to work on Fedora more
responsible.

Regards,
Christoph