On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 5:19 PM, Barry Schwartz <chemoelect...@chemoelectric.org> wrote: > Damien Levac <damien.le...@gmail.com> skribis: >> My humble opinion: >> >> If people want to work on a project, it is their own decision. > > That pertains to hobbyists. I’m purely a hobbyist, filling timek; I > work on what I enjoy. Anyone who argues with that can keep it to > themselves. > > But we are talking, instead, about profit and non-profit organizations > that have goals and in some cases ask for our donations. Whose goals > are being achieved?
You do need to consider the resources you're actually talking about here. You can't compare the resources of a community-driven distro like Gentoo to something like RedHat, and you can't even compare something like RedHat with the likes of Google. At my workplace the entire annual Gentoo budget would pay one employee for a few weeks tops. Most of the more community-oriented distros try to use their money as effort-multipliers. The Gentoo mailing lists, cvs, forums, etc don't cost that much to run but they enable huge amounts of community interaction. And when you look at stuff like Freedesktop the goal is for you to be able to plug a USB headset in and have it suddenly usable for phone calls, just like on any other modern OS. Sure, fonts are also something that can stand improvement, but they've actually come a long way. I'd say that getting printers to work is more important - though it is telling that even major vendors like Apple, Google, and Microsoft haven't even tried to solve that problem on their new OSes. -- Rich
