7 Apr
2005
7 Apr
'05
12:56 p.m.
Hi,
it's so long-awaited result that it's even hard to believe in it now ;-)
Alex raised a few very important topics, let me add to it:
1) Developer payment - this question must be worked out thoroughly - if
we're going with only the bounty system, it's the easiest to maintain.
However with paid-developers, as Alex pointed out, creates a problem - how
to differentiate each one's "salary".
There are two generally two ways to get the development process done: First
of all create development path, mark milestones, estimate roughly number of
people and number of hours to complete each part. Then:
a) pay developers monthly agreed full-time or part-time salary, and
developer promises relatively strict timeframe for reaching every major
milestone. If not reaching, then the developers salary might be reconsidered
somewhen. Or might be not.
b) pay developers for completed parts - this allows to get rid of
"fulltime" or "parttime", since dev is actually paid for reaching the
end
result.
b is actually close to bouny-system. a would be cool, but only if developer
wishes this way.
What's other's opinion about this?
2) I agree with Alex that sponsoring expos travelling would be great (though
$150 per night just for hotel sounds like a bit too much for me, but maybe
american prices are higher than europe's), it's the main thing after
developers payment.
3) Board - what does it mean? Will it define main strategic decisions? If
so, wouldn't it be fair to do it as we already started - by open voting
process amongst all active (=having commit-access in svn) developers?
I just don't know about it - if it's some legal thing, then I'm not really
interested, and I would leave this to you :-), but if it's for making
decisions about reactos development, it's structure etc, then I'd think that
most of ros-devs should be involved in this process. Am I right?
Also does being a board-member will mean generally distancing from actual
development? Or it's kind of the same thing as being coordinator, when it's
possible (and mostly needed) to be developer and coordinate some effort,
like translating.
Again - it's so great this process is starting to move forward, I'm very
excited about it, certainly big thanks goes to Steven for not giving up ;-)
With the best regards,
Aleksey Bragin.
Steven Edwards wrote:
Hi,
Just to let everyone know we are now approved to be a 501c3 org in the
United States meaning that
we can give a tax deduction for any contributions received for donations
to the Foundation. I am
in process of trying to get my paperwork together now to come up with a
plan to move forward as I
have never done this before and its been a learning process. Sorry its
taken so damn long......
Congratulations, and thanks so much for your hard work on this issue! You
deserve a big clap of applause.
I would like to propose that we get something up
rather quickly on
foundation.reactos.org and
review/amend the draft bylaws as needed as well as have our first real
meeting after Jason and I
have discussed off list drafting a new budget plan for the following
expenses.
Bounty System
Retainer for Legal and Accounting
Supplementation of Hosting Costs
Administrative Assistant
Reserve Fund
I totally agree.
Just to give you a idea I am wanting to budget
whatever income we might
have in the following way
80% developers/bounties
5% reserve fund (Mutual Funds, Savings, Etc)
5% legal reserve and retainer costs
5% supplement hosting and misc expenses (expos etc)
5% part-to-full time administrative assistant to help me manage paper work
as I suck at it.
Two issues I see here:
1) Developers. Do you mean that each developer will be paid? How will this
be done? equally shared? Not to sound like an ass, but there may be times
when a developer does absolutely nothing (read: me for the next month),
while someone else is hacking away 100KLOC of code. Or someone that
generally only does little fixes (which can be really useful, and is all
the useful time he can offer due to work/family/school) versus someone
which already has assured income and spends 24 hours a day working on
Reactos. Would it be fair to pay everyone the same amount of money? Sorry
if I'm misunderstanding the issue, but I just want to be fair. Besides,
I'm sure many developers might want to refuse getting paid. Working for
free is sometimes a personal choice, and the offers certain tangible and
psycoligcal advantages. I don't know about others, but I myself would feel
bad in many ways to receive money by working on ReactOS. I would feel as
if any bugs ormistakes that I make now have monetary losses associated
with them.
2) I think expos should get more then 5%. An expo of 4 people would cost
around 2000$ (assuming 150$/night * 3 nights, plus food and other needs,
*4 people). Now at minimum we'll probably want to attend a North American
and a European conference, meaning 4000$. The European one is bound to
have more then 4 people anyways, so with 6 people, it'll up the cost to
6000$. 5% means that we would need 80 000$ in donations. Seems a lot to me
at this stage. Then again, we probably won't want to pay the full cost of
an expo at this point, but whatever, I'm just giving ideas and I hope they
help!
Prior board meetings mainly consisted of me
telephoning each board member
upon the initial
incorporation and we have not really moved forward since that time. Now
that we are all nice and
legal its time to hit the ground running. Currently our board of directors
consists of long time
developers to ReactOS and Wine
Steven Edwards, Jason Filby, Alexandre Julliard, Brian Palmer and Rex
Jolliff.
I would like to get community feedback as part of our bylaw amending
process on the current status
of the board and when/if we should hold elections and restructure. Also
from people that agreed to
be on the board. Do you still want to do it? Does anyone else? Etc....
I would love to be on the board. I think I have some pretty good ideas for
moving forward, and it'll be a good short break from coding when I'll
happen.
Thanks
Steven
Best Regards,
Alex Ionescu
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