Bounties and the GIMP 2

December 1, 2005 gimp 4 Comments

Sven wrote a response to my analysis of a GIMP bounty in my blog.

From the point on that Daniel dissapeared, the bounties have been dead and there was nothing that we could have done about that. Your summary puts it like there would have been an offer on the table all the time. But there wasn’t. There was a deal between Mark and Daniel and that deal had failed. It would have been wrong to assume that there was still a valid offer at this point. Without clearly defined milestones, there are no bounties.

I disagree with that, since plainly, Mark considered the bounties were offered to the project, and weren’t a deal between himself and Daniel. In addition, for the 18 months between when the bounty was proposed and was pulled, to my knowledge, Sven didn’t send an email to Mark asking him about the bounties. I think a little more communication could have cleared up a lot of questions much earlier.

My biggest regret in the whole affair is that we could have announced the offer far & wide, and had maybe some new contributors, but because of this single perception that the bounties were somehow “a deal between Mark and Daniel”, a great opportunity went to waste.

Web traffic stats

December 1, 2005 gnome 1 Comment

First off – congrats to the KDE project for a new major release. With the performance improvements going into GTK+ and friends, and the performance gains in QT 4, the next generation of KDE and GNOME should both be smaller and zippier, which is brilliant.

I came across http://www.alexa.com via http://radar.oreilly.com today, and checked out the web reach of www.kde.org versus www.gnome.org – the results are pretty interesting.


The first thing to notice is that we’re both trending upward, albeit erratically.

The most interesting point, I think, is that over the last few days, when KDE made a major release, *both* projects got more attention.

Next Entries »