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Bounties for Gnome Optimization
Eugenia writes "Novell and OSNews are sponsoring the memory reduction project led by Novell's Ben Mauer by providing bounties to developers to help to clean up bloat in GNOME and related programs."
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This is great news. I switched from KDE about a year ago because of the newer gnome interface. (2.4+?) I run gnome on FreeBSD 5-stable and found that my biggest complaint is the memory usage. I have a dual xeon 2.0 gig with 1 gig of ram and gnome + xorg eat up at least 200-300mb of the ram. Maybe while they are at it they can fix some other problems with gnome like the fact the default stack size needs to be increased in many non linux systems when porting it!!!!!
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Offering money is a great way of getting people interested in many things, but do the people who are capable of creating valuable bug reports and/or patches really need these bounties?
I wonder how many crappy bug reports and patches are to be submitted because of the "easy" money being given. I do believe that the bounties will go to the right people and for the right reasons, but more the crap, the more it takes work to find the gems.
Nevertheless, it's about time to unbloat Gnome.
Tapio 'itn' Nuutinen
As you can see from Novell's actions they are totally biased towards Gnome but still they make more money out of Suse distribution which uses KDE extensively.
Feel the irony?
They should instead be desktop neutral and support KDE developers too...
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
While they've still got a long way to go, each successive release of KDE is substantially improved in terms of required CPU power and memory usage. KDE 3 ran a great deal faster than KDE 2 despite all sorts of added functionality, and KDE 3.4 RC1 is the fastest yet by a pretty big margin. The upcoming Qt 4 has a whole slew of performance improvements which should reduce requirements further.
The bounties Novell is offering are too low. They're offering $1-200 for tasks that will take an adequately skilled programmer, already familiar with GNOME, something like 2-4h to complete, including the docs that will let GNOME integrate the code (which will help win the bounty). The programmer doesn't need to spend time testing the code, though that will increase their chances of winning. So they're offering $50:h.
That isn't enough to support a community of coders, even if the range of bounties were scaled up to supply a significant headcount with enough work to keep busy (say, 500-1000 bounties a year). The labor might be fueled by people who are coding GNOME anyway, to prioritize completion/submission of some tasks. But the better, even more productive coders won't be available at those rates. It remains to be seen whether a multitude of mediocre submissions can compensate for too-cheap bounties that can't attract quality coders. Or perhaps this model will merely send all coding offshore, to programmers who can work so cheap that a single $100 bounty won can fund a month of unsuccessful submissions to other bounties they lose.
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make install -not war
I think this is a horrible idea. When you have to offer bounties to encourage people to alter open source, then you're basically hiring and paying programmers...Open source isn't about hiring and paying people, it's about everyone working together to make better software for themselves.
I think you are confusing Open Source Software and Ken Kesey's Magic School Bus. One solution to this problem is for your to do way less drugs.