[Vaidhyanathan Mayilrangam Gopalan] > If we do, then we are essentially saying that only those developers > who are rich enough (in terms of money, time , ability ) to travel > are only ones who are worthy of contributing. It has got nothing to > do with the amount of work they are putting into Debian.
This is not really the case. Those spending lots and lots of time and doing lots and lots of work on Debian related activities, do tend to get their travel funded to go to such meetings. The two debian-installer devcamps was funded by Debian Edu. Several of the central people in Debian got their travel to the 2003 and 2004 devcamp/debconf funded by HP, Lindows, Canonical and others. The ftpmaster/release team gathering was funded by Debian Edu. The Custom Debian Distro workshop in Spain will be funded by some Spanish government agency. And these physical meetings have proven effective both as a way to speed up the progress in Debian, and to grease the interaction on-line after the meetings. No-one has proposed to replace all the on-line interaction (email, IRC, etc) with physical meetings. We are talking about giving the existing teams, with the currently active members, an opportunity to meet and talk and coordinate and come up with new ideas, not to exclude everyone else, but as a way to speed up progress. I've been to a few such meetings, and everyone there have been very clear on the need to keep the rest of Debian involved. That is the reason the summaries keep flowing from these meeting, bug reports are created to organize the ideas, design proposals are written and posted on the mailing lists, and the people at these meetings keep hanging out on IRC, reporting what is happening to those unable to join. So I not believe the danger is really present, as all those heavily involved in Debian are aware of the importance of keeping the development process open to all the capable people in the Debian community. :) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
