Hello, On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Karthik Peri <u4660...@anu.edu.au> wrote: > Hi Guys > > I am karthik, and am translating rhythmbox as a project in my FOSS course. I > just wanted to get some information about the project. > > I would like to know how the project is funded, i.e. how is paying money for > the developers to write code??
As for the project infrastructure, which is mostly the GNOME FTP and live.gnome.org website, that is hosted on Red Hat servers. So the internet-facing resources that allow the project to be publicly viewable are funded by a major Linux distributor, who in turn is funded largely by governments and big corporations who buy licenses to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Of course, it could probably be hosted for free on other sites like Sourceforge, but since GNOME already has hosting from Red Hat, it makes sense to use it. As for the developers -- since you're taking a FOSS course, you should really know how the FOSS development model works. If they don't explain it to you, well, then I'd say it's a bad course. ;) I imagine some of the people who contribute more heavily to Rhythmbox have been paid, at some point in time, either as a consultant, or as a full-time employee of a company that stands to gain from distributing a better Rhythmbox (for instance, Red Hat). That said, there is no guarantee that someone contributing to Rhythmbox will ever make any money from their work. In fact, a lot of people work that way. That is the nature of FOSS. For instance, I have developed a plugin for Rhythmbox, but it has not (and never will) earned me any money. The only "guaranteed" personal benefit of significant work on Rhythmbox (or any other FOSS project) is that you can add your contributions to your portfolio of work, CV, or resume. That means you are more likely to be hired by companies looking for experienced developers, because they can see your code. That ignores, of course, that working on features you yourself will benefit from is useful; and since you are the original developer, you will probably make the best possible use out of your own software. It also ignores the unmeasurable benefit to the public interest of making FOSS available. I've noticed that you have submitted quite a few separate threads to the mailing list; if you have a lot of general questions like this about Rhythmbox, ask them all in a single email, so you don't have to keep restating that you're in a class on FOSS. It also improves the SNR of the mailing list. To that end, I'm going to try and answer the other two questions you asked here as well: "As a part of my project I am translating rhythmbox in hindi and would like to know its next release date so that I can try to finish it before that date." Empirically, a stable release of the 0.12 series has happened about every two months, give or take a week or two. This has been consistent since about a year ago. Rhythmbox 0.12.8 was released on March 28. I'm not a release manager, so don't take this as authoritative, but I would guess that the next release would be somewhere around the week of June 1. Sometimes Jonathan Matthew, the maintainer, will send a message a little while before release, to give contributors a heads' up that it's time to get any last minutes changes reviewed and committed. Keep an eye out for such an email. "I am doing the traslation work of rhythmbox and would like to know when and why the rhythmbox moved from SVN to GIT." The migration from SVN to Git for Rhythmbox was, as far as I know, done as part of the wider GNOME migration from SVN to Git. Rhythmbox is a significant GNOME application, in that it's well-integrated with the GNOME desktop, and also generally follows GNOME's centralized policies. More info about the GNOME migration from SVN to git is here: http://live.gnome.org/GitMigration Finally, a large chunk of what you've asked here applies to the GNOME project as a whole, and maybe even to the broader "Free Desktop" community of FOSS desktop-oriented operating systems like Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc. I'd have expected that you would learn most of this in class, especially the part about how the development is funded (i.e., it isn't). Disclaimer: Most of this email is just observations from my own personal experience, so it's very likely that other project contributors will disagree with me on some points if their experiences differ. HTH, Sean > > Please reply > > Thanking you > Karthik > _______________________________________________ > rhythmbox-devel mailing list > rhythmbox-devel@gnome.org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/rhythmbox-devel > > _______________________________________________ rhythmbox-devel mailing list rhythmbox-devel@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/rhythmbox-devel
