Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 04:41:13PM +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> I honestly don't think either you or Philip are aware of how outreach
> works in the context of free software.

I know that with a good documentation (i.e. a book) and good development
tools, developers will be more attracted by the Gnome platform.

> the Foundation spends money on outreach because it's demonstrably the
> most convenient and effective way to increase the user base and, thus,
> the contributors to the project. it's also the "cheapest", so to
> speak, because it increases the volunteers working on the project in a
> much more efficient way than hiring developers to work on single
> aspects of GNOME.

There are important areas where Gnome is lacking. If the Gnome
Foundation can give a little more financial support to improve those
weak areas, it would be great.

Not everything can be achieved by beginners during a GSoC or OPW. For
example writing a good and recent book on GLib/GTK+, like GGAD was [1],
is something that can be done only by an experienced developer, ideally
by a GLib/GTK+ maintainer. Like Havoc Pennington describes it [2], GGAD
is an "advanced internals"/"conceptual understanding" kind of thing. And
this kind of book is needed to get more experienced developers,
beginners would learn more quickly, and better software would be
created. For the long-term it would be beneficial. It would be a good
investment.

[1] http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1811
[2] http://ometer.com/books.html

--
Sébastien