I was mildly amused when reading Michael's blog. Suarez-Potts had nothing else to invent to bash Novell then to start to criticise the way they spent money to bring developers to one place. In my not so humble opinion, inspite of the food served in the "World Capital of Gastronomy", there was not really anything to say against that experience. It was way better then the some-special-selected-people dinner sponsored by another company in Koper.
I was just wondering whether it is the same Suarez-Potts that did not refuse to profit of Google hospitality (flight and hotel payed) during the Google Summer of Code "Mentor" Summit. Funny enough, I don't remember suddenly what was the Summer of Code project he was mentoring last year.
But the bottom-line of this is that LSP is even criticizing the fact that people want to contribute engineering resources and try to encourage developers to contribute to OpenOffice.org. Just wondering whether Louis has an idea about what a FOSS project is. It is all about producing software and as good software as possible. As a by-product of this, there can be human relationships of other type that come to be, but the focus is still on the software.
Although it is true that OpenOffice.org project "structures" are quite efficient at producing talking shops instead of developers, this situation should be considered more as a dysfunction then as a normality. As well as it should be considered dysfunctional to have someone who is not developer representing OpenOffice.org at hacker's meetings. What is the argument such a person can have to encourage contributions? What level of understanding of everyday concerns of a FOSS hacker?
Frankly, it should be our target to fight these dysfunctions. And only if we succeed in this, there is hope that the "OpenOffice.org Community Manager" will have actually something to manage.
