I can't believe all the complainers lately. Who do you think is running the show? Where do you think all the help/support is coming from?
Shad I hope you can understand I'm not complaining, I am however very concerned about SME survival.
I'm not sure I know how I could have stated my point to make it very clear as to my very concern.
SME and contribs.org is really being run/driven by a very small handful of people (10-20 max) who are committed and put forth the effort to make the system work. They are all volunteers and don't make any money from this. It isn't going to matter who is elected to what position those who are dedicated will continue to work. The election may make things better but it won't destroy the distro.
There is nothing stopping anyone from becoming part of this inner circle you just have to dig in and help. In the past few months we have had a number of people step up and start doing the best they can and we have had some great progress made. It might not be apparent to all but those that are close to what is going on see the progress being made.
We also seem to have 10,000+ individuals/servers that are benefiting from all these individuals hard work. I know there are some that are helping in the ways that they can. There are many have contributed either time or money. But it is a fact that the number of people contributing to the distro is nowhere close to that 10,000 number. If each server owner even contributed $10 that would give us $100,000 to use to market/support/improve the distro. Last I heard we weren't even close to 1/10 that amount.
Complaining doesn't help anyone and doesn't solve anyone's problems. The community needs to step up and support itself. The people currently doing the work have plenty to do already. If we do more then we are now then other areas will suffer.
Also there is plenty of stuff in the pipeline that could be release if there were reasons/ability to support it. The entire build structure is in place for both 7.x and 8.x. We almost have all the contribs in place for building on the same structure (just lacking some participation of a few contribs authors). We also have everything in place to build/release i686, x86_64 versions of the distros, with a possibility of sparc, ppc, and possibly other archs not to far away.
I hope those that do contribute, continue to do so (and feel proud of the efforts they have made so far). The rest of you please step up and start supporting your distro so that we can make it the very best it can be.-Shad
Well thats something I would say needs to be prominently displayed with a little editing. It's the kind of information users need, to be able to make appropriate decisions.
Last I heard we weren't even close to 1/10 that amount.
It might not be apparent to all but those that are close to what is going on see the progress being made.
If your looking for more donations then you have to prominently display the progress for all to see.
I copied/pasted those two statements together because the are without a doubt welded together.
I certainly hope you weren't expecting users to send money to a black hole.
If we do more then we are now then other areas will suffer.
Not sure what your referring to, I would say that at this critical juncture customer relations is not something
to include on the suffer list.
You may not owe anything to users however those that donate by that very gesture become customers.
I might add that prior to your post I was a user, now I'm a customer and I currently have no problem in continuing
that relationship.
I know no other way to make my point more prominent as to priorities.
Like in business there is a balance between customer relations and product development.