[CentOS] Corporate support for CentOS

Sun Mar 27 14:25:32 UTC 2011
Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>

At Sun, 27 Mar 2011 13:36:02 +0100 (BST) CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> > 
> > What makes you think CentOS is not willing to be commercially sponsored?
> > (Or only work developing CentOS?)
> > 
> > I would LOVE to be able to do CentOS as my only job.
> > 
> > No one that we know of is willing to pay a full time salary for 1 or 2
> > or 3 people to develop CentOS.  If they would pay for it, we would
> > likely do it.
> > 
> > They might be willing for us to let their current employees do some
> > CentOS things ... but not willing to pay for CentOS development.
> 
> 
> Sorry, that was just my impression from previous posts. I guess I have that wrong. Maybe I am confusing the reluctance to take donations at the moment with commercial sponsorship. Thanks for correcting me.
> 
> Couple of questions, then....
> 
> What is the average current time commitment per week, i.e. man hours that is currently volunteered by the core developers?
> 
> What would that need to increase to, to significantly reduce release times (which I think was the overall goal)?
> 
> What would the *market rate* be for the skills required? Just to give a rough figure to work with and shouldn't be related to any particular person's current day job.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Ian.

I expect that from a *corporate* POV the CentOS 'team' would work for
maybe a man-day (a few update RPMs) to a man-week or three (point
release, major update, etc.), and the rest of the time have little to
do *with respect to CentOS* (not worth being on a full time payroll). 
Unlike Red Hat's staff who are working on fixing bugs, writing and
testing back ports, etc. between updates and releases. And fielding
support calls from paying customers, etc.  And I expect Oracale and
Novell have a similar work flow, except that they are piggybacking on
Red Hat *for free*.

I belive SL is maintained by a *research* organization, where the
maintainers are like researchers or support staff, who are paid to do
research or to administer research machines most of the time and then
work the few hours (minor updates) or days/weeks (point release / major
update, etc.) and the research organization gives them 'leave' to
concentrate on the SL updates on an as needed basis (eg the SL
maintanence is a *part* of their job description, but not all of it).

The CentOS developers have full time 'day jobs' and can't work on CentOS
while at their day jobs.  It *might* make sense if the 'day jobs' the
CentOS developers work for *also* were corporate sponsors of CentOS, but
I suspect that is not going to happen for all sorts of reasons.

> 
> 
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>                                                                                                    

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Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
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