Haxe Foundation Draft

[Nicolas Cannasse]

Hi,

I have wrote down my thoughts about the way I propose the Haxe
Foundation could be setup.

I'm interested in any comments/feedback on this !

Please read it there : http://bit.ly/KWKlwa

Best,
Nicolas

[Maximiliano Fernández]

This is taking a good shape.

Talking about Haxe Users Groups I was already doing that task in my city (Montevideo, Uruguay), joining efforts with emerging programmers that want to learn real world usages for their knowledges. We have a small group (four guys and me guiding their efforts), but trying to reach more public in the educative ambiance (Mainly in "Universidad de la República", the most large university in the country, and the only state university here). And following this same thread of "teach people to use the tools and language", don't has the foundation the task to create a group to mantain the documentation? I'm really, really eager to help in this area, documenting extensively the standard library and translating the documentation to spanish in my free time. If there is something coordinated in this way, let us know.

See ya!

Maximiliano Fernández do Santos

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[Philippe Elsass]

Seems reasonnable - I like the idea of bounties as a way to drive contributions.

You can count on FlashDevelop.org as a "friendly partner" :)

--
Philippe

[Franco Ponticelli]

As far as I will stay in Boulder I will be more than glad to organize a local group. The Boulder community is not huge but extremely dense in terms of software developer population.

All the points in the document seem fair and well thought. The tier for sponsoring companies could be a little steeper; I think that the strategical partners should contribute at least 20k/25k or more to better differentiate from the rest. Of course that means they deserve a lot more visibility and to be honest the Haxe website has already an interesting audience (70k visitors per month and more than 300k page views).

Franco

[misprintt]

This is a great draft!

I had a few thoughts in regards to the level of detail on membership teirs and spending

Members:

what do the gold/silver/bronze/strategic membership tiers entitle companies to. I think companies need to know what benefit one provides over the other? A representative example of each could be useful.

Spendings:

For companies to consider different membership tiers requires more detail on the breakdown of budget across these categories. I know a lot of this will come from initial board meetings, but some sort of indicative allocation is required. A simple example for each (e.g. Bounty for feature of size X is between €Y and €Z )

Ad-hoc bounties:

It may also be worth outlining how/if companies could donate bounties to specific features/targets outside that of the core foundation budget/membership entitlements. For example - say that Massive wanted to donate/invest in fast tracking the C# target to a point where it could pass Microsoft/XNA certification on Xbox. Ideally this would be orchestrated via the foundation as well.

Cheers,

Dom

[Cauê Waneck]

Nicolas, I'm really excited to see it on paper already, and I'm really looking forward for it. :)

Some thoughts:

• I think we should add support plans as well. Maybe this is implied with the bronze/silver/gold/strategic partnerships? This is something that enterprises will value a lot, even if the compiler is very stable, they don't want to take risks of something failing in the process
• As Dom has said, I think that ad-hoc bounties would be a great way to improve the compiler and make companies happy ;) 
• It may be worth looking at other open source projects to see how much they charge for support. The experience I have shows me that the amounts may be a little higher.

About local groups, I'd be happy to organize one here in São Paulo. I'll look more into doing some workshops after the 2.10 release and see how it evolves. I have contact with university professors who teach game development, I'm sure we can arrange some workshops. If anyone is interested in joining in, please contact me off-list!

Cheers,

Cauê

2012/7/2 Nicolas Cannasse <ncan...@motion-twin.com>

[Whitetigle]

Hi,
just a few thoughts on Board / decision gameplay :

While I agree 100% with a wise ruling board ( = ethics commitee ) and a core board of involved / dedicated pairs,
I fail to see how money could make people win a vote.

I mean, even though it exists elsewhere does not mean it is a good idea in the sense that tomorrow any larry Elison and friends could get all the power just because they got the cash ? Weird... And even if company had to apply for strategic partner, I think money should get out of the discussions since little involved companies could have a wiser and purer motive than big ones.

And I If I had to choose ( which won't be the case, anyway) but If I had the opportunity to choose, I would prefer to give a vote to people who spread the word like game makers who display a huge "made with HAXE" logo when their game starts on 10M customers ipod.
I mean, it would more be a merit thing.

Of course when you pay, you want something.
But why put money at the core of the gameplay ? For me, knowing that great developers like the one you proposed will kind of rule the Haxe kingdom will make me feel safer that knowing that Mr High-Tech Mogul can make everything look like hell just because He got the money.

Just my 50cents :)
Cheers,
François

[JLM]

Yer have to agree about the commercial point.  If a company donates then the donations should be partly used to sponsor developers to spend allocated time specifically on areas they vote are important... but this should not effect the choices made on the direction of the language as a few commercial contributors at this time may skew the more general perspective into niche areas that would not be useful to future commercial contributors.  A point in case was the font issue that was brought up at the haxe conference, it was very specific issue for specific use case so sponsor money should be in part allocated to developers willing to work on this... but it should not effect the overall goals of haxe which may also align as much with educational goals such as the links with Ocaml and use in Universities and schools for teaching coding as well as with the many commercial varied uses which currently may not have a sponsor.

[Juraj Kirchheim]

On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 1:34 PM, JLM <net.jus...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Yer have to agree about the commercial point. If a company donates then the
> donations should be partly used to sponsor developers to spend allocated
> time specifically on areas they vote are important... but this should not
> effect the choices made on the direction of the language as a few commercial
> contributors at this time may skew the more general perspective into niche
> areas that would not be useful to future commercial contributors.

I think donations and bounties are two different things.
You can throw money at bugs and that's reasonable to do, but you can
hardly motivate creativity through cash. You can get creative and
skilled people such as the Haxe team the space and security and
thereby freedom to drive Haxe even further. Until now, they have
relied on themselves to do this, by investing the free time, within
the financial security their day jobs give them.

Languages that come from an academic environment have the benefit of a
developer team that can do this full-time without the pressure the
development of a commercial product means.

I don't know whether it is realistic to actually sponsor the work of
our compiler team, but it's definitely something I would love to see
come true.

> A point in case was the font issue that was brought up at the haxe conference, it
> was very specific issue for specific use case so sponsor money should be in
> part allocated to developers willing to work on this... but it should not
> effect the overall goals of haxe which may also align as much with
> educational goals such as the links with Ocaml and use in Universities and
> schools for teaching coding as well as with the many commercial varied uses
> which currently may not have a sponsor.

I believe it's good idea to reach out into academia. I dropped out of
university, so I don't really have the connections to bring anything
of that kind into life, but I'm sure some universities could actually
be interested in this great project and its incredible potential. That
might be a great source of young talents for our community. Students
might write their bachelor/master theses about some aspects of Haxe or
about their attempts to integrate features from other languages and
analyse how those compose with what's already there or whatever.

Still, I really do think bounties have their place. Even in third
party libraries. It might be a good idea to have an infrastructure for
all Haxe related bounties, to mediate between companies with money and
developers with expertise. And also it's a great thing to point at,
when people as "so who uses this Haxe thing anyway?"

Regards,
Juraj

[Arnoud Bos]

On Thursday, July 5, 2012 5:07:20 PM UTC+2, Juraj Kirchheim wrote:

I believe it's good idea to reach out into academia. I dropped out of
university, so I don't really have the connections to bring anything
of that kind into life, but I'm sure some universities could actually
be interested in this great project and its incredible potential. That
might be a great source of young talents for our community. Students
might write their bachelor/master theses about some aspects of Haxe or
about their attempts to integrate features from other languages and
analyse how those compose with what's already there or whatever.

+much!

I think introduction to the academic world will be a really an important accellerator for adoption. I remember

following a class in university called "principles of programming languages" in which we wrote small programs in

smalltalk, ada, prolog, c and another one i forgot. I think haxe would perfectly fit

in a class like that as it has it's own unique characteristics. 

Or it could serve as an "introduction to programming" language because it's so clean and

consistent. 

Or it could be an example for modern compiler building....

Some of my teachers wrote their own books/publications on the subject they taught. 

It's quite common to do so in the academic world. More books on Haxe are also a key to

better adoption IMHO.

And finally like Juray said: The tech universities are the places where you find young eager talent.

the draft for the foundations looks really good by the way!

cheers,

Arnoud

[Greg Dove]

This does look like a great start. 

From the document ("principal goals" and "other roles") I get the impression that the board has stewardship of the ecosystem, but not the Haxe language itself. Is that the intent?

If not, you could start the process of decisions about language features with a semi-'formal' board review and vote on something like: http://code.google.com/p/haxe/issues/detail?id=1030

I have observed in the past the introduction of 'surprise' additions that were entirely driven by the 'Ethics Committee', this - IMO - is a good thing for Haxe, (its kind of a Steve Jobs style I guess, which seemed to work out quite well for Apple!). But perhaps if the request has come from the community it could be part of the board's role to review and vote on it. 

Just some thoughts...

[Stephane Le Dorze]

Make sense.

[Nicolas Cannasse]

Le 02/07/2012 23:31, Nicolas Cannasse a �crit :

Thanks to all the feedback so far !

I took some time to patch the proposal with the following changes :

- made "Local User Groups" visibility a goal of the Foundation

- added "Ad-Hoc Bounties", which seems a good idea

- detailed what kind of support/services you get for sponsoring
membership (will have to get the confirmation from other compiler team
developers that it's ok this way for them)

- added a section about "Language Design" in Board section : the goal of
the Foundation is NOT to manage the language design or features, it's
more about the whole ecosystem / communication

Interested in feedback on those changes, or the whole document if you
have not read it yet ;)

Best,
Nicolas

[Nicolas Cannasse]

Le 05/07/2012 08:19, Whitetigle a �crit :

> Hi,
> just a few thoughts on Board / decision gameplay :
>
> While I agree 100% with a wise ruling board ( = ethics commitee ) and a
> core board of involved / dedicated pairs,
> I fail to see how money could make people win a vote.

Just a small answer to this point ;)

Sorry if the original document was not clear enough, I hope that the new
version is more explicit.

The Foundation Board does not have voting rights on language
design/features. This is a strict technical aspect that is handled by
the compiler team as we do today. We can however benefit from the
companies feedback of what difficulties they have in some areas, which
will help us making the language better.

I think for instance that Haxe quality is in good part thanks to
Motion-Twin having used it in production for years, with many developers
with different technical level involved. The feedback I got from that
was really helpful.

As for the money, after many years we see there are some tasks that
requires both a more strategic organization and to be able to pay
someone to get some things done (documentation is good example).

I feel it's normal that companies that put some money in get both some
services in return (support plans), and can decide at some point how
money get used. This can be done through AdHoc Bounties or by joining
the Board.

Finally, I think that having the most involved companies on board (!)
with the compiler team and key community people will greatly help to
enhance Haxe.

In case you're still afraid, I guess we could have the ability to
prevent one specific hostile company from joining if we see they are not
really on-line with our goals.

Best,
Nicolas

[Joshua Granick]

If it is helpful, I have made some editing adjustments:


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MhzYd_SM7LvdudAmhCcpkGk1h-2PLd8OVa9It8uFJHs


It isn't perfect, but it may help polish what was already written




On Tue, 10 Jul 2012 02:44:59 -0700, Nicolas Cannasse
<ncan...@motion-twin.com> wrote:

--
Using Opera's revolutionary email client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

[Maximiliano Fernández]

I get an empty document Joshua... Perhaps you didn't share a public document (With the "share" button)

[Joshua Granick]

Does this work?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MhzYd_SM7LvdudAmhCcpkGk1h-2PLd8OVa9It8uFJHs/edit

[Maximiliano Fernández]

That works ;)

[Whitetigle]

I will take time to read it next week :)

[Lee Sylvester]

Some initial thoughts:

• Work carried out by any funded members should ideally be logged with a repo platform managed by the Haxe Foundation.  This way, any monies paid can be better controlled by being able to actually see that work is being carried out.
• I like the support option, but who will provide this, specifically?  I'm more than happy to help as I'm sure many others are, but I think this needs quite a bit of thought as to how the logistics of this will actually work.  For instance, to some extent, the Haxe community group provides support to anyone who logs a question with exceptional speed...  What we're proposing here is a more intimate relationship between the sponsors and the Haxe Foundation, whereby support is guaranteed at a certain level, but this could be a logistical nightmare for an individual, or a complete mess for a group of people, if the rules aren't defined and people don't know what the protocols are.
• I feel some light advertising of some sort would be a good expense by the foundation under a set limit.  We're always concerned that Haxe doesn't get enough exposure, so this would be a good time to improve upon this.

I'll comment more when I've had time to think this all through :-)

Lee

 

[Alex Hoyau]

@Lee

I think that haxe exposure is an important issue, but it should be addressed by communication more than advertising - press releases, articles, conferences, workshops, demos, hackathons... what do you think?