Ok I feel urge to respond to this. Note that I am no way manager nor support. I am stupid programmer. So don’t take this as official respond, more like my personal one. Also I am kind of sorry to my colleagues as I am going to disclose some less nice things but I would say important for this topic.
So having this out of the way. It’s all over and over again. We are not responding to your topics on forum, some messages on support are weeks without respond from us and merge requests on github are hanging sometimes even for months and of course we are not fixing those bugs fast enough or at all. I am going clear to the point. This is simply all because we don’t have enough man power. Let me tell you how our software team looks currently (ignoring hardware as that part of the team is not visible to you too much). We have currently about twenty people in software team (including support). That doesn’t sounds so bad isn’t it. So let’s take it apart. About a half of those people, including me, are students and are working on part time. One of those people is documentarist who has no time to write documentation most of the time because she is responding to tickets on support. Then we have one person for support and another person that is partly working on support and partly tracks collected data and analysis (also part time employ). Then we have two persons for kernel but they have together just a 0.6 of full time because they have other obligations. Then we have three colleagues working on webs (note that we have a lot of webs and mostly in tragical state and this include Foris). Then two devops (again note that our infrastructure is big because we are doing data collection and distribution and both of these require not trivial server setup). And now if I put rest of people together, accounting for part times, then I am left with just cca 4.5 man power. So we are maintaining Linux distribution, about fifty or so software projects, where about five of them are huge ones and hardware devices with just less then five people in restatement. I would say that it’s miracle that Turris works at all. We are underpowered big time.
The reason why that is, at least as I see it, is because after Turris Omnia release we kind of exploded requiring more and more people. But as some of you know, getting good people is not easy. We have steady flow of new colleagues to our team but that is slow and most of them are students. And at the same time we are loosing some skilled ones as they are leaving for new opportunities. That is common problem in IT. But we have also problems with hiring. To core team we need very uncommon set of skills. There is not much programmers with Linux skill set that includes embedded, packaging and networking. And for most is our coverage just simply overwhelming. So result is that we are gaining less people than we would like and less then we need to fulfill projects and yours needs. So if you have some friends with this skill set or it’s even you then we are hiring and we are hiring even to posts not listed in our jobs list. And of course if you miss some skill then don’t be afraid to apply too we would train you if you are willing. If you are able to help here on forum for example then you can also do it as job and we would be very happy to hire you.
Also to comment that we are responding in free time (not paid), of course that we are paid to respond and we do it in work (we are no way discouraged to do so). Problems is that to really do something we have to also respond in our free time. So if we note that we are responding in our free time it means that we are on top of time payed basically working for free. We are doing this because we believe in project and love it and we hate if you don’t see it the same way. I think that I used it as argument because somebody was overall offensive to me once.
To end on this. I don’t want to sound negative so I want to thank to all community members that are supporting us. This is no way standard and we appreciate it. We are planning to reward most active helpers with something in future (this is not promise, it’s just something that we are discussing). And my own overall target is to make community contributions more easy. I have already proposed, here on forum, few times community managed packages repository and I am still thinking about it. And if you have some ideas how you could contribute more to project without our intervention then please share them. We want to have health community that is helping each other and is part of what this project makes the best thing to work on.
Edit: Just to clarify. I have posted this not because I want you to join Turris team (if you do then nice). But I did it because it seems to me that there is growing displeasure with Turris team in community. And I think that its all because we are not clear about our capabilities. We have limited resources and I just wanted to show you how limited. I think that if you understand what we are able to do and what we just can’t then both sides can be more satisfied.
Although that doesn’t mean that we won’t try to respond to everything relevant here on forum nor that we won’t be responding to support. We want to be better. But it’s process to get us there and of course we appreciate all criticism as that show us the way we should continue and what we should improve.
Erratatum in documentation is kinda outdated.) and also
