To be Fair and Balanced, That is the Question

As you may or may not be aware, your committer representatives are responsible for the allocation of the Friends of Eclipse fund. There's not a lot of money and we'd like to use it in a way that promotes our community. A few people have proposed ideas. Some were accepted and some were not. We'd like to think our decision making process was fair and balanced, but that's been called into question, particularly with regard to a request for release engineering support for ECF. As a group, all the people currently running to be a committer representative agreed that using the community's limited funding to scratch the admittedly nasty itch of one specific project isn't appropriate.


To me, that seems fair and balanced, but apparently some are inclined to see it differently. Simply put, we are doing damage to small projects like ECF by saying no, we have wasted the valuable time they spent asking for money, and we generally don't represent the interests of the community. The list of things we're doing poorly is long and we're clearly bad people. It's ironic to me how often those most skilled at dishing out critique---calling Ekke an ignorant hack being another good example---are the very same ones so easily offended by another's poor choice of words. I need to keep an open mind though, so if others feel we've misjudged in our decisions, please let us know your thoughts.