Migs Paraz has recently posted about Project David. In that post, you could read about SpecOpsLabs Philippines recruiting people. However, in a recent article in inq7.net SpecOps will outsource to India and Vietnam…
So what in the world is going on here?
In the article, Lewis mentioned that the Philippines doesn’t have enough talent who can do Project David and that he wanted it to be a Philippine-based product. However, a paragraph later, Lewis explained that there was trouble mobilizing enough talent to support its development operations. Chances are that the talents SpecOpsLabs Philippines would like to have on their team do not really support their Project David. After all that has been written and said over mailing lists, articles, et cetera, I could see that there are people who still remain dubious of this project.
I viewed the website of SpecOpLabs Philippines and saw this page: http://www.specopslabs.com/projdav-framework.htm
The fine print at the bottom of the page goes:
*The WINE Project was one of the pioneers of Linux-Windows compatibility and we are appreciative of WINE’s 10+ years of service to the Linux community. As stated above: “our DAVID Technology is utilizing certain components of the WINE Project” any modifications that we make to these components will be made available to the open source community.
Personally, I would rather see this on top of the page rather than below and in fine print. I see nothing wrong with acknowledging the technology used in Project David. However, doing a Google search on Project David and SpecOps Labs would give your various reactions of people in the open source community. Some of them are very skeptical about it. How could one not be skeptical if as found in last year’s article their development schedule is only for the construction phase was 6-8 weeks tops? As Rob Thomas of Linux Electrons wrote: ”
From the SpecOpS website it appears that they have been working on this since the 00′-01′ time frame. So maybe they do have working code. If their claims are true, then SpecOpS Labs is set to slay Goliath.”
Maybe there’s quite a number of talented Filipinos who share the same sentiment. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they do. I suppose that the community would like to see a more transparency from SpecOpLabs before they could consider joining the team.
Sacha Chua has something to say on the matter as well. She has ranted about it and has given tips to companies looking for talented people. You could read all about it here.
I chose to post certain thoughts on the matter separately in order to distinguish that those are my personal sentiments. The entry is here.