Re: live.gnome.org Maintenance
On Fri, 18 May 2012, Andrea Veri wrote: Hi, tomorrow morning (from 10 AM, GMT +2) there will be a downtime of live.gnome.org, we're switching the wiki over a new machine since we're experiencing high loads and problems while loading pages. I'll follow up this mail with more details as soon as the migration will be completely done. If you have any question, please join #sysadmin on GIMPNET. live.gnome.org will go under MAINTENANCE in a few minutes while I migrate the content to the new host I finished setting up yesterday night. Another mail will follow as soon as everything got migrated. cheers, Andrea signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Questions for the board election candidates
Hi all, I have a few questions for the candidates in the upcoming election to the board. They are obviously shaped by my interests, but I believe that other Foundation members may be interested in the answers as well. 1) Open Source or Free Software? This is about personal philosophy: Do you prefer the pragmatism of the Open Source Initiative or the political idealism of the Free Software Foundation? (Some of the candidates have already flagged a stance on this.) 2) Overhaul of GNOME's git infrastructure I personally believe that the way the GNOME git system is set up is a bit antiquated and doesn't use git to its full potential. It's fine for developers with commit access, but contributors without have to create individual patches and attach them to bug trackers or convince the maintainers to look up their personal branch hosted somewhere else and merge in. In a time when GitHub is setting the standard for ease of use when it comes to forking, merging and development, GNOME is lagging behind. I have heard chatter among GNOME people about setting up a GNOME instance of Gitorious to gain that kind of functionality, but nothing has really happened. Do any of the candidates want to make a juicy campaign promise on this issue? 3) GNOME and Ubuntu In the recent years there has been a public perception of a schism between GNOME and Ubuntu resulting in double work and wasted resources on both sides. Do you think that perception is unfounded or not, and how do you plan to handle it? 4) Stance on GNOME forks Similarly, GNOME 3 has met with some opposing developments like Cinnamon and MATE. It is of course the right of dissatisfied users to do what they want and fork if they like, but should GNOME ignore them or try to find ways to work together with them? -- Robert Nordan r...@robpvn.net ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: live.gnome.org Maintenance
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 09:58:58AM +0200, Andrea Veri wrote: live.gnome.org will go under MAINTENANCE in a few minutes while I migrate the content to the new host I finished setting up yesterday night. Another mail will follow as soon as everything got migrated. Awesome! It is still weird that it had so much problems just by forcing SSL / https on. Guessing outgoing bandwidth problem, let's see. FYI, I plan to break another site (force SSL) so you can fix it again :P -- Regards, Olav ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
Hi, On 05/22/2012 09:58 AM, Robert Nordan wrote: 1) Open Source or Free Software? This is about personal philosophy: Do you prefer the pragmatism of the Open Source Initiative or the political idealism of the Free Software Foundation? (Some of the candidates have already flagged a stance on this.) Please don't equate Open Source and pragmatism, and Free Software and idealism. This suggests that Free Software is not also pragmatic, or that Open Source developers are not idealists. This is a pet hate of mine, and frames anyone who calls themselves a Free software developer as not living in the real world. Free Software is all about pragmatic idealism - using the system against itself to give users rights we feel they should have as software authors. And, in fact, Open Source is also about pragmatic idealism - using a different brand for the same thing to avoid an unfortunate ambiguity doesn't change the fact that Open Source developers also care about giving users rights they would not otherwise have. Thanks, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
On Tue, 2012-05-22 at 10:35 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, On 05/22/2012 09:58 AM, Robert Nordan wrote: 1) Open Source or Free Software? This is about personal philosophy: Do you prefer the pragmatism of the Open Source Initiative or the political idealism of the Free Software Foundation? (Some of the candidates have already flagged a stance on this.) Please don't equate Open Source and pragmatism, and Free Software and idealism. This suggests that Free Software is not also pragmatic, or that Open Source developers are not idealists. This is a pet hate of mine, and frames anyone who calls themselves a Free software developer as not living in the real world. Free Software is all about pragmatic idealism - using the system against itself to give users rights we feel they should have as software authors. And, in fact, Open Source is also about pragmatic idealism - using a different brand for the same thing to avoid an unfortunate ambiguity doesn't change the fact that Open Source developers also care about giving users rights they would not otherwise have. Thanks, Dave. I'm so sorry, I was not intending to imply that one was better than the other or that they are diametrically opposed. Let me rephrase the question: Do you prefer the Open Source Initiative approach to pragmatic idealism or the Free Software Foundation approach to pragmatic idealism? -- Robert Nordan r...@robpvn.net ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: live.gnome.org Maintenance
On Tue, 22 May 2012, Andrea Veri wrote: [...] live.gnome.org will go under MAINTENANCE in a few minutes while I migrate the content to the new host I finished setting up yesterday night. Another mail will follow as soon as everything got migrated. The migration has just finished and the following wikis now have a new home: 1. live.gnome.org 2. pango.org 3. gnome-db.org (still needs DNS to be updated since we don't manage it) Have a nice day everyone and thanks for your patience, Andrea signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: live.gnome.org Maintenance
On Tue, 22 May 2012, Andrea Veri wrote: On Tue, 22 May 2012, Andrea Veri wrote: [...] live.gnome.org will go under MAINTENANCE in a few minutes while I migrate the content to the new host I finished setting up yesterday night. Another mail will follow as soon as everything got migrated. The migration has just finished and the following wikis now have a new home: 1. live.gnome.org 2. pango.org 3. gnome-db.org (still needs DNS to be updated since we don't manage it) Everything should be back to normality now, I've managed to renew a good bunch of SSL certs as well and enabled 443 on several virtual hosts. Please report any error or malfunctioning you may find either by opening a bug on the 'sysadmin' product in bugzilla or join #sysadmin on GIMPNET. Enjoy! Andrea signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
On Tue, 2012-05-22 at 09:58 +0200, Robert Nordan wrote: Hi all, I have a few questions for the candidates in the upcoming election to the board. They are obviously shaped by my interests, but I believe that other Foundation members may be interested in the answers as well. 1) Open Source or Free Software? This is about personal philosophy: Do you prefer the pragmatism of the Open Source Initiative or the political idealism of the Free Software Foundation? (Some of the candidates have already flagged a stance on this.) I agree with Dave's concerns over how this question is worded. But people do contribute for different reasons, some for moral reasons, others because they think it's just a better way to produce quality software. I think it's fair to ask candidates their motivations. I believe free software makes the world a better place, not just by making better software, but by empowering people to tinker and learn and build off the ideas of others. I believe people ought to be in control of the devices that are increasingly integral to the way we live. I view software as an applied science, and science works best when we share knowledge and ideas. That said, I often use the term open source. I pick my battles. 2) Overhaul of GNOME's git infrastructure I personally believe that the way the GNOME git system is set up is a bit antiquated and doesn't use git to its full potential. It's fine for developers with commit access, but contributors without have to create individual patches and attach them to bug trackers or convince the maintainers to look up their personal branch hosted somewhere else and merge in. In a time when GitHub is setting the standard for ease of use when it comes to forking, merging and development, GNOME is lagging behind. I have heard chatter among GNOME people about setting up a GNOME instance of Gitorious to gain that kind of functionality, but nothing has really happened. Do any of the candidates want to make a juicy campaign promise on this issue? We got Git in the first place because some hackers decided to set things up and do a trial conversion. It wasn't the board. It was people getting stuff done. If people want a Gitorious instance, it should happen the same way. But, if the board can provide any resources to help that, I'd vote in favor. 3) GNOME and Ubuntu In the recent years there has been a public perception of a schism between GNOME and Ubuntu resulting in double work and wasted resources on both sides. Do you think that perception is unfounded or not, and how do you plan to handle it? There is a schism between GNOME and Ubuntu. The GNOME community, by and large, wants to create a finished product. Ubuntu wants to do the same thing, and they want to do it differently. They are two different products made by two increasingly different groups of people. We do share technology, and I think we should work together as much as possible on that technology. I fully support things like cross-project summits and hackfests. I don't have a problem with multiple projects existing, though we ought to collaborate where possible. But at the end of the day, the GNOME Foundations exists to support GNOME, so that has to be our first priority. 4) Stance on GNOME forks Similarly, GNOME 3 has met with some opposing developments like Cinnamon and MATE. It is of course the right of dissatisfied users to do what they want and fork if they like, but should GNOME ignore them or try to find ways to work together with them? It's clear there are people who want to continue having something like GNOME 2. And it's clear there are people who are willing to step up and do the work. That's great. I fully support it. And I think we should work with them, provided they want to work with us and provided we have the resources. Honestly, I wouldn't mind at all continuing to have a GNOME 2 product line, as long as there are people willing to make it happen. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Boston Summit?
On 2012-04-27 17:17, Michael Hill wrote: Hi Karen, On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: Are there teams (or individuals, since this is a less formal event) in Toronto, Boston and/or Montreal that are willing to take on the burden of trying to organize this? I don't want to speak for Ryan, but I'm available to be part of any Toronto team. I know of a couple of developers, a couple of docs people and a GSoC intern. (Okay, the developers are Behdad and Ryan.) Lucas Rocha posted a photo of the Mozilla space on G+ today. (Ignore his comment about snow, it's sunny now. Please also disregard what Shaun says about snowstorms and flights, that was unseasonable. Snow on Thanksgiving weekend is unheard of, or at least fairly rare.) I'd like to get to Boston sometime, so if it's in Toronto this year, and I invite everyone to my folks' place for Thanksgiving dinner, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to go next year. I don't see any further discussion from this on the Boston/Montreal/Toronto Summit! Should we set up a (somewhat informal) bid process? I'm reminded of this, as I just got the confirmation on the space in Boston for Columbus Day weekend (we don't have to pay any fees, thanks to MIT and to Walter Bender). If there's a push to have this elsewhere, we should at least free up the space so others can use it. karen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Brian Cameron - Stepping down from the board
Brian- Thanks for your selfless service the past few years. Your dedication, including to some of the board's most thankless tasks, has been admirable and will be very difficult for the board to replace. Luis On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 6:15 PM, Brian Cameron brian.came...@oracle.com wrote: Friends in the GNOME community: After serving 4 terms on The GNOME Foundation board of directors, I will be stepping down at the end of this term. I would like to thank everyone in the community who has supported me and allowed me to represent them on this board. It has been a profoundly rewarding and truly inspirational experience to help The GNOME Foundation and GNOME community to grow. The years that I have served on the board have been exciting and productive times. I am proud to have served as president and secretary; to have been involved with the development, release and celebration surrounding the GNOME 3 release; and to have helped with the development of successful GNOME programs like the Outreach Program for Women. In my time on the board, I have witnessed so much growth within the community. Since then, the GNOME Foundation has hired two executive directors, started having successful annual summits in Asia, and has more than doubled the number of hackfests held each year. Just to mention a few highlights. My stepping down should not be viewed as me becoming less involved with GNOME. I plan to continue working on GNOME for Oracle and expect that I will continue helping the GNOME Foundation and community in many ways. I mostly feel that it is just time for me to step down to reclaim some of my life back. 4.5 years (including one 18-month term in 2008-2009) is a long time to serve on The GNOME Foundation board of directors. I believe that only Jonathan Blandford served as a board member for a longer period of time (5 years). With the two most senior board members (Germán and myself) both stepping down at the end of this term, it is especially important for passionate people to serve the community. So I again encourage people who are considering to run for the board to step forward. It is a great way to increase one's involvement with GNOME and free software and to help make sure that GNOME continues to rock. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Brian Cameron - Stepping down from the board
On 05/22/2012 09:53 PM, Luis Villa wrote: Brian- Thanks for your selfless service the past few years. Your dedication, including to some of the board's most thankless tasks, has been admirable and will be very difficult for the board to replace. I want to second that. Having been on the board for a few terms with Brian, I too fully appreciate all the leadership he has shown over the years lifting where no one else wanted to. behdad Luis On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 6:15 PM, Brian Cameron brian.came...@oracle.com wrote: Friends in the GNOME community: After serving 4 terms on The GNOME Foundation board of directors, I will be stepping down at the end of this term. I would like to thank everyone in the community who has supported me and allowed me to represent them on this board. It has been a profoundly rewarding and truly inspirational experience to help The GNOME Foundation and GNOME community to grow. The years that I have served on the board have been exciting and productive times. I am proud to have served as president and secretary; to have been involved with the development, release and celebration surrounding the GNOME 3 release; and to have helped with the development of successful GNOME programs like the Outreach Program for Women. In my time on the board, I have witnessed so much growth within the community. Since then, the GNOME Foundation has hired two executive directors, started having successful annual summits in Asia, and has more than doubled the number of hackfests held each year. Just to mention a few highlights. My stepping down should not be viewed as me becoming less involved with GNOME. I plan to continue working on GNOME for Oracle and expect that I will continue helping the GNOME Foundation and community in many ways. I mostly feel that it is just time for me to step down to reclaim some of my life back. 4.5 years (including one 18-month term in 2008-2009) is a long time to serve on The GNOME Foundation board of directors. I believe that only Jonathan Blandford served as a board member for a longer period of time (5 years). With the two most senior board members (Germán and myself) both stepping down at the end of this term, it is especially important for passionate people to serve the community. So I again encourage people who are considering to run for the board to step forward. It is a great way to increase one's involvement with GNOME and free software and to help make sure that GNOME continues to rock. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
How does each candidate propose to make use of GNOME and its communication to build support in the user community for free software and the freedom it provides? The free software movement practices pragmatic idealism. Our ideal is freedom for those who use software. We say that all programs should be free, and our practical goal is to bring that about. The open source camp is pragmatic too, but mostly not idealistic. The promoters of open source generally don't aim to make all programs open source. They recommend a certain development methodology, presenting it as a practical issue and not as an ethical requisite. You could imagine someone saying ethically, all code should be open source, but that's not the views of the open source camp. The idea of the GNU system follows from the free software movement's ideals. If you want to escape from nonfree software, pragmatically you need a free system to escape to. It has to be 100% free software in order to do the job; 99% free software doesn't get you all the way out. That's why we launched GNOME. In 1998, KDE was free software, but in order to use it, one had to use nonfree Qt as well. Thus, KDE was leading to a system that couldn't be 100% free software. We had to do something about that, and what we did is GNOME. (Nowadays Qt is free software, so KDE doesn't have this problem any more. Part of why Qt is free software is that GNOME put pressure on the developers to make it free.) GNOME's usefulness as a software package is independent of how we talk about it. However, the use of GNOME provides an opportunity to educate the users about this issue, in philosophical and political terms -- to teach them the idealism of the free software movement. Thus, my question: how does each candidate propose to make use of GNOME and its communication to build support in the user community for free software and the freedom it provides? -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
Hi Robert. On 05/22/2012 03:58 AM, Robert Nordan wrote: 1) Open Source or Free Software? Open Source AND Free Software. :) With respect to my own pragmatic idealism: * I value freedom and tend to say Free Software. BUT I have no philosophical problems with those who say or prefer Open Source. None whatsoever. * If you think I'm turning off my Android's GPS because getting lost is preferable to using a non-free driver, think again. ;) BUT I did donate money (the cost of a new unlocked QWERTY phone) to the Replicant Project because I would much prefer to not get lost AND to not use non-free software. As soon there is a fully free Android with GPS and a QWERTY keyboard I will buy it. I hope that they accomplish this soon. * I find it disturbing and unfortunate that with the very many things these two groups have in common, the focus seems to always come back to the few differences which exist. And I wonder if that is in the best interest of either group. I myself do not think it is. Thus as a pragmatist I will do everything I can to advance Free, Libre, Open Source software. I will not engage in debates about Open Source versus Free Software, however, because I feel doing so is to the detriment of our shared goal of eliminating proprietary software. As an idealist, I'm fully convinced we can achieve our shared goal -- if and only if we work together. 2) Overhaul of GNOME's git infrastructure I personally believe that the way the GNOME git system is set up is a bit antiquated and doesn't use git to its full potential. I personally do not have serious problems with GNOME's git system or associated infrastructure, though admittedly I am a tad antiquated myself. ;) Having said that, I also do not have serious objections to an overhaul -- with one possible exception: Any time my ears hear the word overhaul, my brain receives potentially significant disruption. GNOME 3 is still sufficiently young that I think all of us -- designers, developers, document writers, marketers, translators, ... -- need to keep our focus on it and not lose momentum. Thus if it were up to the Board to decide upon this issue, my supporting it would be based primarily on two things: overall community support of it and how smooth/seamless the transition would be. If everyone wants it and it can JustHappen(tm) without us skipping a beat, it's got my vote. Otherwise, let's wait a couple of cycles. 3) GNOME and Ubuntu 4) Stance on GNOME forks (I hope you don't mind my combining your last two questions, but from my perspective they're just different flavors of the same general issue.) From a *purely philosophical* standpoint, I don't think these schisms or forks are necessarily a bad thing. What's been happening lately is a demonstration of the beauties and strengths of FLOSS: If you can do it better, if you can meet an unmet need, if you disagree with the direction a project is taking, then get the code and do it the way you think it should be done. Form a community around your effort. Learn, create, and share. If you're right and you indeed did it better, or met an unmet need, or took a direction that needed to be taken, what you created makes the world a better place. And even if you weren't right, you gained knowledge and experience and skills in the process which you can apply to other FLOSS software projects. And that, too, makes the world a better place. Being more practical and less pollyannaish: If you consider everything we do in GNOME, it's a huge, huge amount of work. I think the odds of any fork or schism becoming truly independent/separate are pretty slim. So they still need GNOME. And I would argue that we need them (see huge, huge amount of work above). As for how to handle it Depends what it is. ;) With respect to Canonical/Ubuntu: I'd love to have some discussion with them around where they are investing (losing?) time with respect to GNOME modules. Example: At one point, whilst trying to troubleshoot a couple of downstream-only Orca bugs, I learned that their Gtk+ was heavily patched; their... I *think* it was pygobject... was essentially version Y, but claimed to be version X because they patched it into almost-Yness rather than just pulling our version Y; they had gnome-foo version 3.2.x, but gnome-bar version 3.0.x, but would ship gnome-baz version 3.4. Why are they doing this?? And that is not a rhetorical question; I genuinely would like to know. But more importantly, if there are things we can be doing upstream to prevent or reduce this extreme downstream smorgasbording, I think we should do so: 1. Extreme smorgasbording can lead to breakage. Breakage makes FLOSS software look less desirable. If the user knows that the module in question is a GNOME module, that makes GNOME look less desirable. 2. Extreme smorgasbording surely takes time. Wouldn't it be easier to just pull from upstream? Hopefully they would agree that it would
