Re: Questions for the board election candidates
hi; On 22 May 2012 08:58, Robert Nordan r...@robpvn.net 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? aaah, the perennial, philosophical discussion between the Judean's People Popular Front and the People's Front of Judea. ;-) why or? I'd say both. there's room for philosophical debate - and there'll always be room for that, whether we like it or not. personally, I like to use free and open source software. thankfully, I don't have to write it a lot. :-) 2) Overhaul of GNOME's git infrastructure personally, I don't think we need an overhaul of our infrastructure. I classify an overhaul in the same scope as changing the whole source revision control system, and we clearly had our share of those. the main reason why we have a central repository should be obvious to everyone; GNOME is not a single project with a single code base, so we cannot have a single authoritative tree, and just release from that. given the nature of the collection of software that is GNOME, we need multiple repositories - and we need to grant access to those on gnome.org. the main issue is barrier for entry; installing a gitorious instance on gnome.org would make it easier to create an account than the current process of creating one for git.gnome.org. just as a side note: one of the reasons why we have a process in place is because having the write bit on gnome.org allows you to touch every single repository, so we need to have some check and balances on who gets one. another one is that a repository on gnome.org usually has a better visibility and some degree of authoritativeness coming with it, than a random repository on github. I somewhat agree: we could install a gitorious instance on gnome.org to reduce the administrative overhead for creating a Git account to access a specific set of repositories, e.g. something like playground.gnome.org, or gitorious.gnome.org, assuming - and this is what I said multiple times when asked my opinion about it - that somebody steps up and helps the sysadmin team with the task of installing it and potentially maintain it. the role of the Board would be to facilitate this process: finding (dedicated) hardware, or bandwidth, in case the current resources are not enough, for instance. hiring somebody to do it would be a last resort: if nobody is willing to step up then probably it's not so necessary, after all. personally, I think that using gitorious.org, or github.com, are *also* fine choices; moving a repo from there to gnome.org is really easy (I've done it a couple of times myself). the Accounts team has done a tremendous job in making the process of getting a Git account as fast and painless as possible (kudos to them). obviously, lowering the bar for access to gnome.org is a perfectly fine goal, so who's going to help out? :-) 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? we've gone our separate ways in many regards - though I think we ought to separate between Ubuntu, the distribution, and Canonical, the company. Ubuntu is still using GNOME components, and is shipping GNOME 3; for this, I'm grateful, and I don't see any issue. many distributions ship with GNOME, albeit not as a primary environment. that GNOME was chosen by Ubuntu as their primary environment for these many years was mutually beneficial, and, again, I'm grateful for that. obviously I'm disappointed in the change in direction - but I understand the position and the intent of Canonical (in many ways, it's similar to ours, albeit with a different implementation), and all I can say is: good luck, and thanks for all the fish. I think this sentiment is shared between many GNOME developers. on the Canonical side, though, I'm less than thrilled. the various copyright and licensing agreements for Canonical-backed projects conflicts with my view on contributions and barriers of entry; as I said during the discussion for the GNOME Copyright Assignment Guidelines, I barely accept this kind of agreements when they come from the FSF, under the assumption that the FSF won't really change that much - but I have many more objections when they involve a commercial entity. I had to enforce a similar assignment in my day job, and I tried to get it removed for almost two years - until it was finally lifted - so I'm really skeptical about them, and the barriers to contribution that they impose, in exchange for a small measure of safety for the entity issuing them. other than that, I think we're still very much collaborating - just like with any other downstream distribution, when it comes to packaging,
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
1) Open Source or Free Software? aaah, the perennial, philosophical discussion between the Judean's People Popular Front and the People's Front of Judea. ;-) I never saw that Monty Python movie, but the impression I get is that those two organizations had the same goals, the same methods, and almost the same name, but refused to cooperate at all. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) By contrast, the two camps in the free software community have different goals, partly similar methods, and different names that reflect their different values, yet they do cooperate on many practical activities which serve both goals. It's the diametrical opposite of the Monty Python satire. If you think our situation is even slightly like that satire, you need to read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html for more explanation of the difference between free software and open source. GNOME should continue to welcome the participation of developers with open source views. All GNU packages do this. The idea of treating those people as the JPPF and PFJ treated each other is a straw man. The real issue is that GNOME should also give public support to the free software movement. Not by battling, rather by spreading and endorsing the ethical ideas of free software (and making the name visible, too). A few candidates have written about how they would do this (or how they would refuse to do it). Where do the other candidatess stand? -- 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 https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Facilitating the Integration of Free Software into Academic Courses (was Re: Questions for the board election candidates)
The GNU education team looked at software-carpentry.org and reported important flaws. They use the Mac and Windows platforms, and they include flash videos in their web pages. These work directly against users' freedom. At the philosophical level, they are in the open source camp. They use the term open source, and their ideas are the open source ideas too. They don't say a word about software freedom. I think their actions are a reflection of their views. It is possible to agree inwardly with the ideas of software freedom but present only the open source ideas in one's discourse. This is what Stormy says she does. However, most of those who say open source are saying what they really think. You can find hundreds of projects which develop a program that is free, but base their actions on open source ideas, and make secondary decisions in a way that works against software freedom. Mozilla and OpenOffice are two examples. Whatever your thoughts may be, what you say makes a difference. Inward support for the free software ideas won't lead others if you don't show it in your words (and actions, of course). When we work to get academic activities involved with GNOME, let's take care to lead them away from the path software-carpentry.org chose. -- 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 https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
On 2012-05-27 00:44, Stormy Peters wrote: I try to avoid these conversations because I think there are lots of over generalizations, stereotypes and emotions. I just want to say that I generally use the term open source *and* I believe in many of the values attributed to free software. I don't believe that using different terminology makes us as different as some portray. I agree with this, in that I also think that folks in practice use the terms interchangeably, sometimes even when talking wholly about the ideals of freedom. I hate for us to get distracted too much arguing about terminology (as Joannie says), but I do think there is an important discussion about the importance of freedom to GNOME and the role of the GNOME Foundation in promulgating freedom. As a charitable nonprofit, I believe our existence must be based in the ideals of software freedom and our mission and public good are totally related to those ideals. (For example, we're not a trade association.) I think that in order to be true to our nonprofit mission, GNOME itself must be committed to freedom. karen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
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.) I tend to say free software myself, but won't correct people who call it other things. I am happy that FSF is part of the Adboard and the help and feedback they have given to the board over the years. 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? As far as I've understood, setting up Gitorious is a bit of work, so that leaves us the option of A. Taking away sysadmin time from other things or, B. Pay the Gitorious people to do it. Time and money could probably be better spent on other things, but I think it's at least worth to investigate it. 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? I'm not sure I agree it's wasted resources. It's always great that projects try out different things, especially if those projects are focused on what attracted me about GNOME when I first joined the project: Software freedom and making hard choices. I think a large part of the schism is because Ubuntu was once what Debian or SUSE is today, just a loose collection of packages (although they actually made a hard decision about what DE to ship at the time; GNOME), but is nowadays increasingly building a distinct product by making hard choices, just like is GNOME is these days too. Both projects do share a lot of components though, and bringing the relevant developers to the right hackfests and conferences is a good way to develop those components. 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? We're building GNOME and I would like to focus on that. It's great that people fork and try out other paths, but I don't feel I have time to pay any attention to those projects specifically. - Andreas ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Facilitating the Integration of Free Software into Academic Courses (was Re: Questions for the board election candidates)
I am no expert on education, but your GNOME Outreach Program for Professors sounds like a good thing. -- 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 https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
* 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. There is a logical reason for this. The basic core idea in the free software movement is that nonfree software is an injustice. Ultimately we want all software to be free. In the meantime, for our freedom's sake we want to avoid nonfree software, and we should help others avoid it. Everything else follows from this. This core idea just happens to be the part that open source disagrees with. What we say is ethically imperative, they merely recommend for practical advantage. Their practical recommendations about software development are similar to ours, except that they accept some nonfree licenses. What the two camps have in common is equal to the open source camp's position. Where they differ includes the free software movement's basic core idea, its principles. Open source advocates recognize this. Thus, they have frequently suggested, Let's set aside our differences and work together to advocate the ideas we have in common. Which is equivalent to, Let's all advocate the ideas of open source, and drop the free software ethical principles. Of course, the free software movement declines the suggestion. The free software movement's response is to look for ways to advocate these principles more and better. That is why I am asking candidates how they will do more in GNOME to communicate these ideas. I'm not asking candidates about their personal software usage. I would encourage you to reject nonfree software in your personal life, but there's no reason to discuss that on this list. The issue here is what GNOME should do. -- 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 https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
I try to avoid these conversations because I think there are lots of over generalizations, stereotypes and emotions. I just want to say that I generally use the term open source *and* I believe in many of the values attributed to free software. I don't believe that using different terminology makes us as different as some portray. On May 26, 2012 9:44 PM, Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org wrote: * 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. There is a logical reason for this. The basic core idea in the free software movement is that nonfree software is an injustice. Ultimately we want all software to be free. In the meantime, for our freedom's sake we want to avoid nonfree software, and we should help others avoid it. Everything else follows from this. This core idea just happens to be the part that open source disagrees with. What we say is ethically imperative, they merely recommend for practical advantage. Their practical recommendations about software development are similar to ours, except that they accept some nonfree licenses. What the two camps have in common is equal to the open source camp's position. Where they differ includes the free software movement's basic core idea, its principles. Open source advocates recognize this. Thus, they have frequently suggested, Let's set aside our differences and work together to advocate the ideas we have in common. Which is equivalent to, Let's all advocate the ideas of open source, and drop the free software ethical principles. Of course, the free software movement declines the suggestion. The free software movement's response is to look for ways to advocate these principles more and better. That is why I am asking candidates how they will do more in GNOME to communicate these ideas. I'm not asking candidates about their personal software usage. I would encourage you to reject nonfree software in your personal life, but there's no reason to discuss that on this list. The issue here is what GNOME should do. -- 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 https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
On Thu, 2012-05-24 at 20:24 -0300, gnomeu...@gmail.com wrote: 2012/5/22 Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org: [...] 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? In short, I have no plans to use GNOME as a platform to spread support for Free Software. It is clear you have no empathy with Free Software. It is your opinion and that is ok. In practical matters, if you were elected as director: would you block any activity that involves working with FSF? or would you be indifferent? Similarly, would you avoid sponsoring activities/people whose goal is to spread GNOME and Free Software? -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Facilitating the Integration of Free Software into Academic Courses (was Re: Questions for the board election candidates)
Hi Joanie, On 05/25/2012 12:49 AM, Joanmarie Diggs wrote: snip Thoughts? I love it, from beginning to end! A great idea and one where we will have lots of help if we decided to open it up to other organisations too. And I love the idea of turning the professors into mentors as well - get the teachers teaching other teachers. All for it! Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
Hi David, On 05/25/2012 01:24 AM, gnomeu...@gmail.com wrote: In short, I have no plans to use GNOME as a platform to spread support for Free Software. Thanks for your frank and honest answers both to this question and the previous one. It's made it very easy to decide not to vote for you. And I mean that as a compliment - I much prefer knowing where you stand on issues that are important to me before the election, rather than being disappointed by you afterwards. Thanks, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://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.) Reading http://www.opensource.org/history: The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with free software [...] This sort of characterisation of another organisation is really not what I would want GNOME associated with. To me, they are different terms for the same thing. If we were talking specifically of attitudes of proponents of the different terms, I have bad stories to tell about both sides. The important thing is making 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 It isn't chatter, it was discussed on this very list: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2011-September/msg8.html 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? It's not up to the Board to make the decision of whether to deploy a gitorious instance. If money, consulting, or similar is needed to deploy it, then we can help, but the infrastructure work, including explaining the needs for such a deployment, would need to come from the various GNOME teams, and a group of hackers actually doing the work. 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? schism: A split or separation within a group or organization We're still GNOME, and in one piece, so not really a schism, and more of a fork. I think Canonical (and not Ubuntu) have tried to make their own desktop, developing their own shell so they could differentiate their offering, but keeping most of the upstream underlying infrastructure. Problems start happening when the underlying infrastructure moves and your project relies on the old bits. You end up spending time reconciling your changes based on the old infrastructure, and don't have time or resources to upstream the things you could upstream (and thus lower your maintenance burden). When resources aren't so tight, we usually see good contributions flowing from Ubuntu into GNOME. The rest of the problem is Free Software 101: the lower your delta to upstream, the easier it is to maintain. I'm sure we'll see Ubuntu's fork get back closer to upstream. 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? They're allowed to, certainly. For MATE, I think they'll hit maintenance problems very soon, when they've stopped spending time running sed on GNOME sources. Cinnamon is a good example of shell extensions use (cf. question 2, Unity could probably be implemented like that), but I think they're missing out on a lot of innovations and changes happening in GNOME 3. The effect is going to be more and more jarring as GNOME applications change to integrate with the shell. So I'm disappointed that they wouldn't choose to work upstream in some cases, but Cinnamon is certainly a more viable fork, especially if they start contributing to infrastructure, rather than just skinning the shell. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Facilitating the Integration of Free Software into Academic Courses (was Re: Questions for the board election candidates)
I hope no one minds the new subject. But I started out innocently enough answering Richard's question. But at the end had an essay plus a proposal. I hate when I do that, but what's done is done, so I wanted to separate it out from the Board Candidacy discussion. On 05/22/2012 10:56 PM, Richard Stallman wrote: [...] 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. Exactly. Hence my statement in my candidacy announcement [1]: ... I would like to see GNOME working actively with colleges and universities to facilitate the integration of Free Software development and philosophies into their courses. We (GNOME Accessibility Team) have already done some work with Dr. Heidi Ellis at Western New England University. She has been introducing her students to Free Software through HFOSS (the H standing for Humanitarian). This work has included coordinating with her, guest lecturing in her course, finding GNOME projects towards which her students can contribute, answering questions as needed, and so on. What we (GNOME Accessibility, Heidi, and Heidi's students) have learned in the process is that the idea is sound. We just need to iron out the wrinkles. We can build upon our experiences, find more professors, and get more GNOME teams involved in supporting this effort. My reasons for why GNOME should (IMHO) get behind this approach very much includes the need and desire to build support in the community for free software and the freedom it provides. But it is by no means limited to that. Far from it, in fact. Having been an educator for 15 years, not to mention a graduate student for two degrees prior, it's beyond obvious to me that there is no better teaching/learning tool than real-world experience. I see GNOME being a great way for college and university students to get this experience. And I believe it benefits all parties involved: * Students: - Learn about Free Software, not just what it is, but WHY it is. - Gain re-world work experience. And not just in terms of coding. Sure, the Computer Science students would. But why stop there? We could work with Technical Writing students, Art students, Marketing students, HCI students, Foreign Language students. Maybe even Law students and Philosophy students; Sociology students if we're clever. * Professors and Academic Institutions: - Give their students skills they'll need upon graduation. - Be seen as cool and innovative. * Companies Contributing to GNOME: - More, and more-qualified, applicants from which to choose. - The opportunity to get to know, and get to be known by, future potential employees. * GNOME: - More users (for those who aren't already users). - More contributors. - More people who know about Free Software and what we, as a Foundation, stand for. This, at least in my mind, makes a heck of a lot of sense. And as a Free Software community, we're already quite used to and very well-equipped to support people showing up and saying Hi, I want to help. So we just need to get the professors on board, how hard could that be? Heh. I had a couple of weeks off before I joined Igalia and I used some of that time to visit a few computer science professors. Turns out getting them on board may be a tad harder than I imagined. * They are not familiar with -- and thus not comfortable teaching -- all the tools we use. * They want certainty in terms of assignments and projects. * They want predictability with respect to a schedule. * They want a curriculum they can follow. * They do not want to be pioneers. BUT, they seem to truly dig the idea other than that. And, yes, that sounds like snark; I don't mean it that way. They really were excited and enthusiastic about the idea. But then they started thinking it through in terms of their actual courses and the doubts came pouring in. So my more specific response to this question: 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? is the following proposal: = GNOME Outreach Program for Professors = This would be an ongoing, largely self-sustaining program in which we: * Introduce professors to GNOME and Free Software. * Show them what we have to offer (the practical benefits listed above) * Pair them with a GNOME mentor who would help them: - become familiar with the tools we use; the modules we have; our culture, both GNOME-wide and team-specific; and relevant community members - find a suitable project - provide support (iron out wrinkles, answer questions, etc.) Suitable project types: * Existing
Re: Facilitating the Integration of Free Software into Academic Courses (was Re: Questions for the board election candidates)
On 05/24/2012 06:49 PM, Joanmarie Diggs wrote: * They are not familiar with -- and thus not comfortable teaching -- all the tools we use. * They want certainty in terms of assignments and projects. * They want predictability with respect to a schedule. * They want a curriculum they can follow. * They do not want to be pioneers. BUT, they seem to truly dig the idea other than that. FWIW, Software Carpentry is one of the more successful experiment I've seen in the Free Software meets Academic Courses experiments. Thought I share the link: http://software-carpentry.org/ behdad ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Facilitating the Integration of Free Software into Academic Courses (was Re: Questions for the board election candidates)
On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Behdad Esfahbod beh...@behdad.org wrote: On 05/24/2012 06:49 PM, Joanmarie Diggs wrote: * They are not familiar with -- and thus not comfortable teaching -- all the tools we use. * They want certainty in terms of assignments and projects. * They want predictability with respect to a schedule. * They want a curriculum they can follow. * They do not want to be pioneers. BUT, they seem to truly dig the idea other than that. FWIW, Software Carpentry is one of the more successful experiment I've seen in the Free Software meets Academic Courses experiments. Thought I share the link: http://software-carpentry.org/ Seneca College's collaboration with Mozilla has also, by all accounts, been a raging success: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Main_Page behdad ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Facilitating the Integration of Free Software into Academic Courses (was Re: Questions for the board election candidates)
On 05/24/2012 06:59 PM, Luis Villa wrote: FWIW, Software Carpentry is one of the more successful experiment I've seen in the Free Software meets Academic Courses experiments. Thought I share the link: http://software-carpentry.org/ Seneca College's collaboration with Mozilla has also, by all accounts, been a raging success: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Right. In fact, it seems like Mozilla Foundation is the place to go... Greg Wilson (Software Carpentry's lead) works from the Toronto Mozilla offices... This one too: http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1116533--girls-only-code-writing-camp-hits-toronto behdad ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
2012/5/22 Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org: 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. I don't think we have a duty or even a right to educate users in this fashion. Regardless in my personal experience having given presentations on the subject, trying to force a political ideology along with the topic generally leads to glazed over eyes and dismissal at best. I am happy to talk about such matters if requested but I am certainly not in favor of using GNOME as a platform to force such views on people. I am here to present a great modern desktop (and eventually OS) not an ideology. There happens to be a number of appealing effects of being Open Source and some limitations created by the state of affairs (DRMed content, software patents, redistribution restrictions, e.g.) that I will happily highlight when relevant but I reject that I have a right to educate people beyond that extend. 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? In short, I have no plans to use GNOME as a platform to spread support for Free Software. David Nielsen -- 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 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://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: 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: 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: 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
