Hi Bernhard,
On Wed, 2010-11-24 at 23:27 +0100, Bernhard Dippold wrote:
> one question on the ESC:
Sure !
> What I only see described between the lines, is something we should
> consider, as is has led to a very disappointing situation in OOo:
:-)
> Can ESC decide on topics related not only to coding and development, but
> influencing larger parts of the community?
Well; I guess we need some final decision making power on all detail
going into the binaries we ship, which IMHO should be the ESC falling
back to the board for highly contentious topics.
> Probably all of you know about the OOo-ESC decision on implementing the
> color"less" ODF icons.
Oh - grief; my input in those meetings was extremely -scathing- on this
topic, perhaps Rene / Thorsten can remember. Since I'm not an artist I
consulted our artists, and they rejected the idea of 'ODF' labels on
icons, and the icons themselves on the basis of l10n, not fitting with
the existing platform icon sets etc. The idea was pretty much a poor
joke from my perspective.
> The topic has been discussed in an ESC meeting, where nobody objected
> loud
Nah - I objected pretty vigorously; but there was no real point in
fighting Sun/Oracle on this - we had abandoned hope of improvement
around here anyway; we just said something like "you go ahead, we will
not" ;-)
> , then presented in a blog entry after the first version had been
> finished and despite very strong opinions against their implementation
> implemented in OOo3.2.1 with the negative feedback foreseen by their
> critics.
Entirely predictable in my view.
> I don't want to experience another similar situation - well knowing,
> that the OOo-ESC is special because of Oracle.
I think Oracle was the key here; the OO.o art team (Stella) never
seemed to interact well with the community, in my experience. eg. Novell
tried to provide an entirely new high color icon theme, assigned it all
to Sun, but Stella instead of joining in just duplicated it all ;-) etc.
We shouldn't let that sort of thing happen in future.
> The Bylaws state that the ESC "provides technological guidance on
> strategic matters". That's guidance, not decision.
IMHO - it is poorly phrased; it should be the 1st port of call for
technical and product decisions. As such, it needs to include active QA,
UX, etc. people whenever their input is needed.
> Will the BoD be the entity to decide in such a situation?
And escalate here, on the odd occasions it is necessary.
> Sorry for coming up with such a more or less hypothetical case, but I
> really want to avoid problems as we had them in OOo...
Sure - makes sense; I really think this was down to the pathology of
the Sun situation; and I'm optimistic that by being inclusive we can
have a better outcome. Having said that - adding too many stake-holders
with a love of saying "no" to the process has its own risks too - we
need to take some decisions that not everyone will like.
Does that make some sense ?
HTH,
Michael.
--
michael.me...@novell.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
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