Re: A few questions for the candidates
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote: Hi, I originally wanted to have some questions included in the list of questions sent by the membership committee, but I feel like waiting for Friday while the voting period is already opened is waiting a long time and I'm not being patient here :-) I apologize because some of those questions are most likely a bit easier to answer for people who are already on the board... 1) I've read with interest the mails from the candidates announcing they're running, and most (if not all -- I didn't double-check) include some motivations with examples of what they'd be interested in working on. Why are those tasks/ideas things you cannot work on while not being on the board? Some of my points can be worked on without the board yet I missing the overview in some areas and some others need official representatives from companies or organizations. Being on board will ease the planning and and organizing these meetings with set parties. 2) What are your non-usual (ie, not code, not translations, not documentation, etc.) contributions as a GNOME Foundation member? (organizing events, pushing people to do things, finding sponsors, etc. are all possible answers) If being a mentor for GSoC counts then yes. Else I only did coding. (Does allowing Vincent to beat me in Mario Kart to boost his ego count?) 3) What is your opinion on the co-location of Akademy and GUADEC in 2011? And if you think it was not the best choice, will you still be able to help it happen? I am actually for it since it motivates and pushes for cross-desktop development and communication. 4) How much free time per week do you think you will be able to allocate for the board? (I'm very well aware that this could be 0 for some weeks, and 100% of your time for other weeks; I'm just asking in general) to be very honest i think 10 - 20 hours per week at maximum... 5) Are you okay giving up some of your current GNOME responsabilities/activities to join the board? (give up a maintainer hat, or hack less, or participate less in a specific team) Or do you think it won't be necessary and why? (I know it's a bit related to the previous question :-)) I don't think I will be giving away responsibilities or activities since most of the work I did or do is caught up by my team and maintained by them... So my role with them is more or less organizational than coding. I just chip in now and then with some prototypes and bugs for them to look at and take in if they like. I plan to do the same thing if elected for board, by motivating community members to take actions and drive them into solving issues. 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if elected? If yes, which role and why? No not really, since I would rather observe people taking over these roles first and learn from their experience 7) What do you think of the current GNOME Foundation budget? Had you read it at least once before reading this mail? (it's okay if you didn't look at it before, btw) I read it a week ago before deciding to run for candidacy (someone tipped me to do so) and while I am very surprised by the income and outcome, there should be a security buffer of 20% at least... This is a point I think should be discussed by the board and community. 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about? (I'd love to not read 11 times the same answer, thanks :-)) Help your app: By donating money to your favorite app you get your name mentioned in a new Thank you tab in the About dialog of an app. 9) Will you be at GUADEC this year? (there's a board meeting and an advisory board meeting there) Yes 10) Make or break question: what's your favorite french expresision? The french bits of the Les Poissons song from the Little Mermaid Thanks, Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list Je vous en prie, Seif ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:11 AM, Owen Taylor otay...@redhat.com wrote: The secret master plan Boy do I wish I had a secret master plan tucked in a drawer somewhere! It would be really useful To the extent we have a master plan, it's in two documents that everybody has seen: http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RoadmapTwoThirtyOne I think the community would love to see some more why behind the how :) For example I'd like to know why shell reinvents the graphical toolkit and comes with a (hardcoded?) theme which in turn makes it look out of place. Or why JS and not LUA or Python. I'm sure there was some evaluation behind these decisions but I'm not even sure where to dig. It's details like this that make the project look more like OpenOffice than a GNOME app (here's the resulting code versus here are the plans and the rationale, please discuss). Cheers, -- Patryk Zawadzki ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
Hi! I think the community would love to see some more why behind the how :) For example I'd like to know why shell reinvents the graphical toolkit and comes with a (hardcoded?) theme which in turn makes it look out of place. Or why JS and not LUA or Python. I'm sure there was some evaluation behind these decisions but I'm not even sure where to dig. It's details like this that make the project look more like OpenOffice than a GNOME app (here's the resulting code versus here are the plans and the rationale, please discuss). Well, there is this link in the Technology-section of http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell and it explaining some of these: http://blog.fishsoup.net/2008/10/22/implementing-the-next-gnome-shell/ Regards, Johannes ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 11:57:49AM +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:11 AM, Owen Taylor otay...@redhat.com wrote: The secret master plan Boy do I wish I had a secret master plan tucked in a drawer somewhere! It would be really useful To the extent we have a master plan, it's in two documents that everybody has seen: http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RoadmapTwoThirtyOne I think the community would love to see some more why behind the how :) For example I'd like to know why shell reinvents the graphical toolkit and comes with a (hardcoded?) theme which in turn makes it look out of place. Or why JS and not LUA or Python. I'm sure there was some evaluation behind these decisions but I'm not even sure where to dig. http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell links to a blogpost explaining the rationale It's details like this that make the project look more like OpenOffice than a GNOME app (here's the resulting code versus here are the plans and the rationale, please discuss). Seems very open to me. -- Regards, Olav ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 11:57 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:11 AM, Owen Taylor otay...@redhat.com wrote: The secret master plan Boy do I wish I had a secret master plan tucked in a drawer somewhere! It would be really useful To the extent we have a master plan, it's in two documents that everybody has seen: http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RoadmapTwoThirtyOne I think the community would love to see some more why behind the how :) For example I'd like to know why shell reinvents the graphical toolkit and comes with a (hardcoded?) theme which in turn makes it look out of place. Or why JS and not LUA or Python. I'm sure there was some evaluation behind these decisions but I'm not even sure where to dig. how about starting from the wiki page of the project? there's a lot of information, rationales and links to discussions. but, ultimately: it's a choice from the maintainers and I expect people accept decisions from the maintainers of a project because - well, they are the ones doing the damned work. It's details like this that make the project look more like OpenOffice than a GNOME app (here's the resulting code versus here are the plans and the rationale, please discuss). what's fundamental is that not everything should be open to discussion. sure, if you disagree on the choice of colors in the CSS theme then you can discuss it with the UI design team - as long as you avoid bike-shedding them to death because that's not nice and all; but if you want to discuss the language of choice then you misunderstood how an open source project works. the gnome-shell developers decided, and you either follow them or you can start writing your own shell in your own language. I wouldn't assume people started questioning every single decision taken 12 months ago (or even farther back) because that's an incredible amount of what the damn kids today call stop energy - and in general it's not even worth following up to every crank that sends an email saying you should have used LUA!!11!1 JS suckzZzZzZ. as for design, it's even simpler: just because open source convinced a lot of hackers that they could design user interfaces it's a pure fact that not everyone should even be allowed to design. you need training, and you need specific competences. mocking up something in Inkscape is *not* one of those competences - though it helps. after working for two years with a great design team I can only have the greatest amount of respect for whoever does this for a living. people sending random mockups are far, far away from the kind of people you want contributing design ideas for a successful user experience. whoever thinks otherwise is seriously mistaken, and lives in a fantasy land of ponies and unicorns and rainbows. +++ the GNOME Shell design and development process, as somebody that looks at it (slightly) from the outside, and since its inception, has been nothing *but* open. it's your classic open source meritocratic project, with two benevolent dictators that ultimately make the calls on technology and design. there's *nothing* new. they happen to be RedHat employee just because they started the project; GIO has been written by a RedHat employee and yet I don't see masses in revolt because the community didn't have a greater deal of control on it. hell, half our current platform has been written by RH employees and everyone seems to be using it, contributing to it and improving it. ciao, Emmanuele. -- W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 12:52 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: sure, if you disagree on the choice of colors in the CSS theme then you can discuss it with the UI design team - as long as you avoid bike-shedding them to death because that's not nice and all; but if you want to discuss the language of choice then you misunderstood how an open source project works. the gnome-shell developers decided, and you either follow them or you can start writing your own shell in your own language. Fair enough but in the past GNOME used to share the common graphical design. the HIG is not really a common graphical design, otherwise the rules in there would be much more stringent than they actually are. and it would be kept up to date. ;-) GNOME Shell is radically different here so it's not the usual case. I wondered not about the supposed one-upping the color choices but about actually using the current theme instead. That's hardly what one would call bike-shedding. the current theme is CSS and some assets; changing it could be interesting, but there are motivations that descend from the overall design - the black is used to connote the negative space, and maintain the overall attention of the user not on the chrome, but on the content (the user's workspace(s)). it's a common user interaction approach that is used by authoring tools and by photo editing software. again, this is generally defined in the design guidelines. could it be better? yes - what couldn't be. but it's there, and if it's unclear just get hold of Jon on IRC and pester him to make it clear(er) on the wiki. But then again, it's now too late to discuss any of the choices as the code is already there. It would still be nice to have a single information source that isn't just linking to other people's blogs. :) that would be the design PDF, for the design side. the PDF is in some cases high level, or concise in the rationale; could be defined the apocalypse. the blog posts are the exegeses, done by the designers to explain and expand the apocalypse. we might need some synopsis as well: a short write up for each technology and design bit - though that should probably be done after the user testing and after the bulk of the features have landed, to verify whether or not the design holds up in the first place. ciao, Emmanuele. -- W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
From: Emmanuele Bassi eba...@gmail.com It's details like this that make the project look more like OpenOffice than a GNOME app (here's the resulting code versus here are the plans and the rationale, please discuss). what's fundamental is that not everything should be open to discussion. sure, if you disagree on the choice of colors in the CSS theme then you can discuss it with the UI design team - as long as you avoid bike-shedding them to death because that's not nice and all; but if you want to discuss the language of choice then you misunderstood how an open source project works. the gnome-shell developers decided, and you either follow them or you can start writing your own shell in your own language. Probably offtopic, sorry, but ... After read this paragraph, and reading again GS roadmap [1], I realized that theming are not included in the issues listed on the accessibility section of this roadmap. Anyway, Willie Walker identified this as one of the big issues of GS towards GNOME 3.0. [2]. There is any possibility to include theming in the accessibility issue list ? As Emmanuele Bassi said, right now there are people with a deep knowledge on design and usability working on GS, at it would be awesome if they could be involved here (and it seems that they are interested [3]). BR [1] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RoadmapTwoThirtyOne [2] http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GNOME3#Theming [3] http://blogs.gnome.org/wwalker/2010/03/02/gnome-usability-hackfest/ === API (apinhe...@igalia.com) ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 1:14 PM, Emmanuele Bassi eba...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 12:52 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: GNOME Shell is radically different here so it's not the usual case. I wondered not about the supposed one-upping the color choices but about actually using the current theme instead. That's hardly what one would call bike-shedding. the current theme is CSS and some assets; Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was referring to the current GTK+ theme (with the recently intoduced dark variant support, hint, hint) :) -- Patryk Zawadzki ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 14:40 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 1:14 PM, Emmanuele Bassi eba...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 12:52 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: GNOME Shell is radically different here so it's not the usual case. I wondered not about the supposed one-upping the color choices but about actually using the current theme instead. That's hardly what one would call bike-shedding. the current theme is CSS and some assets; Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was referring to the current GTK+ theme (with the recently intoduced dark variant support, hint, hint) :) The GTK+ theme for GTK 3.x will change in the short future, and hopefully have *proper* dark theme support (as opposed to my attempts at using Darkilouche for the colour theme in the gnome3 branch of gtk-engines). ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few questions for the candidates
2010/6/2 Seif Lotfy s...@lotfy.com: I read it a week ago before deciding to run for candidacy (someone tipped me to do so) and while I am very surprised by the income and outcome, there should be a security buffer of 20% at least... This is a point I think should be discussed by the board and community. I'm not sure what you mean by a 20% security buffer. We do have money in the bank that would get us through a difficult time period. (How much time depends on whether we kept running as usual or whether we scaled back.) Given that buffer, our goal is to use the money we bring in every year in activities that support our mission. (Thanks to Vincent for asking this question, I hope it prompts lots more people to read to read the GNOME Foundation budget and goals and give feedback.) Stormy ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few questions for the candidates
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 5:30 PM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote: 1) I've read with interest the mails from the candidates announcing they're running, and most (if not all -- I didn't double-check) include some motivations with examples of what they'd be interested in working on. Why are those tasks/ideas things you cannot work on while not being on the board? I guess it's one of those scenarios where if you're not fully committed to an idea/project then it is hard for you to make it a priority. I mean, anyone should be able to lend a helping hand to the Board, but when people have other things happening in their lives, no matter how well intentioned they may be, things they are not directly involved with sort fall by the way side. I feel that once I'm 100% involved with the Board duties, I will be able to work on the those ideas and get feedback from the other Board members. 2) What are your non-usual (ie, not code, not translations, not documentation, etc.) contributions as a GNOME Foundation member? (organizing events, pushing people to do things, finding sponsors, etc. are all possible answers) In my case it would be advocacy. I happen to live in an area with a very rich open source environment, with lots of companies (Red Hat, rPath, to name a few) doing some direct work to bring this technology to the world. There are several local user groups covering pretty much all the popular environments and programming languages, who meet at regular dates throughout the year. I try to attend some of them and when I do, I always make sure to wear my GNOME hat. So I get to talk to a lot of people and tell them about the GNOME project, what it stands for, and point them to the area that they may be interested in helping, etc. 3) What is your opinion on the co-location of Akademy and GUADEC in 2011? And if you think it was not the best choice, will you still be able to help it happen? I was there when the first one took place and I felt that it was a great step toward bring the 2 communities closer together! I feel that we have so much to offer to one another and by holding co-located events we can shorten the gap between us. I'd also love to see Xfce and LXDE people join us and maybe have a series of discussion boards where we could hear what other developers/hackers are working on and see if there's anything in common that we can work together and avoid redundancy. Obviously, there's a balance that we have to keep in mind so that community specific sessions are scheduled to avoid making a co-located event too generic. After all, one of the main points of Akademy and GUADEC is to present and have discussions about the future of each project. 4) How much free time per week do you think you will be able to allocate for the board? (I'm very well aware that this could be 0 for some weeks, and 100% of your time for other weeks; I'm just asking in general) I should be able to spend an average of 12-14 hours/week 5) Are you okay giving up some of your current GNOME responsabilities/activities to join the board? (give up a maintainer hat, or hack less, or participate less in a specific team) Or do you think it won't be necessary and why? (I know it's a bit related to the previous question :-)) When I decided to run for the board I made a commitment to the GNOME community. If I am elected I will most definitely pass the torch of some of the other projects I'm currently involved with so that I can completely focus on being a good member and do a good job together with my fellow Board members. Short answer: yes, I am ok with passing on some of my responsibilities to join the board! 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if elected? If yes, which role and why? I would be very interested in serving as the secretary. I feel that this role allows for a very clear and complete view of how the board operates! Some people may see some of the tasks as tedious (taking notes, writing minutes, etc) but I see it as a great opportunity to learn the ins and outs of how the Board and the entire community works! 7) What do you think of the current GNOME Foundation budget? Had you read it at least once before reading this mail? (it's okay if you didn't look at it before, btw) I have read the last 2 budgets and the first thing I have to say is that it is a very clear and well documented piece of document, so I tip my hat to the treasurer for a great job! One thing that comes to mind is: couldn't we have sponsored more local hackfests? Would it be possible to have more of them in different parts of the globe? It is my goal to learn everything about out budget so that I can better understand the overall financial situation of the entire project and hopefully be able to contribute with any insight I may come across to the marketing team! 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about? (I'd love to not read 11
Re: question for candidates
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org wrote: GNOME is good free software, and thus contributes at the practical level. How will candidates use the user community's awareness of GNOME to contribute to educating the communityn about freedom? The way I see it, GNOME equals good, valuable software and freedom of choice. Being able to represent the entire GNOME community as a member of the Board will allow me to deliver a more powerful and meaningful message to audiences and further enforce that GNOME is all about freedom of choice! -- Og B. Maciel omac...@foresightlinux.org ogmac...@gnome.org ogmac...@ubuntu.com GPG Keys: D5CFC202 http://www.ogmaciel.com (en_US) http://blog.ogmaciel.com (pt_BR) ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few questions for the candidates
Em Ter, 2010-06-01 às 23:30 +0200, Vincent Untz escreveu: Hi, Hi Vincent, hi all. 1) I've read with interest the mails from the candidates announcing they're running, and most (if not all -- I didn't double-check) include some motivations with examples of what they'd be interested in working on. Why are those tasks/ideas things you cannot work on while not being on the board? Indeed I can help GNOME even not being in the board. That's what I already do. The point is that I think I can help *more* by being part of it. Why? Because I'd discuss directly in a small team that can actually get things done (that's why that team exists btw). 2) What are your non-usual (ie, not code, not translations, not documentation, etc.) contributions as a GNOME Foundation member? (organizing events, pushing people to do things, finding sponsors, etc. are all possible answers) This is already answered in my candidacy ;) I'll paste here: I contribute to GNOME in - code, translation - spreading GNOME: I'm always giving talks in Brazil about GNOME and how to contribute. - kind of coordinate GNOME Brazil: motivating users, managing Planet, managing mailing lists, etc - now that you mentioned it, I remembered: I'm also trying to find a way to Brazilian people donate money to the Foundation in a 'more brazilian way'. 3) What is your opinion on the co-location of Akademy and GUADEC in 2011? And if you think it was not the best choice, will you still be able to help it happen? Personally, I'm not a big fan of this. Of course, I can live with that. I think if we need to work together with other teams, we could do that in a hackfest for example. GUADEC is the GNOME event, it's kind weird to meet people around wearing kde shirts :) 4) How much free time per week do you think you will be able to allocate for the board? (I'm very well aware that this could be 0 for some weeks, and 100% of your time for other weeks; I'm just asking in general) I think 10h-15h a week. 5) Are you okay giving up some of your current GNOME responsabilities/activities to join the board? (give up a maintainer hat, or hack less, or participate less in a specific team) Or do you think it won't be necessary and why? (I know it's a bit related to the previous question :-)) I'm aware of this, for sure. The area I could leave is translation, once Brazilian team currently has great man power. 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if elected? If yes, which role and why? I'd prefer not to pick any of these positions right now. As I'd be a new director, I think I need first to learn how things work in these areas. I'd be happy to work in general activities, like to be close to the Marketing team. 7) What do you think of the current GNOME Foundation budget? Had you read it at least once before reading this mail? (it's okay if you didn't look at it before, btw) I think it's a bit confusing. Perhaps with GNUCash effort going on things become easier to read and understand. 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about? (I'd love to not read 11 times the same answer, thanks :-)) Maybe not answering directly your question, but: I think we should be more aggressive asking for donations directly in the desktop. gnome-about should do this job for us. This is related to a thread started yesterday in marketing list (which I've replied). 9) Will you be at GUADEC this year? (there's a board meeting and an advisory board meeting there) Yes! 10) Make or break question: what's your favorite french expression? I pass... :( Thanks, Vincent Cheers, -- Jonh Wendell http://www.bani.com.br ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
Og Maciel ogmac...@gnome.org writes: The way I see it, GNOME equals good, valuable software and freedom of choice. Hi, Can you say what freedom of choice means? Is it the freedom to choose between various software packages, i.e Will I choose to use Flash or Silverlight? Or is it always having the choice of downloading the source code, and the freedom for the community to choose to modify and distribute modified versions of all the software they use? Thanks. -- Ciarán O'Riordan, +32 487 64 17 54, http://ciaran.compsoc.com Please help build the software patents wiki: http://en.swpat.org http://www.EndSoftwarePatents.org Donate: http://endsoftwarepatents.org/donate List: http://campaigns.fsf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/esp-action-alert ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Ciaran O'Riordan cia...@member.fsf.org wrote: Can you say what freedom of choice means? Is it the freedom to choose between various software packages, i.e Will I choose to use Flash or Silverlight? Or is it always having the choice of downloading the source code, and the freedom for the community to choose to modify and distribute modified versions of all the software they use? Hi there Ciarán, thank you for your question. For one thing, GNOME has always meant freedom of downloading the source code and being able to modify, fork, distribute, do whatever catches your fancy. The inclusion of Flash, Silverlight, etc is not a GNOME thing per se but more of a distribution decision. In other words, GNOME does not handle the decision of what other distributions choose to ship. We focus on providing quality software and empowering people to work or even create new component that they want to use. So, to answer your question, GNOME means choose what you want to use and by the way, here's the source code and mailing lists, and forums and channels where you can learn how to use the source code. Cheers, -- Og B. Maciel omac...@foresightlinux.org ogmac...@gnome.org ogmac...@ubuntu.com GPG Keys: D5CFC202 http://www.ogmaciel.com (en_US) http://blog.ogmaciel.com (pt_BR) ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
Em Ter, 2010-06-01 às 17:03 -0400, Richard Stallman escreveu: Here is a question for the candidates. To advance to the goal of freedom for software users, we need to develop good free software, and we need to teach people to value and demand the freedom that free software offers them. We need to advance at the practical level and at the philosophical level. GNOME is good free software, and thus contributes at the practical level. How will candidates use the user community's awareness of GNOME to contribute to educating the communityn about freedom? Hi Richard and all, Personally, in my talks about GNOME, often (depending on the audience), before talking about GNOME itself, I talk about free software, its principles, its benefits, its philosophy. Then I explain why GNOME was created and how tied GNOME is with free software and the GNU project. We should encourage people to do the same when talking about GNOME as a project (in non technical talks). GNOME Marketing team is working on a subproject called GNOME ambassadors: We rely on GNOME Ambassadors like you to spread the word of GNOME and teach people the advantages of using a free desktop. (quote from http://live.gnome.org/Ambassadors). This is a great opportunity to do such task. Cheers, -- Jonh Wendell http://www.bani.com.br ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 11:31 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 11:57 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:11 AM, Owen Taylor otay...@redhat.com wrote: The secret master plan Boy do I wish I had a secret master plan tucked in a drawer somewhere! It would be really useful To the extent we have a master plan, it's in two documents that everybody has seen: http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RoadmapTwoThirtyOne I think the community would love to see some more why behind the how :) For example I'd like to know why shell reinvents the graphical toolkit and comes with a (hardcoded?) theme which in turn makes it look out of place. Or why JS and not LUA or Python. I'm sure there was some evaluation behind these decisions but I'm not even sure where to dig. how about starting from the wiki page of the project? there's a lot of information, rationales and links to discussions. but, ultimately: it's a choice from the maintainers and I expect people accept decisions from the maintainers of a project because - well, they are the ones doing the damned work. I second Patryk's observation that it is not easy to fish info from the discussion archives. There should be some easy to find FAQ for developers that are curious about why, not just how and what It's details like this that make the project look more like OpenOffice than a GNOME app (here's the resulting code versus here are the plans and the rationale, please discuss). what's fundamental is that not everything should be open to discussion. ... I wouldn't assume people started questioning every single decision taken 12 months ago (or even farther back) because that's an incredible amount of what the damn kids today call stop energy - and in general it's not even worth following up to every crank that sends an email saying you should have used LUA!!11!1 JS suckzZzZzZ. ... + the GNOME Shell design and development process, as somebody that looks at it (slightly) from the outside, and since its inception, has been nothing *but* open. it's your classic open source meritocratic project, with two benevolent dictators that ultimately make the calls on technology and design. there's *nothing* new. they happen to be RedHat employee just because they started the project; I sense a suspicion from the outsiders (not RedHat employees) that project is not just manned by the RedHat employees, but controlled by the company. When design/architecture decisions are made within the company in most of the cases you get, at best, monstrosities like an OpenOffice. GIO has been written by a RedHat employee and yet I don't see masses in revolt because the community didn't have a greater deal of control on it. hell, half our current platform has been written by RH employees and everyone seems to be using it, contributing to it and improving it. ciao, Emmanuele. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Sergey Panov si...@sipan.org wrote: I sense a suspicion from the outsiders (not RedHat employees) that project is not just manned by the RedHat employees, but controlled by the company It's controlled by the people doing the work, like any other project. What does it mean to be controlled by the company? It sounds a bit far-fetched. When design/architecture decisions are made within the company in most of the cases you get, at best, monstrosities like an OpenOffice. The differences between gnome-shell's development and that of OpenOffice are so staggeringly different that I'm not sure how to respond to such a statement. I really don't see how any of the critical responses in this thread are not already answered by Owen's original post. Sandy ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 20:45 -0700, Sandy Armstrong wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Sergey Panov si...@sipan.org wrote: I sense a suspicion from the outsiders (not RedHat employees) that project is not just manned by the RedHat employees, but controlled by the company It's controlled by the people doing the work, like any other project. What does it mean to be controlled by the company? It sounds a bit far-fetched. I was not speaking for myself, I still hope RedHat is an unusual company. But I can see how people can project their own experiences in the corporate environment on inner workings of RedHat. In other companies, the lead engineers are interacting with FOSS communities directly, but the dark cardinals(aka managers) control development behind the scene. When design/architecture decisions are made within the company in most of the cases you get, at best, monstrosities like an OpenOffice. The differences between gnome-shell's development and that of OpenOffice are so staggeringly different that I'm not sure how to respond to such a statement. You did not have to respond - it was not a statement. One of the candidates proposed a company-agnostic open venue to evaluate/discuss strategic design/architecture decision. I was trying to explain why it might be important. I really don't see how any of the critical responses in this thread are not already answered by Owen's original post. I am not sure what do you mean by the critical responses in this thread and I do not care much about that particular discussion (I guess I belong to the minority which views things like Gnome Shell or Zeitgeist as an icing on a cake, a cake with a serious problems I care about). - S. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
