Fwd: Candidacy: Seif Lotfy
Lefty fwd'd his reply to the list, but not mine to him. -- Forwarded message -- From: Iain i...@gnome.org Date: Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 5:34 PM Subject: Re: Candidacy: Seif Lotfy To: Lefty (石鏡 ) le...@shugendo.org On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 4:39 PM, Lefty (石鏡 ) le...@shugendo.org wrote: On 6/1/10 7:38 AM, Iain i...@gnome.org wrote: It seems to me that your underlying belief is that there is too much (large) corporate influence in GNOME. Would you say that you might have some conflict of interest here given that your project (Zeitgeist) was ignored/shunned by the GNOME Shell developers? Iain, this seems unreasonable to me. Is anyone who decides to run for the board who's ever had a disagreement with some group of GNOME developers or other going to be subject to the suggestion that they have a conflict of interest? If that's the case, I doubt we can really find a single qualified candidate. Everyone's got their interests and views, and (hopefully) the candidates are candid about what their views are. I think these suggestions of conflicts of interest are, honestly, a little out of line. I disagree, I don't remember any candidate who has quite glaringly obvious conflicts of interest running though their candidacy statement as Seif's. Its a struggle to find anything in his statement that doesn't come from his annoyance that Zeitgeist is not being picked up for GNOME 3. I have to say that I don't think we need to have spotlessly clean, conflict of interest free candidates. Its perfectly fine to run for the board even if these conflicts exist. They are his opinions, interests and beliefs after all, but it seems rather disingenious to pretend that the conflicts do not exist and I think it is completely proper to mention them, discuss them in public and to allow people to make up their own minds as to whether the conflict is going to cause a problem if they are elected. This is the reason elected representatives are supposed to inform the public as to their conflicts of interest, so that we can see whether or not the decisions they make are for the good of the project/country or for the own person. Seeing as Seif has mentioned in the past his plans for starting a company based around Zeitgeist, I think this is a very important issue. The board is not a method to push your personal projects in the limelight. In future, I would prefer it if you would reply in public, thanks, iain ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Fwd: Candidacy: Seif Lotfy
On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 11:52 +0100, Iain wrote: On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 4:39 PM, Lefty (石鏡 ) le...@shugendo.org wrote: On 6/1/10 7:38 AM, Iain i...@gnome.org wrote: It seems to me that your underlying belief is that there is too much (large) corporate influence in GNOME. Would you say that you might have some conflict of interest here given that your project (Zeitgeist) was ignored/shunned by the GNOME Shell developers? Iain, this seems unreasonable to me. Is anyone who decides to run for the board who's ever had a disagreement with some group of GNOME developers or other going to be subject to the suggestion that they have a conflict of interest? If that's the case, I doubt we can really find a single qualified candidate. Everyone's got their interests and views, and (hopefully) the candidates are candid about what their views are. I think these suggestions of conflicts of interest are, honestly, a little out of line. I disagree, I don't remember any candidate who has quite glaringly obvious conflicts of interest running though their candidacy statement as Seif's. Its a struggle to find anything in his statement that doesn't come from his annoyance that Zeitgeist is not being picked up for GNOME 3. The way I read Seif's candidacy is that he wants more coordination to take place between different GNOME stakeholders (community, Canonical, RH, Novell, etc) when it comes to the development and design of a technology like GNOME's Shell. This is _perfectly_ reasonable and several people have responded already that they understand and agree with this. Include me in that group. In future, I would prefer it if you would reply in public, In my opinion is your Seif - Zeitgeist conspiracy theory, crazy. It's also my opinion that it doesn't belong on the foundation-list. Can you stick to asking the candidates relevant questions? [Context] Lefty fwd'd his reply to the list, but not mine to him. In future, I would prefer it if you would reply in public, Lefty did reply in public. Getting your reply on the foundation-list is your responsibility, not Lefty's. It would even be impolite if he'd have forwarded a private reply from you to him unto a public mailing list. Cheers, Philip -- Philip Van Hoof freelance software developer Codeminded BVBA - http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
Le jeudi 03 juin 2010, à 01:13 -0400, Sergey Panov a écrit : 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. Let me try to address the suspicion you're highlighting here, with a few examples we could have if we follow the same kind of rationale: - empathy is controlled by Collabora - gnome-panel is controlled by Novell - gobject-introspection is controlled by Litl. Or Red Hat now. Or both. - orca is/was controlled by Sun/Oracle. - etc. It's just the way maintainership works. We can always assume there are dark cardinals or whatever. Or we can see who are the people working on those projects and see if we trust them based on what they achieved in our community. I do trust Guillaume, Xavier, Johan, Colin, Willie and many other people from various companies. (I kind of trust myself too ;-)) Now, why wouldn't we trust Owen and Jon for GNOME Shell? And don't get me wrong -- I happen to disagree with some stuff they're doing from time to time. But it doesn't mean I should stop trusting them. Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
Le jeudi 03 juin 2010, à 11:54 +0200, Seif Lotfy a écrit : On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:47 AM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote: And don't get me wrong -- I happen to disagree with some stuff they're doing from time to time. But it doesn't mean I should stop trusting them. But would't you like to have the points you disagree with be discussed or reevaluated? Sure. And this can happen if I have time. I think this is the issue the community is facing. There is a difference between We are going to do it like that because we think its right, and that is how it is gonna be and We are doing it like that because we think it is right, but we are open for discussion Right now the Shell developers are somewhere between both stand points. I know some developers who were able to cooperate with them. But I think more transparency around discussions and evaluations are missing. Really, how is it different from what's happening in any other module? I can certainly blame Guillaume and Xavier for not being able to have metacontacts in empathy today while it's something I asked two years ago; but they've chosen to do it the way they believe is right, which happens to take more time. What was the way for me to change this? It's easy: I could have get more involved and send a patch. That's the same for GNOME Shell. (Except that for the design part, you don't send a patch, you participate in a discussion and the discussion should be well argued.) Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
Le jeudi 03 juin 2010 à 12:12 +0200, Vincent Untz a écrit : snip Really, how is it different from what's happening in any other module? I can certainly blame Guillaume and Xavier for not being able to have metacontacts in empathy today while it's something I asked two years ago; but they've chosen to do it the way they believe is right, which happens to take more time. What was the way for me to change this? It's easy: I could have get more involved and send a patch. That's the same for GNOME Shell. (Except that for the design part, you don't send a patch, you participate in a discussion and the discussion should be well argued.) I think the difference is that the Shell /is/ the GNOME desktop. It's the main change for the GNOME 3 user experience, and it's influencing everything you may do with your desktop. If you're not happy with Empathy, you can switch to Pidgin and still think you're using stock GNOME. But within one year, if you don't use the Shell, you'll feel out of place. That alone is IMHO enough to justify that the Shell design and development is different from others', and requires discussion - just like designing an API requires some amount of feedback from the developers that will use it. I'm not saying the Shell devs are doing this wrong, but here's how I conceive the situation, which explains that people have higher expectations than for other modules. Regards ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
On 06/03/2010 02:54 AM, Seif Lotfy wrote: And don't get me wrong -- I happen to disagree with some stuff they're doing from time to time. But it doesn't mean I should stop trusting them. But would't you like to have the points you disagree with be discussed or reevaluated? I think this is the issue the community is facing. There is a difference between We are going to do it like that because we think its right, and that is how it is gonna be and We are doing it like that because we think it is right, but we are open for discussion Right now the Shell developers are somewhere between both stand points. I know some developers who were able to cooperate with them. But I think more transparency around discussions and evaluations are missing. Just a quick note regarding the design procedures here. From my experience, Jon and Jeremy hang out both hang out in #gnome-design all day and are publically discussing all design issues there (even down to the smallest details). Me, Hylke, Garrett, Jakub and others have all been giving feedback, drawing mockups and evaluating designs, even though, as always, Jon and Jeremy have been doing most of the job (as us others have other day jobs and priorities). - Andreas ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
2010/6/3 Sriram Ramkrishna s...@ramkrishna.me: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 3:31 AM, Emmanuele Bassi eba...@gmail.com wrote: 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. I agree, it's open for the most part. What it suffers from is two things: 1) despite all the links, people either are not reading them or it's not good enough to communicate where gnome-shell is going. 2) stop energy can cut the other way preventing new people from actively joining the project due to no one managing or channeling the enthusiasm. UI discussions are hard because there are so many of them, and I know it's tough for developers to keep chiming in on these things. But I myself have a hard time figuring out what the end state is since there is still an unfinished quality to the whole thing and we aren't very far from gnome 3.0 release IMHO. The bottom line though I think it would be easy for Owen and Jon to have some kind of community manger to manage the discussions and also be able to create energy. What about a community team that gives a place for these issues to be discussed in more depth? Thinking of something like the marketing team but with a mission such as Make GNOME a great place where contribute and of course, not exclusive to the Shell, we have this same issue everywhere. That same team could find ways to improve communication with downstreams such as RH and Canonical. If we are having to have Owen put some messages like these, it just a big downer. Agreed. Regards, Tomeu Anybody who goes around and starts throwing conspiracy crap about Red Hat or whatever loses all credibility in the discussion. I've been seeing this crap for over 10 years, give it a rest. sri ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
2010/6/3 Andreas Nilsson nisses.m...@home.se On 06/03/2010 02:54 AM, Seif Lotfy wrote: And don't get me wrong -- I happen to disagree with some stuff they're doing from time to time. But it doesn't mean I should stop trusting them. But would't you like to have the points you disagree with be discussed or reevaluated? I think this is the issue the community is facing. There is a difference between We are going to do it like that because we think its right, and that is how it is gonna be and We are doing it like that because we think it is right, but we are open for discussion Right now the Shell developers are somewhere between both stand points. I know some developers who were able to cooperate with them. But I think more transparency around discussions and evaluations are missing. Just a quick note regarding the design procedures here. From my experience, Jon and Jeremy hang out both hang out in #gnome-design all day and are publically discussing all design issues there (even down to the smallest details). Me, Hylke, Garrett, Jakub and others have all been giving feedback, drawing mockups and evaluating designs, even though, as always, Jon and Jeremy have been doing most of the job (as us others have other day jobs and priorities). - Andreas This would be a good FAQ. We really do need a gnome-shell FAQ I think. I might help out on the whole community thing on shell if people are willing, it depends on whether this six month project I'm on comes to a close. My contributions have tapered off due to a high work and personal load. sri ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 8:53 AM, William Jon McCann william.jon.mcc...@gmail.com wrote: This would be a good FAQ. We really do need a gnome-shell FAQ I think. I might help out on the whole community thing on shell if people are willing, it depends on whether this six month project I'm on comes to a close. My contributions have tapered off due to a high work and personal load. http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/FAQ Jon And thus I prove my own damn point about not reading anything. Touche, Jon. Touche. sri ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Status update? (was Re: Starting the process for this year's Boston Summit)
Hi John. A number of us from the a11y community will be attending the AEGIS Conference in Spain. We're now in the (very early) planning stages of an associated hackfest [1] and are trying to decide if it should extend through 9 October. At least for me, the answer depends on what the plans are for the Boston Summit this year. Therefore, at the risk of being a noodge, would you happen to have any updates? Thanks in advance! Take care. --joanie [1] http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/HackfestAEGIS2010 On Wed, 2010-05-19 at 10:25 -0400, John Palmieri wrote: Hello all, I'm going to be starting the process for setting up the Boston Summit. That basically means getting the space at MIT and then a budget from the board. Last year we saw an issue with the timing of other GNOME related conferences. This year we have a choice of two dates, Columbus day weekend, October 9th-11th or piggyback the weekend after the Linux Plumbers conference, November 6th-8th. I'm leaning towards keeping Columbus day weekend because it is easier to get rooms, and it reduces confusion by having it at the same time every year. The reasons for piggybacking the Plumbers conference is that a number of our fellow GNOMies will already be in Boston and we might get a few stragglers from other parts of the Linux stack to stop by and offer their perspective. I want to get the foundation members' opinion on this. Ultimately it will be up to the board to make a final decision but I plan to have a concrete date by the middle of June if not sooner. I hope you are all getting excited to reflect on the work done in the past year and plan the future of the GNOME platform. I hope to see as many of you as possible at GUADEC and the Boston Summit this year! -- John (J5) Palmieri Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
