Re: [Fwd: Re: Beginning of the 2005 GNOME Foundation elections]

2005-11-16 Thread Joe Shaw
Hi,

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 12:27 +0100, Quim Gil wrote:
> I didn't comment anything about Vincent's concerns about being a
> candidate and in the comittee as well because I saw clearly no problem
> with it.
>
> Gosh, we are not the EU Parliament or the US Congress. Neither have we
> 28 candidates to choose from. If we keep kicking off candidates for
> procedural reasons we will end up not needing to vote at all.

Seriously.  And once the elections are ongoing, we have a process to
verify our votes and challenge the results.

If anything, the fact that Vincent is on the elections committee and has
been doing a fantastic job makes me much *more* likely to vote for him.

Joe

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Re: GNOME dependent on Mono

2007-11-29 Thread Joe Shaw
Hi,

On 11/29/07, BJörn Lindqvist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> No. The boycottnovell site and the OP alluded to that there would be
> moral, philosophical and or legal problems with GNOME depending on
> Mono and or C#. Is that fact or is it fiction?

Moral or philosophical is hard to judge, since so many people are
involved in GNOME for so many different reasons.  I can't tell you how
many times I've heard people say they object to Mono because it's a
"Microsoft technology".  I've never had this problem personally, but
maybe that's because Mono is a totally independent, free and
successful implementation of it, and partly because C# is so much like
Java it's tough to argue that it's somehow new and novel.  Likewise
the level of hatred toward Novell over the past year would color
people's moral and philosophical positions, as is clearly the case at
boycottnovell.

The legal aspects have always seemed like a strawman argument to me.
There's nothing particularly different about Mono than GNOME, Samba,
or Apache.  There's no reason to believe that Mono is any more or less
patent encumbered than any other piece of open source software.
There's no reason to believe that Mono infringes on copyrights any
more or less than other pieces of open source software.  However,
unlike many other open source projects, Mono's messaging on this has
been clear: they don't believe they violate any patents and have plans
to work around them if they do and if you've used tools to disassemble
Microsoft code, etc., you may never contribute to Mono.  I don't
believe GNOME has a policy that clearly articulated.

And for as much threatening as Microsoft does around IP, they're not
particularly active in litigating on it.  In fact, they are the 900lb
gorilla and most small companies and patent trolls target them,
because that's where the money is.  Their FUD against us is a more
effective weapon than actually suing us.  And I believe the broader
open-source community, with the help of invested corporations like
IBM, Red Hat and yes, even Novell, have given us a reasonable defense
in the unlikely event.

The real legal threat to us comes from patent trolls, and we've
already seen the start of this with the recent lawsuit against Red Hat
and Novell, and over things that are much more trivial and broad than
what applies to Mono.  They're more likely to cripple us, and it's
ought to be a driving motivator for patent reform in the US.

Joe
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Re: GNOME dependent on Mono

2007-11-29 Thread Joe Shaw
Hi,

On 11/29/07, Diego Escalante Urrelo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I once hurt my finger installing beagle, but that was because of
> excesive computer use. The installation just triggered my problem.

That's fixed in the new version.

Thanks,
Joe
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Re: GNOME dependent on Mono

2007-11-29 Thread Joe Shaw
Hi,

On 11/29/07, Jeff Waugh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
>
> > The more "cool stuff" depends on Mono, the closer we get to a situation
> > where a Microsoft attack on Mono would put GNOME in a vice.
> >
> > If these programs are important enough to deserve the term "miss out on",
> > then I think they should be written in another language.

Again, I think this is a strawman argument.  There's no evidence to
suggest that Microsoft would attack Mono any more than they would
attack other free and open source software like GNOME, the Linux
kernel, OpenOffice, Samba, Apache, Python, etc.

> That is a decision left entirely up to those who create such Free Software.
> I don't believe that we can tell them what to do or how to do it. We can ask
> politely.

It's been frustrating over the past few years that GNOME hasn't taken
a firm position on the issue.  I have personally felt very in limbo
because my application is in C#, and it would make me much more
comfortable if the community and/or the foundation came out strongly
in support of it as a first-class language and environment, or to
reject it from ever becoming a core piece of the platform.

I suspect there hasn't been anything firm because (a) there is quite a
bit of division within the community on the issue and (b) there is
some element of "walking on eggshells" around Novell and its
endorsement of the environment.

I agree this isn't really something that the foundation can force, but
even "asking politely" in an official capacity would be a step in the
right direction.

Maybe this is something the candidates should argue over. ;)

Joe
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Re: GNOME dependent on Mono

2007-11-29 Thread Joe Shaw
Hi,

On 11/29/07, Jeff Waugh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I agree this isn't really something that the foundation can force, but
> > even "asking politely" in an official capacity would be a step in the
> > right direction.
>
> The Foundation asking politely of developers with regards to their choices,
> or Novell (or any developer advocating Mono) asking politely of the GNOME
> Foundation with regards to a policy?

I meant in the context of your email, which I understood to be the
foundation asking politely of its developers not to develop using
Mono.

Novell asking would be fine too.  Or anybody.  Consider this my asking. :)

Joe
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Re: GNOME dependent on Mono

2007-11-30 Thread Joe Shaw
Hi,

On 11/29/07, Vincent Untz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Le jeudi 29 novembre 2007, à 18:03 -0500, Joe Shaw a écrit :
> > It's been frustrating over the past few years that GNOME hasn't taken
> > a firm position on the issue.  I have personally felt very in limbo
> > because my application is in C#, and it would make me much more
> > comfortable if the community and/or the foundation came out strongly
> > in support of it as a first-class language and environment, or to
> > reject it from ever becoming a core piece of the platform.
>
> It depends what you call "platform" :-) If it's the GNOME Developer
> Platform, it is my understanding that there's a consensus we want to
> keep the platform in C.

Indeed, I wasn't totally clear on this.

I do believe things get a little muddied when we start talking about
things like daemons, D-Bus interfaces, etc.  My understanding is that
we want the Platform in C because it makes it usable from all
applications and bindable into other languages.  But libbeagle is a C
library that talks over a IPC to a C# running daemon.  Does that make
it suitable for platform?  Can D-Bus interfaces become part of the
platform?

> The main issue here is that each time a
> mono-based app is proposed, there are comments only made on the fact
> that it's mono-based. Also, quite often, there are comments for python
> apps because it's slow, memory-hungry, etc.

Indeed, the technical arguments are sane and good criteria to
determine a module's suitability.  But the philosophical and moral
objections, to borrow a phrase, are what seem to create a double
standard in my eyes.

Thanks,
Joe
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Re: GNOME dependent on Mono

2007-11-30 Thread Joe Shaw
Hi,

On 11/30/07, Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> And for as much threatening as Microsoft does around IP, they're not
> particularly active in litigating on it.
>
> When the issue is about patent law, saying "intellectual property"
> instead of "patents" only tends to confuse the issue, by spuriously
> extending it to copyrights, trademarks, and other totally different
> laws.

I actually meant both patents and copyrights, so I think my
characterization was accurate.

Joe
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Re: Proposal: Desktop Search hackfest

2008-07-21 Thread Joe Shaw
Hi,

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 11:07 AM, Quim Gil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Proposal: Desktop Search Hackfest.
> Calling to: Xesam, Beagle, Tracker projects and whoever else is involved.
> When: September 19 + the days the developers decide before & after.
> Where: Berlin.
> Why: The Board made a call to organize hackfest around events and the
> Maemo Summit has answered.
> Budget: Funded by Nokia within reasonable terms.

Sounds like a good idea, but I don't have the vacation time to make
the trip, so I'd be unable to make a hackfest outside of Boston.
Somehow I doubt that Nokia's reasonable terms include paying my
salary. ;)

That's probably ok anyway because I haven't been doing Beagle hacking
lately and have been in my co-maintainer's accurate description an
"armchair quarterback."

I don't think that the other two main Beagle hackers (dBera and Arun)
are on this list -- one of them being a KDE guy -- but I've forwarded
the email to them privately.  The best way to reach them would be on
the dashboard-hackers mailing list:

http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers

Joe
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