Re: question for candidates

[Pockey Lam]

On 05/26/2011 02:10 AM, Andy Tai wrote:
As Fedora is the only current GNU/Linux distribution adapting GNOME 
3.0 as the default desktop, how would you facilitate to make GNOME 
technologies to work well (meaning minimal local patching needed) on 
other GNU/Linux distributions like Debian, and such distributions 
which may work on components competing with certain parts of GNOME, 
such as Ubuntu?  And how would you facilitate to make GNOME 3 run well 
on other free OS environments, especially the BSD based ones, like 
OpenBSD and FreeBSD?


And how would you facilitate collaborations with Ubuntu, especially, 
despite the different viewpoints of developers on issues like GNOME 
Shell vs. Unity?


Actually OpenSUSE has also released a version of their OS with GNOME 3.0 
as default and Debian is actively working on supporting GNOME 3.0 as well.


I also feel that most distributions nowadays are multi-desktop (Fedora, 
OpenSUSE, Debian, Mandriva, Magea, etc) and not GNOME, KDE or 
. Only the smaller ones, or 
specific companies chose otherwise. Apparently I have a different 
perception of what the GNOME environment is, but I am not a technical 
person.


Now facilitating technological decisions means that we help with what 
the community has decided (as I mentioned it in my previous answers). At 
this stage no decision has been taken yet and whenever we (the 
community) decides to go either way, the way the foundation facilitates 
those is by supporting hackfest, conferences, GNOME Users Days, release 
parties or whatever activity can help promoting and improving a specific 
part of GNOME.


Should the foundation be able to raise more funds (and this is one of 
the purpose of the foundation, a lot more than making technical choices) 
we could decide to recruit a developer to help with a specific project.


However which project would be decided to support is really up to a 
consensus and the various priorities we may have. Maybe long term 
support could provide more value than supporting other kernels. And this 
is just an example.


I hope I have answered your question.

Thank you.

Pockey





--
Andy Tai, a...@atai.org , Skype: licheng.tai
Year 2011 民國100年
自動的精神力是信仰與覺悟
自動的行為力是勞動與技能


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Re: Fwd: Question for the canditates

[Pockey Lam]

On 05/26/2011 01:49 AM, Andrea Veri wrote:

I'd like to ask two questions of all the candidates please:

1) As GNOME has matured the number of officially supported language
bindings has decreased. The quality and availability of various
language communities own bindings has varied wildly to say the least.
How would you work to improve this situation?

2) What are your own feelings on supporting fairly new languages and
standards like Go and Perl 6?


Like other candidates and as previously stated in my answer to Frederic 
Peters I don't think the foundation role is to dictate technical 
choices, but to assist those willing to contribute to GNOME in their 
contributions, as long as it is inline with the direction of the project 
or as a R&D activity within GNOME.


In fact how would you see the foundation pushing for those? Having the 
board directors write the code themselves? Force someone from company X 
to do it? Pay a consultant to write "some code"?


Pushing for language support that no body is interested in (or has 
started to work on) would be an artificial push if no one join the 
effort.  However, if there is a demand and someone interested in working 
on it the board should definitely help to encourage more contributors to 
get involved and support the project.


I hope i have answered your questions.

Thanks.

Pockey



Thank you all for considering my questions. Cheers, -Ali
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Re: Question for the canditates

[Diego Escalante Urrelo]

Nothing to add, so I'll save some electrons: +1 Stormy

2011/5/25 Stormy Peters :
>
>
> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 11:49 AM, Andrea Veri  wrote:
>>
>> 1) As GNOME has matured the number of officially supported language
>> bindings has decreased. The quality and availability of various
>> language communities own bindings has varied wildly to say the least.
>> How would you work to improve this situation?
>>
>> 2) What are your own feelings on supporting fairly new languages and
>> standards like Go and Perl 6?
>
> I too agree that is not up to the board to decide which languages GNOME
> supports.
>
> But the board should listen to people like you that voice a concern about it
> and act. They should:
> * Help make sure the right people hear those concerns,
> * Get feedback from other people and companies as appropriate. For example,
> the board could invite you to an advisory board meeting to express your
> concerns and get their feedback. They could also reach out to other projects
> or work to get information about developer preferences in general (not just
> current GNOME developers.)
> * Facilitate the work. As Bastien stated, the Foundation can help organize
> and fund hackfests that really help accelerate work.
>
> Stormy
>>
>> Thank you all for considering my questions. Cheers, -Ali
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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Pockey Lam]

On 05/25/2011 02:24 PM, Frederic Peters wrote:

Hello all,

GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).

What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
put into positions by different persons?


My contributions being mainly in the promotion and marketing areas (as I 
am a non-technical contributor) I have difficulties to fully understand 
what GNOME OS exactly means. It surely is a great marketing term but 
does it mean we become a GNOME/Linux distribution or does it mean we 
tightly integrate with a specific kernel where functionalities provided 
merge deeply with that kernel? Or does it mean something else?


I tend to care more about the visible parts of GNOME and how accessible 
we make our desktop to all kinds of people, leaving the technical bits 
to the experts.


Now, to answer the second question I believe the foundation is here to 
represent its members and assist them in their endeavors whichever those 
are (to some extend and within the GNOME project). I find it very 
unrealistic for the foundation to dictate technical decisions if the 
foundation doesn't have manpower to implement them.
The community (each and everyone voicing their opinion) should come up 
with an idea of what GNOME OS is and the foundation should make it 
understandable to our users and people outside of the project, promote 
it and support that idea.



Thank you.

Pockey



Thanks,

 Fred

[1] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS doesn't help, the only laid out
 plan I know was in Jon McCann "Shell Yes!" talk at GUADEC (now
 locked on slideshare.net)

[2] this question comes first but in terms of candidacies to the
 board, I believe the next ones are even more important.
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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Richard Stallman]

I really think the GNOME OS idea is a very good one, that is, making
GNOME provide access to configuration and features of the underlying OS,
so that it is a complete desktop that can deal with everything the users
would ever need from a desktop.

The idea is fine, but calling it "GNOME OS" is confusing since GNOME
was designed to be part of the GNU operating system.  Someone else
suggested "GNOME Desktop System" -- that avoids the confusion.

But at the same time we have people from OSes other than Linux
interested in using GNOME,

Linux isn't an operating system, it's a kernel.  I think you're
talking about the GNU system but calling it "Linux".

That's a big misunderstanding.  GNOME has no special relationship
with Linux but does have one with the GNU system (see gnome.org).

-- 
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 free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel/
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Re: question for candidates

[Andre Klapper]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 11:10 -0700, Andy Tai wrote:
> As Fedora is the only current GNU/Linux distribution adapting GNOME
> 3.0 as the default desktop, how would you facilitate to make GNOME
> technologies to work well (meaning minimal local patching needed) on
> other GNU/Linux distributions like Debian

I don't see a big difference here to the situation with GNOME 2, but
maybe I'm not aware of specific issues - Can you please elaborate if
something has become worse with GNOME 3 (which of course does not rule
out to improve this even if nothing has become worse)?

Other distributions will ship GNOME3 by default with their next release
(e.g. openSuse 12.1), or the release after the next one (e.g. Mageia 2),
or make GNOME3 available via providing additional sources (e.g. Ubuntu's
GNOME3 PPA for 11.04 or openSuse's GNOME3 repository for 11.4).

> , and such distributions which may work on components competing with
> certain parts of GNOME, such as Ubuntu?

Canonical seems to seek for differentiation in terms of user experience
(maybe in combination with differing ideas of development models, but I
don't want to speculate on their motivation) and it's a pity that while
they share our vision of a great desktop easy to use for everybody they
chose a different technical approach.

Again, the GNOME community should embrace and welcome all distributions
to get involved in any (but not only) technology related discussions,
while sticking to technical arguments.
I'm mentioning this as some recent postings on desktop-devel-list felt
rather political (distributions/companies) than technical, by not
treating positions as opinions of individuals but as employees of
companies. I consider the latter harmful.

>   And how would you facilitate to make GNOME 3 run well on other free
> OS environments, especially the BSD based ones, like OpenBSD and
> FreeBSD?

I think I've covered my position in response to the GNOME OS thread:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2011-May/msg00103.html

andre
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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Andre Klapper]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 08:24 +0200, Frederic Peters wrote:
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
> 
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?


To me the term "GNOME OS" has both a technical and a marketing aspect
which are of course linked to each other.
I consider the technical one rather a release-team topic while the
marketing one is something to be handled by the marketing team and/or
the board.

On a marketing level, it is about strengthening the brand "GNOME"
towards existing and potential customers which are currently
distributions.

Technically, "GNOME OS" seems to imply pushing for a higher level of
standardization and integration with Linux platforms which might lead to
increased adaption of our stack, with the backlash for other (less
spread) Unix-based platforms to potentially have more work to integrate
GNOME.
However I consider this to be the reality already with most GNOME
developers using Linux, hence no radical change here.

GNOME should be welcoming to contributions making parts of the GNOME
stack that are either focused on Linux or Linux-only also support other
platforms.
If this is not feasible because of highly increased code complexity
(which seems to be a likely case e.g. for systemd) these parts of the
stack must at least define and provide stable interfaces for potential
implementations on non-Linux platforms and should welcome especially
non-Linux platform developers to get involved in discussions on API
introductions/changes for such projects.

Currently I don't see anything to "decide" for the board or the release
team on the topic "GNOME OS" since its definition is vague.

Plus I am not convinced that the term "GNOME OS" instead of "GNOME"
helps us pushing our technology, especially after the moduleset
redefinition that clarified what the GNOME Core is in combination with
the increased freedom on the application level (Let the market and its
users decide on the latter level).

andre
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Re: Question for the canditates

[Stormy Peters]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 11:49 AM, Andrea Veri  wrote:

>
> 1) As GNOME has matured the number of officially supported language
> bindings has decreased. The quality and availability of various
> language communities own bindings has varied wildly to say the least.
> How would you work to improve this situation?
>
> 2) What are your own feelings on supporting fairly new languages and
> standards like Go and Perl 6?
>

I too agree that is not up to the board to decide which languages GNOME
supports.

But the board should listen to people like you that voice a concern about it
and act. They should:
* Help make sure the right people hear those concerns,
* Get feedback from other people and companies as appropriate. For example,
the board could invite you to an advisory board meeting to express your
concerns and get their feedback. They could also reach out to other projects
or work to get information about developer preferences in general (not just
current GNOME developers.)
* Facilitate the work. As Bastien stated, the Foundation can help organize
and fund hackfests that really help accelerate work.

Stormy

>
> Thank you all for considering my questions. Cheers, -Ali
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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Stormy Peters]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 12:24 AM, Frederic Peters  wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
>
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?
>

I think it's up to the GNOME community to decide. However, I think the GNOME
project lacks a common, well communicated technical vision. I think many
people are doing great things but even if we don't all agree on one vision
for the future, we do need to decide which ideas or visions we want the
GNOME Foundation to promote. Is GNOME a set of technologies that we want
other distros and mobile solution providers to use? Is it GNOME if it's not
the GNOME desktop? Are the technologies a subset of GNOME? Should it be an
OS? Once we have answers we are willing to talk about, it will be much
easier to work with other projects and companies.

I don't think we have to have a common, defined vision, but I think it would
be good. While I think it unlikely we will all agree completely, I think
having a vision that we communicate will get us a lot further towards our
goal of a free and accessible desktop.

And I do think our vision should be expanded to be much more than "desktop".
At the very least it should include mobile devices. But I think the board's
role is to help start and facilitate those discussions and then help
communicate the results to all our (new and existing) partners.

Stormy



>
>
> Thanks,
>
>Fred
>
> [1] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS doesn't help, the only laid out
>plan I know was in Jon McCann "Shell Yes!" talk at GUADEC (now
>locked on slideshare.net)
>
> [2] this question comes first but in terms of candidacies to the
>board, I believe the next ones are even more important.
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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Diego Escalante Urrelo]

Hello Frederic :)

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 1:24 AM, Frederic Peters  wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
>
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?
>

My personal take on GNOME OS is that it certainly is ambitious, I like
the idea of expanding our user experience to a the system and not just
the desktop shell and some applications.
There'll always be some rough edges since we primarily hack on top of
Linux but I believe good will always take us to common interfaces and
APIs. It would be foolish to think we can coordinate every known
system/distributor out there on what /we/ want before we actually do
it.
Disclaimer: I've never worked on the low level parts of our stack, so
maybe I'm being naive :-).

As for the Foundation, I'll agree with what others already said:
technical matters are to be evaluated by release-team/maintainers.
However we can influence this with Hackfests or sponsoring work on a
certain area.
I'll echo Ryan that the current approach of
"let-happen-what-will-happen" can have negative consequences, I
believe the approach of Feature Proposals we are seeing can give us
better planning and more fruitful discussions.

This remined me that when we usually ask ourselves about "technical
lead" or "making things clear", I wonder if a team doing a lot of
coordination work (not decisions, working closely with RT) to get
everyone on the same channel would be a more efficient investment.
In my personal experience, sometimes hackers were missing the proper
introduction or a mediator to get things flowing. I'd like to explore
this as a solution under a more formal process than just "beer
budget".

Thanks for the question!
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question for candidates

[Andy Tai]

As Fedora is the only current GNU/Linux distribution adapting GNOME 3.0 as
the default desktop, how would you facilitate to make GNOME technologies to
work well (meaning minimal local patching needed) on other GNU/Linux
distributions like Debian, and such distributions which may work on
components competing with certain parts of GNOME, such as Ubuntu?  And how
would you facilitate to make GNOME 3 run well on other free OS environments,
especially the BSD based ones, like OpenBSD and FreeBSD?

And how would you facilitate collaborations with Ubuntu, especially, despite
the different viewpoints of developers on issues like GNOME Shell vs. Unity?


-- 
Andy Tai, a...@atai.org, Skype: licheng.tai
Year 2011 民國100年
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自動的行為力是勞動與技能
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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Ryan Lortie]

hi Frederic,

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 08:24 +0200, Frederic Peters wrote: 
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
> 
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?

I echo the comments from the other participants that this is not a
question for the board of directors.  The board is not qualified to make
these types of decisions.

The consensus in the community *seems* to be that GNOME OS is a
compelling idea, and I agree with that.  What's left unanswered is what
our responsibility is to people who don't buy entirely into that vision.
On one end, do we consider non-Linux systems?  On the other end, do we
consider non-gnome-shell desktops?

Personally, I lean towards inclusiveness.  I think that it's extremely
important for us to continue to focus on uses of our developer platform
that fall outside of the "GNOME OS" vision.  I think that wide use of
our developer platform is a great way of attracting new contributors to
our project.  That's just my opinion, though, and I'll say again that
this is not the sort of opinion that should be held in an official
capacity by a director of the board.

One way or another, what I do strongly believe [in an official capacity]
is that we need to come up with decisive answers to these questions and
to make our position clear.  Our downstreams suffer from our lack of
clarity and we suffer as a result of that.  This is a problem that you
and I have both heard quite a lot about.

One way or another, we need some body of individuals that is both
qualified to represent the project and willing to take on these kinds of
problems.  Maybe that means that the release team should step up.  Maybe
that means a new body should be formed.  I don't know if it should be
under the banner of "the foundation" or not (I don't even know if the
release team is considered to be part of the foundation, to be honest).
In general, I think that the current approach of
let-happen-what-will-happen is causing damage.

Thanks for the good question.

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Re: Fwd: Question for the canditates

[Brian Cameron]

I'd like to ask two questions of all the candidates please:

1) As GNOME has matured the number of officially supported language
bindings has decreased. The quality and availability of various
language communities own bindings has varied wildly to say the least.
How would you work to improve this situation?


If this is an issue, The GNOME Foundation could work to raise awareness
and to encourage more people to get involved.  Organizing a hackfest, as
others have highlighted, can be an effective way to make progress in a
specific area.  The Python binding community has been organizing regular
hackfests:

  http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests

With GNOME 3 recently out the door, there are numerous areas where
attention is needed (accessibility, touch-screen, HIG, etc.).  If there
are specific language binding problems that need to be addressed, we
should discuss and prioritize them.


2) What are your own feelings on supporting fairly new languages and
standards like Go and Perl 6?


It is not clear to me exactly what you mean by support.  The GNOME
Foundation does not provide the same kind of support that distros may
provide, for example.  If there is a serious interest in better
supporting particular languages, we would need to discuss this on
a case-by-case basis, I should think.  For example, a language could
only be supported if there were enough people interested to do the work
involved.

Brian
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Re: Question for the canditates

[Andrea Veri]

Il giorno 25/mag/2011, alle ore 19.49, Andrea Veri ha scritto:
> 
> I'd like to ask two questions of all the candidates please:
> 
> 1) As GNOME has matured the number of officially supported language
> bindings has decreased. The quality and availability of various
> language communities own bindings has varied wildly to say the least.
> How would you work to improve this situation?
> 
> 2) What are your own feelings on supporting fairly new languages and
> standards like Go and Perl 6?

As already pointed out, this kind of issues shouldn't be discussed within 
the Board. As for me I am not actually a good programmer and I doesn't 
expect to be one in the near future since my daily work and topic is law, 
therefore I would throw the ball to the GNOME developers. Which language
is the best in town is something really subjective and as long as we see 
someone putting some efforts in developing through Go or Perl 6, we will do 
everything
we can to provide him the needed resources to keep his work and contributions.
GNOME is also about innovation and innovation starts from new ideas, that’s 
where
the Board should come in: giving a warm welcome to new ideas, possibilities and 
intuitions providing economic support and anything else needed, it’s something 
the 
Board will never refuse to.

cheers,

Andrea
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Re: Fwd: Question for the canditates

[Lionel Dricot]

> 1) As GNOME has matured the number of officially supported language
> bindings has decreased. The quality and availability of various
> language communities own bindings has varied wildly to say the least.
> How would you work to improve this situation?

I agree with all the other candidates so far. This board cannot do the
work and should not do the technical work anyway.

But, as others pointed out, the foundation can organize hackfests or
support any initiative that would promote a particular binding.


> 2) What are your own feelings on supporting fairly new languages and
> standards like Go and Perl 6?

If someone is willing to maintain it, this is wonderful.

I believe that, to keep a very high quality binding, you either need a
very motivated team or some commercial interests. As long as a binding
is used commercially, some companies can be paid to support that
particular binding and I think it's really good.

That's why I think the foundation should encourage and promote
commercial support through GNOME companies.

Well, I will stop here, else I will repeat what I said in my previous
mails :-)


Lionel

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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Andrea Veri]

2011/5/25 Frederic Peters :

> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?

The idea of seeing a GNOME OS coming out in the future as a full and
complete desktop suite is simply awesome. Many technical and non-technical
decisions that are now taken respecting all the parts (distributions,
companies etc.)
involved in the release procedures and decisions could be finally
taken by the *GNOME*
Foundation (by its members and developers) on its own. On the other
side, changing
GNOME’s definition from a desktop manager to a complete desktop suite
takes in multiple
technical issues (should we go for an RPM-based system or a DEB one?
should we develop
just for the Linux platform? and what about BSD? etc.) that will
require a lot of months and
efforts to happen.

Please also note that I would love seeing GNOME being freely available
to everyone
as it is now, everyone should be able to grab GNOME’s sources and
build their own
distribution like it’s been happening for several years now. Having
multiple distributions
and flavours is definitely a big plus within the Open Source’s
communities, all the
contributors and developers should be able to choose where and how they want to
contribute: seeing your ideals, values and ideas reflected in a
specific contribution makes
you willing to do your best to see it growing and being successful.

That said, I think this is not an issue to be fully discussed within
the GNOME Board
of Directors, it’s a decision that should be taken by the whole GNOME
Foundation i
ncluding *all* his members, contributors and developers together. (i.e
through a referendum)

In the end, as pointed out by a few other candidates this is actually
just a proposal
and many discussions should take place within the Release Team and all
the maintainers
involved to evaluate all the way this possibility, its pros and its
cons to find out which decision
will *really* benefit our beloved project.

thanks,

Andrea
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Re: Fwd: Question for the canditates

[Emmanuele Bassi]

On 2011-05-25 at 19:49, Andrea Veri wrote:
> 1) As GNOME has matured the number of officially supported language
> bindings has decreased. The quality and availability of various
> language communities own bindings has varied wildly to say the least.
> How would you work to improve this situation?

this is a technical and marketing question that the Board cannot
really answer; the GNOME project has always been open to all kinds of
programming tools — even when some times the rest of the free and open
source software world was less than so.

I started contributing to GNOME through the Perl bindings myself, and
occasionally still do. on the technical level, the GNOME platform
offers a compelling story for non-C developers, but much has to be done
in terms of marketing, documentation and QA. what the Foundation can do
is create the opportunity for developers of language bindings to come
together in hackfests and conferences — something that has been done
with the PyGObject hackfest in Berlin, for instance.

> 2) What are your own feelings on supporting fairly new languages and
> standards like Go and Perl 6?

my feeling is: the more, the merrier. :-)

if somebody is willing to create bridges with these communities then,
and I speak as a member of the GNOME Foundation and a maintainer of
libraries and applications, I would only be happy to welcome
collaboration and contributions.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi
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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Emmanuele Bassi]

On 2011-05-25 at 08:24, Frederic Peters wrote:
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
> 
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?

I think I already gave part of the answer[0] to Richard about this, so
I'll not restate my position; I just want to elaborate on the role of
the Foundation a little bit further.

the Foundation's role is of a facilitator; the Board should make sure
that the relevant people connect in a positive environment — and not
answer questions of technical or political nature. the direction of the
Gnome project is the sum total of the people showing up to actually do
the work that brings an awesome experience to the users: maintainers,
contributors, translators, documentation team, and QA. it is true,
though, that the project as a whole needs focus and direction. the
release team covers part of that, by working as the technical oversight
for the actual GNOME release. since one of the goals of the "GNOME OS"
is to make sure that the dependencies are actually chosen and developed
with a whole product in mind, chosing those dependencies has become an
important part of the steering process. for this reason, my view is that
the release team needs to be consolidated, and that it should be
integrated by the equivalent of the Linux kernel's "patch liutenants": a
selected list of individuals, chosen by merit and skill and not
necessarily from within the GNOME project itself, that act as reference
point for different sub-systems: the graphics stack; the power management;
the network stack; etc. these people would be reference points, and
gatekeepers of the QA process — not a steering committee, but maintainers
that will answer to the requirements of the designers, and will keep the
design team and the release team distributions teams in the loop with the
various projects that GNOME depends on. this will help maintainers within
the GNOME project, but will also help the teams of packagers inside the
distributions. *this* is something that the Foundation Board can create
and direct, and I'd be glad to help do if I'm elected.

another role for the Foundation Board is getting OEMs, OSVs and ISVs come
to GNOME, and see GNOME as a compelling product for creating compelling
devices. not a toolkit with a reference user experience, but a complete
solution that can accomodate customizations of design and features — in
the open, and with amazing talent already available. we have a long way
to go for this, but offering a cohesive experience in terms of design,
development and deployment is a worthy goal that should be helped in
terms of marketing, as well as documentation and development.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

[0] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2011-May/msg00016.html

-- 
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B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi
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Re: Fwd: Question for the canditates

[Shaun McCance]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 19:49 +0200, Andrea Veri wrote:
> Forwarding to foundation-list two questions we received from
> Ali-Reza Anghaie. Please don't add membership-committee@g.o
> as CC, follow-ups should be kept on -list. Thanks.
> 
> Andrea
> 
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Ali-Reza Anghaie 
> Date: 2011/5/25
> Subject: Question for the canditates
> To: membership-commit...@gnome.org
> 
> 
> I'd like to ask two questions of all the candidates please:
> 
> 1) As GNOME has matured the number of officially supported language
> bindings has decreased. The quality and availability of various
> language communities own bindings has varied wildly to say the least.
> How would you work to improve this situation?
> 
> 2) What are your own feelings on supporting fairly new languages and
> standards like Go and Perl 6?

I'm going to echo what Bastien said. Which languages to develop
and promote is up to the developers in our community. The board
shouldn't (and can't, really) mandate that we have to have better
bindings for some language. If people care about developing GNOME
applications in Perl, they need to step up.

The foundation can provide resources (e.g. hackfests) to help the
effort, but only if people are putting in the effort. We've been
pretty liberal about funding hackfests, as far as I can tell.

If we were at the point where there were more funds requested for
language binding hackfests than we can afford, then I would lean
towards funding things that make our platform more attractive to
more developers. But I don't think we're at that point.

--
Shaun


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Re: Fwd: Question for the canditates

[Bastien Nocera]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 19:49 +0200, Andrea Veri wrote:
> Forwarding to foundation-list two questions we received from
> Ali-Reza Anghaie. Please don't add membership-committee@g.o
> as CC, follow-ups should be kept on -list. Thanks.
> 
> Andrea
> 
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Ali-Reza Anghaie 
> Date: 2011/5/25
> Subject: Question for the canditates
> To: membership-commit...@gnome.org
> 
> 
> I'd like to ask two questions of all the candidates please:
> 
> 1) As GNOME has matured the number of officially supported language
> bindings has decreased. The quality and availability of various
> language communities own bindings has varied wildly to say the least.
> How would you work to improve this situation?
> 
> 2) What are your own feelings on supporting fairly new languages and
> standards like Go and Perl 6?

Both of those are technical issues, so not within the remit of the GNOME
Foundation Board.

But the Foundation has helped organise various hackfests in the past,
such as the Python hackfest[1], and the GNOME+Mono one[2]. So I'm sure
that if other bindings needed a similar push to be better integrated in
the GNOME platform, the Foundation would be happy to help, budgets
permitting.

[1]: https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/Python2011
[2]: https://live.gnome.org/GNOME%2BMonoHackfest2010

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Fwd: Question for the canditates

[Andrea Veri]

Forwarding to foundation-list two questions we received from
Ali-Reza Anghaie. Please don't add membership-committee@g.o
as CC, follow-ups should be kept on -list. Thanks.

Andrea

-- Forwarded message --
From: Ali-Reza Anghaie 
Date: 2011/5/25
Subject: Question for the canditates
To: membership-commit...@gnome.org


I'd like to ask two questions of all the candidates please:

1) As GNOME has matured the number of officially supported language
bindings has decreased. The quality and availability of various
language communities own bindings has varied wildly to say the least.
How would you work to improve this situation?

2) What are your own feelings on supporting fairly new languages and
standards like Go and Perl 6?

Thank you all for considering my questions. Cheers, -Ali
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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Brian Cameron]

Fred:


GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).


I remember sitting in Jon McCann's talk at Den Haag last Summer where
GNOME OS was first brought to my attention.  It seems a catchy use of
the GNOME brand, but we clearly have not yet found an effective way to
make use of it.

Using the GNOME brand to foster divisions within the Free Software or
GNU/Linux community, to me, feels like the sort of thing Richard
Stallman would be into.  While I love free software, I personally do
not drink this sort of Stalinist kool-aid.  I think it is far more
interesting to work as a community on free software alternative
products that are competitive with those from Microsoft and Apple.


What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
put into positions by different persons?


Yes, I do.  I think that the GNOME Foundation, as a community, needs to
answer these questions and decide how the "GNOME" brand should be used.
We need to discuss, and perhaps vote if the answers are not just
obvious.  Remember, the GNOME board of directors only works to express
the will of the Foundation membership - the board members are your
representatives.

I do think there is real value in having a good definition of our
brand.  It does not seem clear how we should best encourage both a
"GNOME" vision of usability and also promote the fact that GNOME
Technologies are found in GNOME Shell, mobile devices, Sugar, OLPC,
the City of Largo, etc.  The fact that usability can vary across
different hardware and distros, and that we do not yet have a GNOME 3
HIG contributes to things being fuzzy at the moment.

Some have proposed that the GNOME brand be tied to the usage of
particular combinations of technologies or kernels.  Perhaps we need to
use the GNOME brand in a spectrum of ways rather than a single "GNOME
OS".  Perhaps the GNOME Foundation could be a body that blesses
acceptable usages of the brand, such as what can be called "GNOME
Mobile OS", "GNOME Developing World OS", "GNOME Accessibility OS",
"GNOME Technologies", or whatever.  Having some structure and process
towards how we use the GNOME brand could be very useful, especially if
the community ever did something like setup an internet application
store.

The "Build on What we Have (or: too much structure is poison)" section
of the GNOME Foundation charter highlights that The GNOME Foundation
does not have the mandate to be divisive, or that would encourage
forking.  The charter says:

  Any new structure which the GNOME foundation provides, if taken too
  far, will be artificial, ignored, or at worst: really really annoying
  to developers.

  Furthermore, the foundation can have no real powers of enforcement;
  compliance with foundation decision should be an act of good-faith.
  If we've lost consensus to the point where we're regularly forcibly
  ejecting people from the foundation and co-opting their projects,
  we're sunk anyway.

  Instead, the foundation will work with GNOME's strengths to make it
  better. A foundation that provides cohesion, vision, direction, and
  enough organization will be an incredible asset. A foundation that
  attempts to do this, but hides the iron fist under a velvet glove
  will not. Such an entity would likely be ignored, and words like
  "fork" would be thrown around.

How to use a brand effectively is no short discussion.  I think it is
the discussion we are having right now, really.  A very timely thing
to consider with GNOME 3 out the door.  I hope that we, as a community,
are able to do this in a non-divisive manner.

You have to love people who put terms like "iron fists" and "velvet
gloves" in their charter.

Brian
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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Shaun McCance]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 08:24 +0200, Frederic Peters wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
> 
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?

I don't think it's the board's job to decide, but I do think
the tendency of the community right now is to integrate more
deeply with the system, rather than bolt things on top of a
multitude of platforms we don't control.

This is going to raise technical questions. How much will we
dictate software, versus dictating features and interfaces?
Do we want to get into the business of distribution, or are
we happy to let others deal with that?

It's also going to raise branding and marketing questions.
If we see GNOME appearing on non-PC devices, do we want them
presented as GNOME devices, or are we happy to be a footnote?

I don't have those answers, and it's up to the community to
make those decisions.

But if we do want to push a complete software stack, and we
want to push GNOME as the OS for devices, then we need to
look at getting GNOME onto devices. We need to get device
vendors on board, working upstream, and helping us decide
how to best adapt GNOME to their hardware (or adapt their
hardware to our designs).

This is something I'd like to work on if elected.

--
Shaun


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Re: Candidacy: Lionel Dricot

[Lionel Dricot]

Le mercredi 25 mai 2011 à 14:34 +0100, Bastien Nocera a écrit :
> On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 15:19 +0200, Lionel Dricot wrote:

[snip]

> Could you explain what concrete plans you have? Are you thinking that
> the GNOME Foundation should take care of distributing bids from
> customers to its ecosystem?
> 
> You seem to have a set plan, but we don't know any of the details for
> it, which makes it a bit hard to judge.

I have a lot of ideas. Some are well defined, others are just sparks
that need to grow ;-)

Examples includes: common mailing-list for commercial support providers,
seminars during summit, helping entrepreneurs to launch their GNOME
startup (with advices, contacts with investors, potential customers),
coordinating some cooperative event/happenings like commercial
advertising. There's a lot that could be done.

But, before deciding to stand for election, I took the time to talk with
some board members. They all said that being on the board is a
difficult, time-consuming job.

If I'm elected, it will be my first year on the board and I need to
learn. 

I don't want to sound arrogant or too optimistic. I want to keep in mind
small achievable objectives. One of them is the webpage. But I hope that
this webpage will only be a start for more other things, that could be
carried upon by futur board members.

Lionel

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Re: Candidacy: Lionel Dricot

[Lionel Dricot]

Le lundi 23 mai 2011 à 08:45 -0500, Paul Cutler a écrit :
> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 8:22 AM, Martyn Russell  wrote:
[snip]
> > Given the board represent the foundation at the highest level, why shouldn't
> > they be (more?) involved in commercialisation of GNOME?
> 
> Just a quick note, but I believe the Board supports all of these
> ideas.  But none of these tasks require the Board's intervention - the
> community could get all of this done if they chose to (just as the
> Board could too).  There is nothing stopping a community member from
> proposing this (probably best on the Marketing list) and getting it
> done.  I think these are all fantastic ideas.  I think having a Board
> member who owns this could help push it a bit more, but there is
> absolutely no reason we can't be working on this right now.

Hi Paul,

I think that nearly everything can be done without being on the board.
This argument could be given to nearly any proposal.

Supporting the GNOME ecosystem is not only a one-time job like doing a
webpage. It's a day-to-day job which might involves building some kind
of infrastructure (like a commercial support oriented mailing-list,
seminars during GUADEC, commercial cooperative promotions, etc).

All of this *could* be done without being on the board. But if it was so
easy, why would a board be needed at all? And what would be the
legitimacy of those initiatives?

If I'm elected, this would be a clear signal from the community that the
foundation should go the way  I propose it. That's why I really want to
insist that I don't want to represent Lanedo bul all GNOME companies and
entrepreneurs.

Lionel


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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Lionel Dricot]

Le mercredi 25 mai 2011 à 08:24 +0200, Frederic Peters a écrit :
> Hello all,
> 
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
> 
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?

Hi Fred,

I've seen a lot of discussion around that but it was more "feelings"
than rational thinking.

Decisions should be based on facts. Example: how many GNOME users are
*not* using Linux? How many GNOME contributors are *not* using Linux?
What would be the advantages and disadvantages of switching to Linux
only?

I haven't seen a rational discussion about those facts yet, so bringing
it to the board seems a bit early yet.

Anyway, I think that the board should not "take a decision". What would
happens if the board take a given decision and that a substantial part
of the key contributors disagree with that? I personally don't feel
qualified enough to take such an important decision, even if I'm
elected :-)

In my opinion, the board should intervene in such technical debate only
if the community want it or if the board consider that the debate is
harming the community. (that looks a bit extreme).

In that case, I would advocate for the board to keep a mediator role.
The board will try to analyse what are the different alternatives, what
they implies and who the key people are and how to reconcile them. 

The board should remain neutral but, if needed, it could decide to call
for a referendum (this is not a prerogative of the board, any foundation
member can call for a referendum if 10% of the members agree with that).


Anyway, I'm a strong believer in meritocracy. Those who do the job will
choose. The board is not the one doing the job here but could definitely
act as a mediator.

I hope I was not too long ;-) 

Lionel

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Re: Candidacy: Lionel Dricot

[Bastien Nocera]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 15:19 +0200, Lionel Dricot wrote:
> Hi Bastien et al,
> 
> I'm sorry for the late reply but I wanted to take the time to clarify my
> vision.

> But improving the situation is not only about adding a webpage. It's
> really about adding a new paradigm to the GNOME foundation. The GNOME
> foundation should act as the owner of a commercially supported product. 
> This is of course huge and I don't think it would be achievable in one
> year. But, if elected, I would like to achieve at least the first steps
> in that direction. 

Could you explain what concrete plans you have? Are you thinking that
the GNOME Foundation should take care of distributing bids from
customers to its ecosystem?

You seem to have a set plan, but we don't know any of the details for
it, which makes it a bit hard to judge.

> Le lundi 23 mai 2011 à 12:02 +0100, Bastien Nocera a écrit :
> > 
> > Definitely, in fact, that's exactly what I discussed with Martyn on
> > foundation-list a couple of weeks ago.
> 
> I hope I convinced you that it was not only about a webpage.

No, but starting work on the webpage would certainly be a good start :)

Cheers

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Re: Candidacy: Lionel Dricot

[Lionel Dricot]

Hi Bastien et al,

I'm sorry for the late reply but I wanted to take the time to clarify my
vision.

Having an honest experience in the proprietary software world, I
observed that having "official support" was a requirement for any
technological choices.

As such, choosing a product from a given company was always seen as a
"safe choice". Companies feel more safe when there is this "official
support" available and pay a lot of money for that.

One huge problem of free software in the commercial world is that people
think that there's no support for it. Richard pointed out that the FSF
maintain a list of commercial providers, and I think that this is the
reason: to show that Free Software is a good product with commercial
support.

As Martyn said, we have at least one record of one company switching
away from GTK+ because of the lack of perceived support.

I believe that it should be part of the work of the foundation to
promote GNOME and every GNOME technology as a viable, high-quality,
commercially supported solution.

This seems to be confirmed by this quotes on the foundation.gnome.org
main page:

"The Foundation will act as an official voice for the GNOME project,
providing a means of communication with the press and with commercial
and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software."


Improving the promotion of GNOME as a commercial solution will led to
more people looking support for GNOME and more money invested in the
GNOME economy in general.

In the end, a lot of features, bugfixes or even new products are in fact
paid by customers which benefit to the whole community. I could give you
some examples that I'm currently witnessing but I don't want to use this
thread as an advertising channel.

I believe that there are a lot of potential customers waiting around the
corner. There is way more than Nokia. A lot of small companies want to
use GNOME technologies for a niche product and need some kind of
support. Improving the GNOME market would mean the creation of new GNOME
companies, it would means allowing some GNOME hackers to be paid full
time instead of doing a Windows IT job during their 9-17 shift. As a
result, the quality of GNOME will also be improved.

Improving the situation would be a benefit for everybody.

But improving the situation is not only about adding a webpage. It's
really about adding a new paradigm to the GNOME foundation. The GNOME
foundation should act as the owner of a commercially supported product. 
This is of course huge and I don't think it would be achievable in one
year. But, if elected, I would like to achieve at least the first steps
in that direction. 



Le lundi 23 mai 2011 à 12:02 +0100, Bastien Nocera a écrit :
> 
> Definitely, in fact, that's exactly what I discussed with Martyn on
> foundation-list a couple of weeks ago.

I hope I convinced you that it was not only about a webpage.
> 
> > But think that the "communication about commercial support" is only the
> > tip of the iceberg, that there is often small issues or
> > misunderstanding.
> 
> What sort of problems do you expect to see? I'm pretty unclear on what
> "small issues or misunderstanding" you would see.

Bad wording from my parts. Let's state it this way: the GNOME foundation
is currently acting as a the owner of a Free Software product. Which is
fine but, IMHO, could be better. 

I believe that the GNOME foundation should act more as the owner of a
commercial grade free software product. The fact that it's free software
and that there are multiple companies is a strength :
+ more competitive market (cheaper price for the customer)
+ no vendor lock-in
+ more flexible solutions

None of those strengths are particularly visible. On the opposite,
people think that their is no support at all.

> >  It is not only about having a page that list the
> > commercial support companies. It's more about a deep collaboration
> > between the foundation and the companies that live from GNOME.
> 
> I personally don't think that the Foundation needs to be involved in
> setting this up. Rubber-stamping this, certainly, but I don't think that
> those companies that offer services need the Board to be involved to
> make changes to the GNOME website.

I hope that I explained it better this time.
> 
> > And for such deep collaboration to be optimal, the board is the best
> > place.
> > 
> > >  - isn't the Advisory Board, and not the Board, the group where the
> > >GNOME companies (and others, obviously) should be represented?
> > 
> > I think that the board should represent the community. As I said in my
> > previous mail, I believe that the community is mainly composed of
> > independents, big companies with GNOME products and small companies with
> > GNOME services. Thus, I believe that the board should be a fair mix of
> > people from those different backgrounds. I especially happy to see the
> > candidacy of Diego, Ryan and Andre regarding that.
> 
> I would argue that the Board doesn't need to match t

Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Bastien Nocera]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 08:24 +0200, Frederic Peters wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
> 
> What are your thougths on this?[2]

I'd rather not expand on the subject as part of answering questions as a
candidate to the Board.

>  Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?

It's neither the Board's nor the Release Team's decision, in my opinion,
to drive the project technically. The project, and the community that
drives the project in particular, are the ones in charge of where they
want the project to go.

If you're asking me, and my fellow candidates, whether you think there
might be push-back from partners, Advisory Board members, or
distributions on this, I don't think so.

The goal of the "GNOME OS" part of the timeline is to ensure that GNOME
as a desktop doesn't block on other parts of the infrastructure, and
provides a complete and integrated experience. That doesn't stop people
from using bits of the GNOME stack for their applications, or special
cases. That also doesn't stop people from using other distributions,
Unices, or kernels from adapting GNOME for them (or their code for GNOME
in some cases), it probably just wouldn't provide the same experience.

Cheers

> [1] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS doesn't help, the only laid out
> plan I know was in Jon McCann "Shell Yes!" talk at GUADEC (now
> locked on slideshare.net)
> 
> [2] this question comes first but in terms of candidacies to the
> board, I believe the next ones are even more important.
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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Rodrigo Moya]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 08:24 +0200, Frederic Peters wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
> 
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?
> 
I really think the GNOME OS idea is a very good one, that is, making
GNOME provide access to configuration and features of the underlying OS,
so that it is a complete desktop that can deal with everything the users
would ever need from a desktop.

But at the same time we have people from OSes other than Linux
interested in using GNOME, so I think we should take those into account,
even if their developers don't work on making GNOME work on those OSes
as actively as the Linux crowd. So, I think we should not be targetting
only Linux, but make the developer communities of those OSes more active
in GNOME. More people helping can just lead to a better GNOME.

As for who makes the decision, since it's a technical thing, it's up to
the release team/maintainers/future technical board (if any), but I
think the board should be really giving the message that any UNIX-based
OS is supported in GNOME, and make it easier for the developers of those
other kernels to provide their own versions of the Linux-only stuff used
in GNOME (by talking to them so that they get engaged in technical
discussions)

When Linux-only stuff is needed in GNOME, like systemd, I think, as
discussed in the thread, clear-defined interfaces should be provided so
that people from other kernels can easily implement what is needed.

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