Re: GNOME trademark guidelines and user group agreement
On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, David Neary wrote: Let's say that it was a mistake, or that distributing the foot under the GPL is incompatible with defending it as a trademark - what remedy do you think we should consider? Seems like that's what redhat does these days: releasing their product which is Free Software, but you cannot redistribute due to trademarks. Don't flame me for what I just said, it's here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/30/esr_interview.html behdad Cheers, Dave. Alan Cox wrote: That's what it says. I believe that we are going to handle logo modifications on a case-by-case basis. Please let us know if you want to use a modified logo, and as long as it's a reasonable usage, there will be no problem. The logo has repeatedly been supplied as part of official GNOME distribution products labelled as GPL and when this has been pointed out the board has neither replied nor taken action to correct or indicate this was a mistake. Alan --behdad http://behdad.org/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME trademark guidelines and user group agreement
On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Elijah Newren wrote: On 9/9/05, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, David Neary wrote: Let's say that it was a mistake, or that distributing the foot under the GPL is incompatible with defending it as a trademark - what remedy do you think we should consider? Seems like that's what redhat does these days: releasing their product which is Free Software, but you cannot redistribute due to trademarks. Don't flame me for what I just said, it's here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/30/esr_interview.html You can redistribute the source code for Red Hat's RHEL offerings and/or binaries you compile from it, IF you remove Red Hat's trademarks first (which yes, means it isn't RHEL any more, but it's close enough for many); see http://www.centos.org/ and others. Indeed. But the article discusses how magazines cannot distribute RHEL. Also, from the pre-Fedora days, there has been a distribution called Pink Tie which was exactly Red Hat Linux with trademarks removed and renamed. Funnier is that you can get the source code for Fedora Core and remove that silly End User License Agreement, and you have not violated any laws... --behdad http://behdad.org/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
precandidacy: Behdad Esfahbod
Just a quick note that I plan to send out candidacy mail later this weekend. Cheers, --behdad http://behdad.org/ Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill -- Dan Bern, New American Language ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Candidacy: Behdad Esfahbod
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Website: http://behdad.org/ Affiliation: Sharif FarsiWeb, Inc. to change soon, but none of R, N, S, or any other GNOME company. What I like to see the board doing in the coming term: * Continue focusing on areas that are less fun than hacking, like keeping the website alive, marketing, etc. * (More) Proactively looking for sponsors and other sources of income, to support the community. * Commit to the 10x10 plan. Support massive marketing plans to get the word out. Stickers, free CDs, tshirts, getting the word to the LUGs, etc. Like the Ubuntu guys are doing. * Building a team-oriented community. Ad hoc teams are good, but documented teams make it easier for newcomers to join in. Both long-term teams like current release-team and membership committee, and short-term teams to solve an specific problem at hand. Look at the Ubuntu launchpad for example. * Make each foundation member a voice of GNOME. Lead activities in the community, making a more socially active membership. Support programs like bug-fixer of the month, documenter of the month, etc, again, with real prizes sent out. Who I am: I've been a member of GNOME foundation since 2001, but never called myself a GNOME developer until recently, when I found myself well inside, and I believe I am here to stay. I started as a hacker, but found a great family that is much more valuable than the sum of the parts. So I'm trying to get more involved in other aspects of the project. I am a Fedora user and have been following the Fedora marketing team since it was formed. Like everybody else, I was observing how Ubuntu rose, and admired that. Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend the Ubuntu Below Zero conference. Unfortunately I couldn't make it to GUADEC so far. :( I am an internationalization expert in Free Software, and GNOME specifically. I hack on and co-maintain Pango, gucharmap, and dasher. I have been an active member of the Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew free software communities via email, and recently discovered the Toronto community as well. I have been evangelizing the GNU and GNOME projects since 2000. I'm from Iran, moved to Canada in 2003. --Behdad Esfahbod November 14, 2005 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Foundation Elections - Voting systematically
On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Alan Horkan wrote: Given this is a technical audience I'm sure you all understand the logic of how the voting system works but I remind you to consider carefully the value of your votes. Maybe it's time to switch to STV [1]. I will bring that up when next board is in place. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Transferable_Vote --behdad http://behdad.org/ Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill -- Dan Bern, New American Language ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
1. How much time can you dedicate to the board each week? I can spend a total of 5 hours easily. 4. Explain how you expect to meet you goals. If we manage to make the board more open, which seems to be agreed as a most by almost all candidates, then I don't see the baord work much different that other happenings in the project. We set goals, discuss, find interested people, decide/delegate. Like we are all already doing in other aspects of the project. 6. Please assess GNOME: a. What are its strengths The healthy community, the freedom, the timely release process, the usability/accessibility/internationalization/localization. b. What are its weaknesses Lack of decision-making power in the project as a whole. Lack of progress in areas that no individual cares enough to spend time on. So web pages may stay out of date for years, or the commits list broken for months. c. What are its opportunities I see a lot of opportunities for GNOME on small devices, also in educational and governmental institutaions. They are of course all known. And there's also the long-term goal of taking over the desktop market :). d. What are its threats Main treat I see is the software patents. 7. Name the best album you purchased in the last year. Dan Bern (Dan Bern): http://danbern.com/discography.html#danbern --behdad http://behdad.org/ Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill -- Dan Bern, New American Language ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Additional questions for the board candidates
On Wed, 23 Nov 2005, Philip Van Hoof wrote: First question: How important are desktop standards for you. How will you attempt to let the GNOME developers cooperate even more with the freedesktop.org movement? Or do you dislike that movement? In in general: What should GNOME do with fd.org? I strongly support standards in general, and fd.o in particular. But I also believe that if a standard is the right one, GNOME developers will pick it up automatically. No need to push that. About what should GNOME do with fd.o, I guess fd.o is no one other than GNOME, KDE, and a few others. So basically GNOME is partly fd.o. Second question: What will you do to further enhance cooperation with the KDE developers? Will you invite them to our conferences? Will you pay their travel expenses? Will you let them talk on GUADEC? Will you visit their conferences and will you do a talk about cooperation at their conferences? Or will you simply disregard them and think GNOME is superior yadiyada (in which case I wont vote for you, by the way)? We are already cooperating with KDE developers in various aspects. I know I'm doing myself. I will invite them to our conferences, yes. They are welcome to submit as many talk proposals as they want, and I'm generally positive about accepting them. I do not follow KDE news personally, but now I think maybe I should reald Planet KDE. It's KDE that we can copy from without any legal problems after all! Third question: In my opinion, GNOME lacks strong leadership that steers development choices and standards. We have no Linus Torvalds (oh I forget a lot important kernel developers of today, it's not the point -- I picked the most famous one and everybody knows this guy and understands his role as a kernel developer, right?). It's getting increasingly hard for a novice desktop developer to know which desktop standard will succeed and which will not. It's getting increasingly difficult to achieve getting things that will influence other components done. Amongst them are clipboard standards and infrastructure, configuration standards and infrastructure, desktop (presence) notification but also programming environments and languages like C#, Python and Java and the language bindings (which ones belong in the 'official' GNOME distribution -- for commercial software developers this is an extremely important question: Do we support .NET or we don't? Do we support Java or we don't? There's no clarity). And D-BUS is moving forward rapidly. This will introduce a lot new such standards. Even D-BUS itself is such a standard of which it hasn't been said that it's the IPC for a typical modern GNOME application. Or is it ORBit-2? D-COP? I guess nobody knows. Yet there's no real leadership telling the GNOME app developers what direction to go. And there's many questions and even more exciting new technologies being developed today. A very interesting such technology is Galago (desktop notification specification). There's many others (and I'm not going to list all of them just to please their developers). And it's growing rapidly in numbers. I can imagine companies that would like to target the GNOME desktop, while developing solutions for their customers, would like this type of leadership to happen. Yet I can imagine a lot Free Software GNOME developers dislike any form of leadership. It's not a simple problem to solve. Will the GNOME Foundation fill this gap? Or will the GNOME Foundation create a solution? How will you, provided you become board member, address this. Or isn't this important enough for the Board to discuss? Or isn't it the focus of the Board? Some of the issues you raise, like D-BUS, are making a healthy progress in GNOME IMO. It's a matter of time and resources before we get it replace all our IPC. Other ones, like the status of Mono in the project, is exactly the kind of thing that the board needs to ensure is resolved. Note that I said the board needs to ensure is resolved, not that the board should resolve. The FSF may be very helful in resolving the legal issues, should we ask them. Fourth question (finally a non programmer question! :p): Because I can imagine it's going to be an important project for the GNOME desktop and infrastructure, how will you involve yourself in the One Laptop Per Child concept? Yes, it's an important project for GNOME, and GNOME in general benefits from this involvement in all aspects. Other than all the publicity that GNOME can gain from OLPC, I think getting our software to run on a restricted environment like the green machine is a huge improvement on our performance. Without becoming too technical, I like working on that direction. As for how to get myself involved, for now I'm trusting Jim Gettys as GNOME's contact to the project. --behdad http://behdad.org/ Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill -- Dan Bern, New American
Re: [Off Topic] Words to Avoid Vendor [was Re: Questions to answer]
On Sat, 26 Nov 2005, Alan Horkan wrote: Does ISV stand for Independent Software Vendor? If so, the term is often misleading, because the most important developers of GNOME applications--those developing free software--are mostly not vendors. The important point is the need for clear documentation making it easier for those who want to work with Gnome including businesses which self identify under the term ISV. I'm sure the intention was not to exclude anyone. And as an individual, I think that choice of word did fail. Whenever I saw/read ISV in any context in GNOME, I thought of it as issues concerning businesses only, not myself as a *user* of the GNOME libraries, etc. I'm sure I'm not the only one. So the concern is real IMO. behdad ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Women's Summer Outreach Program 2006
GNOME to Sponsor Female Developers in a Summer Outreach Program BOSTON, Mass - June 13, 2006 - The GNOME Foundation is offering USD$9000 to female students in order to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development. The money originates from GNOME's participation in the Google Summer of Code program (code.google.com/soc/), for which GNOME developers will mentor 20 students working throughout the northern summer on GNOME-related projects. This year GNOME received 181 applications to Google's program, yet none were from women. The GNOME Foundation has therefore chosen to reinvest Google's contribution into a new program designed to increase the participation of women in GNOME. The program has no official relationship with Google. Free software prides itself on being open to anyone with a good idea, yet less than 2% of free software developers are female. We, as a community, need to be actively working to change this statistic, and programs like this one are a much needed step in the right direction. said Hanna Wallach, a GNOME developer who is involved in several projects that encourage women to participate in free software development. The Women's Summer Outreach Program is currently accepting applications from female students. Accepted students will receive a stipend of USD $3000 over a two month period. A pool of project ideas is provided at www.gnome.org/projects/wsop/, though original proposals are also encouraged. Projects may either be related to GNOME directly, or indirectly via projects such as Gstreamer and Abiword. Each student will be assigned a mentor to provide guidance throughout the program. Vincent Untz, member of the GNOME Foundation board and coordinator of the GNOME team for Google's Summer of Code program, explained: Many women have the skills required to contribute to Free Software projects like GNOME, but may not see an opportunity to start working with us. By initiating this program, not only do we want to highlight the issue, but we also hope that this opportunity will help more women to get involved in the long term. Applications should be submitted using the form at www.gnome.org/projects/wsop/. More information about the application process may be found at the same location. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Subversion migration recap (cut-off Friday July 14th)
I have some concerns about how per-module repos are going to work: 1) How/when can we group modules into one repo? For example, it might make sense to group glib, pango, and gtk+ into one repo. But that makes it harder to remember/guess the repo paths. 2) Even if we dictate one repo per module: - What are the regulations for creating new repos? Any committer can ask and granted a new repo in a matter of a few hours? - If not, or even if yes, I believe people will start adding new modules into the repos they currently own. For example, if I want to create a pango-benchmark module, I definitely go with the existing pango repo instead of asking for a new one, and that again defeats the identity module-repo mapping. Regards, behdad On Sun, 2006-07-09 at 07:36 -0400, Ross Golder wrote: Hi guys, I hope you have all recovered from GUADEC. As you have all probably long forgotten by now, we are scheduled to migrate the GNOME CVS repository to Subversion next weekend. Friday night at 23:59UTC to be precise. That means that the migration will probably be under way this time next week. Here's an update on the status of the main issues. Archive history issues -- Unfortunately, during it's lifetime the GNOME CVS server has suffered several accidental clock resets (to a point in 1997). The timestamps listed in some of the CVS ',v' files are not always correct and in chronological order. This led to some problems high-lighted by James Henstridge: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-infrastructure/2006-February/msg00059.html Despite lengthy discussions with Michael Haggerty, the current maintainer of cvs2svn, and several patches attempting to work around the problem, it seems that it is unlikely that we'll be able to eliminate the problem entirely - only use the patches we've developed to alleviate the problem in the many cases. The most recent few mail exchanges on the subject are archived here: http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/servlets/BrowseList?listName=devby=datefrom=2006-07-01to=2006-07-31first=1count=4 At any rate, we will not be able to rely on the subversion archive to recreate historical versions. To a certain extent, we can't really rely on the CVS archive either, as various 'CVS surgery' operations will have taken place over the years, in addition to the clockskew problems. However, I will make sure the CVS archives stay on-line in read-only/anonymous mode indefinitely in order to keep that history publicly available as it was at the time of the cut-off. The thing to remember is that this issue will only affect a small minority of the GNOME modules - the majority, esp newer modules, won't suffer this problem and you should still be able to retrieve reasonably faithful historical checkouts from either system in most cases. Migration order --- One downside will be that to migrate the entire CVS repository is that we have a *lot* of history. Current indications are that - worse case scenario - it could take the best part of a month to complete. Obviously, lots of hackers aren't going to want to wait this long before they can continue making commits to their module. So this is how I'm thinking of determining the migration order. We have three 'priority' lists, and then the rest. The first priority list will contain a list of any modules developers specifically request are treated as priority, as they expect to be working with them within hours/days of the migration cut-off (send your requests to me off the list now). The second priority list will contain a list of other modules we consider relatively urgent, such as the 'www.gnome.org' website in case we decide to change anything about of homepage. The third priority list is compiled from a list of the most active modules from the last year in activity order (compiled from a query on 'bonsai-svn' from a fairly recent test migration). Then, the whole list of modules is processed for any not handled above. This can be seen in the migration script 'create-svnrepos.sh', which is linked to and explained here: http://live.gnome.org/Subversion Obviously, at 23:59UTC the whole CVS archive will become read-only. As each CVS module is being migrated to a Subversion repository, it will be available read-only (for checkout and in viewcvs). When each module's subversion repository has been successfully migrated, the repository perms will reset so GNOME developers can proceed to make commits. As each module gets migrated, an '.out' file will be generated containing the output of the cvs2svn run (for the curious). These can be quite big sometimes, so the last few lines (containing the migration statistics) will be directed into a '.tail' file and the whole output file is bzip2'ed down. You should be able to see this happening here for the running test migration here: http://svn.gnome.org/migration/ As you can see from the
Re: Research groups and the GNOME project
On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 21:20 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 16:44 +, Alvaro del Castillo wrote: Right now I am working in the University Rey Juan Carlos and we are working hard researching how free software is developed. By the way, I can vouch for the extreme jaw-dropping coolness of the work of Álvaro and his group. Their research results have been *really* interesting! Like Alan Horkan already mentioned, people (ie. developers) are losing interest in filling in surveys or otherwise helping FOSS research. Perhaps you can point us to the results that you have found interesting? Federico -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill -- Dan Bern, New American Language ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Candidacy: Behdad Esfahbod
Name: Behdad Esfahbod Email: behdad gnome org Affiliation: Red Hat, Inc. Summary: I run for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, because I care about GNOME and I think the Board is very important. I contribute to GNOME on a daily basis, and the board is yet another area of the project I want to challenge myself with. Why: GNOME is People. So is the Board too. I look at the board as a group of trusted people caring about GNOME, elected to make sure the Foundation, and GNOME consequently, performs as good as it can. Most of us prefer to be hacking instead. I would have been happily watching the elections if the current Board members were mostly running again. But seeing many pass it on, I feel like I should offer my share. The current board has done a marvelous job so far, and a lot of their work is still going on. As a board member I like to see we get the revamped website online, and the online store become a reality. I also want to see the Foundation have better writers, possibly funded by the foundation. I want to help better documenting board's events and procedures, and make sure incoming board email is processed as fast as possible. I like to help make a broader and more successful Summer of Code experience next year (I will do regardless). Last but not least, I want to note that in light of the the powerful Ultra-20 machine I was given by the board recently (thanks to Sun), I will be joining the release-team if I'm not elected to serve on the board. GNOME Background: I've been around for a few years, but got seriously involved since last summer. I do a lot of coding and maintenance (although I like to do more!). I maintain Pango, vte, and gucharmap, co-maintain cairo, and hack around glib and gtk+. I also joined the Accounts Team this past January and helped keeping the account request queue short for a couple of months. I still do accounts work from time to time, mostly when someone needs help on IRC. During the summer, I helped the board manage, what I call, a successful Google Summer of Code presence of GNOME. I also mentored a SoC and a Women Summer Outreach Program student. Both finished their project successfully. I was in GUADEC 2006, running a couple of sessions, and Boston Summit 2006, coordinating the very successful Text Layout Summit. I was a candidate last year. I have never been on the Board before. behdad ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Candidacy: Joachim Noreiko
On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 16:39 -0500, Andy Tai wrote: On 11/16/06, Joachim Noreiko [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Name: Joachim Noreiko As a board member, I want to work to lower the barriers to entry that block potential GNOME contributors. I hope that my work on the website and documentation will play a part in that, but I also think more can be done socially. Efforts such as GNOME Love and Patch Squad need more help, for example. I want to make GNOME more coherent. I'd like to see GNOME Certification come about, and that will entail bringing the HIG up to date. I'd like to see more GNOME marketing efforts, which will mean more planning of our release right from the start of the development cycle. You seem to contradict yourself. You want lower the bar of entry but at the same time impose more bureaucratic work such as a certification scheme? Can't speak for Joachim, but I don't see any contradiction here. Lowering the bar of entry mostly deals with individuals, where certification involves projects, and is volunteerly, from my understanding. http://live.gnome.org/GnomeCertification -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill -- Dan Bern, New American Language ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Concerns about the election process
On Sun, 2006-11-26 at 17:30 -0500, Gabriel Burt wrote: On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 21:40 -0500, Ryan Lortie wrote: As a voter, how do I know that my token isn't just a deterministic hash of my choices? The people running the election could then easily just publish my choices along with this token once for every person who chose the same way that I did. It was my understanding (and it could certainly be wrong) that the elections committee was going to publish the tokens and choices in list form. If that is what they do, then checking for duplicate tokens is trivial. If everybody verifies their vote is published accurately, and the results from the published list match the official results, then it is a fair election. Very interesting points Ryan makes. Let me give an example from the results of the election last year: http://foundation.gnome.org/vote/votes.php?election_id=2 What he's saying is that, suppose you voted for me, Quim, Federico, Dave, Bastien, Luis, and Jeff, and were given the anonymous token 0bhnyOzwLJ05jYV2phjusfe0jBYO3HZf. How do you make sure that no one else who voted for the same seven candidates received the same anonymous token? The one attack I can see is making up votes for people who were registered but didn't vote. Gabriel -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Concerns about the election process
On Sun, 2006-11-26 at 20:18 -0600, Gabriel Burt wrote: On 11/26/06, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What he's saying is that, suppose you voted for me, Quim, Federico, Dave, Bastien, Luis, and Jeff, and were given the anonymous token 0bhnyOzwLJ05jYV2phjusfe0jBYO3HZf. How do you make sure that no one else who voted for the same seven candidates received the same anonymous token? I misunderstood. This could be solved by printing the token and the date/time that the vote was received, couldn't it? Is this information being logged so it could be used in this election? Another way could be to publish a list of people who voted, and people can check they are listed there, and compare the number of voters to the number of votes listed. No. It's not easy really. Just because the number of voters matches the number of anon tokens listed, doesn't mean that unique tokens were handed out to voters. The results can be perturbed by handing out the same token to more than one voter, and insert phony tokens with arbitrary votes attached to them. There's nothing we should rush for this year. The point is /not/ that the election committee cannot be trusted. The point is, if we want to have a system in which the voters do not have to trust the election committee, then our current system does not qualify, and for the least, it should not be advertised like it does. Gabriel -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 12:53 +0530, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote: [1] What are your plans to answer the question put forward at the last GUADEC about Why should one become a member of the GNOME Foundation ? I think the current offerings: being able to vote for elections and to get a @gnome.org address are quite attractive to someone passionate about GNOME. Much of our problem here I guess is the not-in-the-face application page and the very slow response time. To improve that, others have already suggested, and I did too a while ago. Offering membership to anyone with lots of bug activity, those who get CVS access, and apply for financial support, etc. will help there. Also, I'm fine, and actually support limiting any financial/costly support to foundation members. E.g. sending people to conferences, or sending them the event box should be limited to foundation members. BUT, only if we have a application process that is so fast that one can become a member as needed, if they qualify. More than that, I don't think there's much more we can offer, nor do I think that it's a problem. Would you be in a position to elaborate on your plans/projects to make membership more interesting for the GNOME Community ? I will pursue the above changes if I get on Board, yes. The recent change of lowering the contribution requirements is already toward these goals. Making sure that the queue is kept very short is next. I think we can do that. [2] What do you think is the most important item on the Board's agenda right now ? The online store + the website revamp. The website is on track and progressing fast, thanks to Quim. The online store however doesn't seem to be on target right now. That's something to look into fast IMO. These two components put together define our existence on the web, and that's becoming more and more important every day. We have cool blogs, we have cool artists, we have cool software. We need to let everyone know about them. What will you do more or better than the previous boards ? Not having been on board, I really can't tell. And given the current board, I'm not sure there's anything I can do better honestly. But I can promise my dedication, and the same work quality that I put in other things that I do. [3] How do you manage your time and that of others ? I'm getting better at this, although starting a full-time job did pressure my earlier habits. Right now, I use mails in my inbox inside Evo and tabs open in Firefox (two applications that I have to kill and restart with my limited memory...) to hold my short-term and immediate TODO items, and Google calendar for the longer term events. I'm most productive over IRC and email, although I can handle infrequent phone meetings. Are you good at working with others including those who might have a differing opinion than yours and try to reach consensus and agree on actions ? I am. I love free software for the working-with-others part, and have been doing that on technical terms very successfully. On the less technical grounds, I understand that there may not be one true way, and I'm ready to compromise, and to respect a consensus. [4] How are you going to manage your current contributions to GNOME once you become a Board Member ? My maintenance duties take a very small part of my time, and are easy to manage. Development and bug fixing however is what takes most of my time. I'm lucky enough to do much of of these as part of my day job at Red Hat. I'm allowed to spend a reasonable amount of my day time on board matters, if elected. If more time needed, I have to find an afternoon or a few hours from the weekend. Both are fine. [5] What do you think is the most important market for GNOME over the coming year and what do you feel you can do to help GNOME achieve better presence ? OLPC definitely, and also more embedded devices. We are fortunatley in pretty good contact with OLPC. The board can make sure that OLPC test systems are sent to strategic GNOME developers that may not be interested in asking for one personally. People working on presence, power management, tagging, etc. [6] What are your plans to encourage and mentor contributions to GNOME from Latin America, Africa and Asia ? How would you increase community participation ? We are pretty on track for Latin America from what I see. As for Africa and Asia, I think we should identify passionate people there, and bring them to GUADEC, and send people there to run small events. That seems like the best way to let people there know we are interested in having them and pass the message. If we manage to attract enough people to start a local community, it's downhill from there. [7] What areas do you see lacking currently in a complete Free Software Desktop ? What would your role be (should you be elected) in addressing the issues ? Multimedia I would say. Now this is a very special issue. We cannot approach it the easy
Re: Concerns about the election process
On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 09:23 -0300, Germán Poó Caamaño wrote: No. It's not easy really. Just because the number of voters matches the number of anon tokens listed, doesn't mean that unique tokens were handed out to voters. The results can be perturbed by handing out the same token to more than one voter, and insert phony tokens with arbitrary votes attached to them. It is pretty hard that two voters receive the same token. This statement is only true because we trust the elections committee. Otherwise, I don't see why it's pretty hard to give two voters the same token. *That* is the point of this thread. There's nothing we should rush for this year. The point is /not/ that the election committee cannot be trusted. The point is, if we want to have a system in which the voters do not have to trust the election committee, then our current system does not qualify, and for the least, it should not be advertised like it does. Having the list of all voters and each voter checking his or her vote, should be enough. IMVHO, Any voter as member of foundation has the moral obligation to check it. As Ryan noted and I tried to explain, checking votes in the current system means almost nothing. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Our annual meeting at GUADEC
On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 21:55 +0100, Quim Gil wrote: - Let's schedule the AGM the afternoon or even early evening before the Core days start. Like it. We can even use the meeting to do some stuff like matching faces to IRC nicks. I know I will miss catching up with at least a couple of people I've wanted to see at GUADEC every year. If we can get all foundation members together before the core days, it's the right place to look for most people you want to meet. They are all foundation members by now, right? -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Supporting Gtk+ Maintenance
On Thu, 2007-03-15 at 09:19 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: So for the foundation board, there are two things that can be done to improve the current situation: 1) Please present the issue at hand (this email and the email linked to above) to the advisory board members, to make sure the companies involved are aware of the situation. And if possible, spread the word to other involved parties or (non advisory) companies. Your timing is fantastic -- we're having an Advisory Board meeting tomorrow morning. I will bring it up then. :-) Indeed. This has been in my agenda for tomorrow's meeting, and I'm taking notes about it right now. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for invitations to be the host of GUADEC 2008
On Thu, 2007-03-22 at 10:37 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: Does that mean that candidates outside the EU would be considered? Not sure - we would need to discuss it. But one thing is for sure - the travel costs for attendees is something which will definitely be taken into account, and in general that will exclude anything outside North America and Europe. /me fancies a GUADEC in Dubai. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Special GNOME event in California next week
On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 13:35 -0500, Jonathon Jongsma wrote: On 4/13/07, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 13:42 -0400, Dan Winship wrote: Seriously though, this surprise announcement stuff is exactly the sort of behavior that the community despises when Novell[1] and Red Hat[2] do it, and now we're doing it to ourselves??? What's wrong with building up some hype? Maybe you can wait until the announcement is out and then decide if you can blame anybody for it? Whether or not we like the announcement or not is, I think, completely beside the point. The point is the openness of the board, which has a mandate to be open and responsive to members. Dan posted this particularly relevant bit of the charter in his email: You are making the same mistake IMO. Blaming the board for something you do not really know yet, but you will know in a week or so. So, why don't you just wait? There is always time to blame. I'll be more than happy to discuss this further, but at some point the membership has got to understand that if the board wants to keep something secret, there most probably is good reason to. And asking for vague details doesn't help anyone in any way. Here is an opportunity that a secret of the board will become public next week. Feel free to discuss it when it's out. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Special GNOME event in California next week
On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 14:34 -0500, Jonathon Jongsma wrote: And again, let me stress that this has nothing to do with whether I trust any specific board members or whether I think the board is doing a good job. I just think that maintaining an open culture where everybody feels that they can have an impact on the future of GNOME is critical to the success of the project. This is the second time you bring this up in the thread, so let me make it clear: if the board keeps some affairs secret, it does not limit anybody from contributing to, having an impact on, or participating in determining the direction of GNOME. If you disagree with this and have a case to the contrary, you should let the board know about it. Cheers, -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board Meeting Minutes :: 29th March 2007
On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 11:47 +0200, Adrian Custer wrote: Now I can't evaluate the *actual* work of the board by the very nature of the secrecy; my only recourse is to trust you to auto-evaluate your situation yourselves. I hope you can do that and then re-iterate that you think it's best or necessary. * The Board is responsible for employees, who must be able to expect privacy with regards to their management and remuneration. I have no real way of evaluating this. Unless a current/prospective board members starts taking credit for what they have done in the board in secret, I don't see how not being able to evaluate the secret stuff is a problem at all. It's not like all board candidates say ...and a lot of other stuff that were private to the board. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for invitations to be the host of GUADEC 2008
On Fri, 2007-03-23 at 00:01 -0600, Miguel Angel López Hernández wrote: El jue, 22-03-2007 a las 12:11 +, Alan Cox escribió: Mexico has some claim to be the original home of Gnome... In fact! we want to organize the GUADLAC (GNOME Users And Developers Latin American Conference) the Latin American GUADEC, later this year, it can be the pre-GUADEC in Mexico :) Why not just GUADAC? You are suggesting that US and Canada should start their own GUADNAC, are you? Greetings, Miguel -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07
On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 22:39 +0300, Quim Gil wrote: About the KDE GNOME event, probably the best way to progress is by doing progressive approaches. Jumping from the current situation to a joint conference sounds a bit like going from self-esteem to the 32nd position of the Kama Sutra in one go. As others have suggested, a successful combined room in FOSDEM would be already a big (and useful) step. Trying to put together GUADEC and aKademy befor trying smaller challenges in save contexts would be very risky. Maybe for some people, not for me. Lets repeat again: many of us can only get to one European conference per year, and even that one is hard enough to get to. Sure, there is DAM, there was DesktopConf, there is LCA, but how can they be efficient if only 50 of the 500 GUADEC attendees get the chance to experience it? And combining both events is complicated only from the organizational point of view. The KDE and GNOME community don't meet in random places, or where the software/events industry decides to organize something. The organization of each event rlies on local communities. It is not that easy for each project to find brave teams and good venues every year (how many candidates for GUADEC 2008 have we got?). Now think about the challenge of searching for a place with GNOME KDE critical mass Lets not mix organizational challenges into the discussion just yet. First step we go see if both parties (KDE and GNOME boards/communities) are interested in the topic. And I don't agree that colocating GUADEC and aKademy has a worse time finding a home. If nothing else, there are more people willing to contribute to the event, more money, etc. I wouldn't spend much time discussing about mixing/approaching GUADEC aKademy. Steps towards combined sessions and programs in the main free (and also non-free) software events is probably more fruitful. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07
On Tue, 2007-06-12 at 12:43 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote: On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 22:39 +0300, Quim Gil wrote: About the KDE GNOME event, probably the best way to progress is by doing progressive approaches. Jumping from the current situation to a joint conference sounds a bit like going from self-esteem to the 32nd position of the Kama Sutra in one go. As others have suggested, a successful combined room in FOSDEM would be already a big (and useful) step. Trying to put together GUADEC and aKademy befor trying smaller challenges in save contexts would be very risky. a good idea is the GUADEMY we recently had in A Coruña. It was just a start, but the idea is very good, get KDE/GNOME developers together and have talks/tutorials/etc of things that are common to both desktops. Doing separate tracks for KDE and GNOME (which is what mixing GUADEC and Akademy would mean) might not be a good idea, since you'll get 2 separated groups with almost no interaction. This is missing the point that GUADEC is about meeting people, not the talks. I guess aKademy is the same. So, until we are all really interested in what the rival desktop is doing, I think it would be better to organise separate events, and have a 2nd edition of the GUADEMY (as part of FOSDEM if that helps), with more focus on collaboration between desktops, so that people really interested in the collaboration can attend. All others can continue going to GUADEC/Akademy. First, I don't think of KDE as rival. Hell Qt developers and I are working together on HarfBuzz! Next, so you think most people are not interested in knowing what KDE hackers are doing? That may even be the case, doesn't mean that it's good. People don't wake up in the morning and decide that they have become interested in KDE. They do if they talk about interesting projects over beer with interesting people that happen to be KDE hackers though. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07
On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 19:02 -0600, Elijah Newren wrote: This combined conference topic was brought up at DAM-4 last week in the Desktop Organization Panel session with jrb and I in the panel from GNOME and Lars and George (don't remember the last names) from Lars Knoll. KDE. When both sides mentioned that the logistics of such an event seemed quite difficult, someone pointed out that helping with this kind of collaboration is one of the reasons for the existence of the Linux Foundation. So, there may well be additional organizational resources available. So, what was KDE's reaction? And any resolution? Are we going to discuss it? Where? -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [guadec-list] Sponsorship letter
On Fri, 2007-06-29 at 15:02 -0500, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: On 6/29/07, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 2007-06-29 at 13:56 -0500, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: Hello everyone, (sorry if someone gets duplicates of this) Fighting the consulates, I realized that it would be a good idea to have a letter from the foundation where it's acknowledged that I'm being sponsored to attende GUADEC and GUADEC-ES. You know, to make things look official. I prefer to have these things handled by GUADEC organizers, not the Board. The standard GUADEC invitation letter looks quite official to me, and has got me (and others) visas already. What kind of problems are you having with the consulate? Yep I know, it's quite good. What I mean with this one is to show that the top-level organization (the foundation) knows about all this and to explain that my trip is both to Spain and UK. Right now I have the standard UK invitation letter (guadec letter) and that's fine, but it only mentions my trip to UK, it doesn't detail that I'm dropping by Spain a few days. Then please get a letter from the GUADEC-ES organizers. A letter from a US foundation about your trip to two conferences in Europe doesn't look that useful to me. It's just to summarize things. Under the asumption that if it doesn't harm then it clarifies things for the embassy. I'm personally quite against the doesn't harm argument when a lot of overhead is involved. Instead, I suggest you go apply really quick with whatever letters you have so far. Cheers, behdad behdad So I crafted a letter about this, with the hope that someone wants to give me a hand and fill in the blanks, insert a png with his/her signature and mail it back to me. Obviously to make it official it has to be a Board Member the one signing it. I hope someone can give me a hand! Diego To whom it may concern (is this english?) On behalf of The GNOME Foundation, I would like to confirm that Mr. Diego Escalante Urrelo is being sponsored to attend GUADEC 2007: The GNOME Conference 15th - 21st July, 2007, Birmingham, United Kingdom, the 8th annual GNOME Users and Developers European Conference and GUADEC-ES 2007: The GNOME Hispanic Users and Developers Conference 12th - 13th July, 2007. Mr. Diego Escalante Urrelo holds a passport numbered 3923409. His flight to Spain and United Kingdom, his accommodation and other expenses during 11th-24th July 2007 are covered by the GUADEC committee in 1 Great Colmore Street Birmingham, B15 2AP, UK. Which is a $relationship with the foundation. He is being sponsored because of his contributions to the GNOME project which include software development, software translation and authoring software documentation. He has also helped promote GNOME in events, media and local community groups. We would like him to attend GUADEC so that he can share his experiences and learn about the latest developments in the GNOME project. GNOME Foundation (gnome.org) is a non-profit, non-government organization based in Boston, USA, with a worldwide membership. The GNOME User and Developer European Conferences (GUADEC and GUADEC-ES) www.guadec.org - www.guadec.es are annual gatherings of GNOME developers, enthusiasts and individual, business, education and government users worldwide. Yours sincerely, SCANED SIGNATURE someone ___ guadec-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/guadec-list -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Regarding OOXML and Microsoft patents
On Tue, 2007-07-31 at 20:09 +0100, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote: Miguel and Michael have done remarkable jobs in many situations, and as such deserve a lot of praise for those jobs. This one, however, is not a remarkable job and deserves critic. It's not about praise or doing a remarkable job. It's about respect. May I suggest that the rest of discussion in this thread be moved out of foundation-list? I don't think it's relevant to the foundation anymore. behdad Regards, Rui ps: is how can we do autoSpaceLikeWord95 a snide remark? Is 2004/48/EC a snide remark? all those things will affect us (you're from Europe, right?) very soon. On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 04:05:48PM +0200, Christian F.K. Schaller wrote: Hi Rui, I just read through this whole thread from start to finish after having gotten a little behind on my email. Personally the ODF versus OOXML discussion is only of secondary interest to me, but one thing struck me through this whole debate. Rui, it is fine to disagree with Miguel and Michael about the qualities or lack of such of the OOXML specification. But I don't think the kind of rude personal attacks and snide remarks you been targeting at Miguel and Michael throughout this discussion belong anywhere. Miguel and Michael have each done more for free software than most of us can even hope to aspire to, and thus trying to smear them only makes you look bad and for people to consider your arguments to be without merit. I assume the reason this debate is on the gnome foundation list is because there is a wish to have the GNOME foundation come out stronger in favour of ODF. But if that is the goal I think a more professional attitude is a better tool, as the current badmouthing do not entice me at least, to get stronger GNOME endorsement ODF. Christian On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 21:34 +0100, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote: On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 03:37:06PM -0400, Miguel de Icaza wrote: Hello, Also, why do you say the format is open? Can you tell me how Word95 does auto-space ? Can you tell me how ODF lays out paragraphs or does line-breaking or wraps text to shaped embedded objects or ... ? Nothing in OOXML spec explains how Word95 does autospace, so how can a full implementation of OOXML respect that tag's meaning? The topic is addressed here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/01/09/specifying-the-document-settings.aspx Use OpenOffice.org 1.1 line spacing this argument is funny, and was addressed at the Portuguese Technical Commission. There is an essential difference between SecretRuleYouCan'tKnowOfProductFuBar and UnderSpecifiedRuleYouCanReadSourceCodeToCompleteKnowledge And it addresses in particular the issue of whether it should be removed or not. Nice, just another repeatition the argument of legacy. What about KWord? Can it support legacy formats, or is legacy only for Microsoft? If it's only for Microsoft (since KWord most definitely can't do it), then how can it be part of an open standard? Of course this is my position on technical merits, others implementors might have other views. On political and activist grounds you might also reach different conclusions, but I will find it difficult in the future to say with a straight face in court well, they did not specify enough, so this format created lock-in. Specially from people who work for a company that is strategically aligned with Microsoft. Ah, the old guilt by association way of constructing a logical argument. Always a fine choice. Well, pot, meet kettle. However, you are the one who said almost word for word what another Microsoft employee said at the Portuguese Meeting. It's fortunate that he didn't speak Portuguese, this is how I could tell you used almost word for word what he said. Do they give lectures on how to answer? I'm curious :) Rui -- Frink! Today is Boomtime, the 66th day of Confusion in the YOLD 3173 + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown + Whatever you do will be insignificant, | but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi + So let's do it...? ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Code of Conduct on foundation-list
Hi, I want to suggest opting in for Code of Conduct [1] on foundation-list. See the Applies to section of CoC for what this means in practical terms. [1] http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct Cheers, -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct on foundation-list
On Tue, 2007-07-31 at 22:52 +0300, Quim Gil wrote: In this context, and in the foundation related lists, an additional code of conduct is just redundant. Understood. But it's just easier to point people to CoC when they behave poorly. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: no confirmation received
On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 18:56 +0300, Zeeshan Ali wrote: Hello people! I paid $50 yesterday morning to become a 'Benefactor' but so far i haven't received any email from the gnome foundation about it. Are you all on vacation at the same time? :) Hi Zeeshan, Thanks for your contribution. Friends-of-GNOME payments are all processed by our part-time administrator. Please give her a few days. Thanks, -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Foundation and Source Code Copyright
On Fri, 2007-08-03 at 12:49 +0100, Thomas Wood wrote: On Fri, 3 Aug 2007 07:06:39 -0400 Luis Villa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] A couple of developers, including myself, have been working on a new capplet for the control center. Since we had been working on it as a group we decided it would be fairest to assign copyright to the foundation rather than any particular individual. You can always jointly own copyright; if you look around CC I'm sure you'll see lots of files that are (c) both jrb and chema, for example. We were aware of this, but since contributions mean that there are often a half a dozen different contributors to one file, we thought it may be easier to assign copyright and then list the contributors as authors. After all, should someone who has made just a small patch really be responsible for the copyright of the whole file, or just the lines they contributed? The opposite question also applies; Should the person who started the work be responsible for the contributions of others which may even unknowingly infringe on other copyrights. It's not about being responsible for others. As was already said, the list is just documentation, it may or may not be correct. The list itself doesn't bring any legal responsibility I guess. With version control systems, it's always possible to track down who introduced what, so you really don't need to worry. And best practice if you are not interested in the copyright of the code personally may be to ask your employer if they are interested. One advantage of the current way we assign copyright is that we diversify ownership. When multiple companies (Red Hat, Novell, Sun, ...) own copyright on a package, it's harder to do something wrong (for example, to relicense the package under a new license). I think these were some of the issues we were hoping to avoid in assigning the copyright to a single entity. Obviously we also hoped that assigning the copyright to the foundation would have the advantage that they would be more prepared to defend the copyright should the need ever arise. If you still want to assign to someone else and be done with it, FSF can do that I guess. Regards, Thomas -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Foundation and Source Code Copyright
On Fri, 2007-08-03 at 21:48 +0200, Juan José Sánchez Penas wrote: On Fri, Aug 03, 2007 at 01:40:39PM -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: ownership. When multiple companies (Red Hat, Novell, Sun, ...) own copyright on a package, it's harder to do something wrong (for example, to relicense the package under a new license). Is this always something wrong? I guess sometimes making easier to change a license can be good (in terms of freedom, for example). All depends on how much you (want to) trust the copyright holder. Yeah, could be good if it was easier to say change Evo from GPLv2 to GPLv3+, but you either end up having many copyright holders anyway (all the people submitting non-trivial patches on bugzilla) or risk blocking development by bureaucracy of having to submit disclaimer or assignment forms first, like what Sun is doing with Java right now, or FSF with Emacs and some other projects. - juanjo -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal: Shift election cycle back six months
On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 02:33 -0700, Andy Tai wrote: OK, simply, the stated reason for the extraordinary measure (face to face meeting timing) is not a strong one to justify touching the term limit of the board. And why do you think so? I totally understand that you may be against extending the term of the current board. That makes total sense, and there's no consensus even at the board level. But, what do you see so in need of justification for extending the term of one board (the next one) from 12 months to 17 months? How can that affect the foundation in a negative way? behdad On 8/9/07, Jeff Waugh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The proposal is about doing something out of the ordinary processes defined by the bylaws -- that is why we are consulting the membership. Rather than point out that the situation is extraordinary, please tell us your feelings or concerns about the proposal as a member. - Jeff ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: no confirmation received
On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 18:51 +0300, Zeeshan Ali wrote: Hello Behdad! On 8/1/07, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks for your contribution. Friends-of-GNOME payments are all processed by our part-time administrator. Please give her a few days. How exactly part-time is this part-time admin? It's been a month now and benefits mentioned on friends webpage[1] aside, i haven't even received a confirmation. I hate to whine about a 50 bucks but a month is a long time. Sorry about it. I've talked to our administrator to improve this situation. In the mean time, your package (plus every else's pending) will be sent out tomorrow or early next week. [1] http://www.gnome.org/friends/ -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
Hi Damien, The problems you raise are real, and not unknown to the community and the foundation board at all. However, I'm not sure who you have in mind when you say am more and more disappointed by the way some people *control* that community, even if they never contributed anything back to it. The problem in short is, we don't have enough people working on our infrastructure. Both this and the planet issue are currently being discussed in the board. That doesn't keep others from suggesting possible resolutions here or to the board-list. Regards, behdad On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 23:19 +0200, Damien Sandras wrote: Hello, As a long time contributor to the GNOME project, I will take the freedom to directly mail the foundation about the current problems I experience in the GNOME community. You probably know that I started contributing to GNOME in my spare time back in 2000. I have dedicated countless hours to my project, GnomeMeeting, now known as Ekiga. It means 7 years of development, exclusively done during evenings, nights and week-ends. Ekiga was the first videoconferencing application available for the Linux desktop, and it is nowadays still one of the best Open Source SIP softphones. I have always believed in GNOME and in its community, that is the only way that can motivate you coding that much and that long. However, I am more and more disappointed by the way some people *control* that community, even if they never contributed anything back to it. When I think to Matthias, I am getting mad. Matthias requested an SVN account several months ago, and never got one. When he went on IRC to ask for the account activation, people replied to him that he had to make a new request and wait. One month later, the account is not active yet. Matthias has been contributing thousands of lines of code to Ekiga since several months, and I still need to commit his patches myself. This is inadmissible. When I think to Julien, I am also getting mad. He has been contributing to Ekiga for 5 years. He recently created a blog and asked to Jeff to be added on planet.gnome.org. He was first ignored, then Jeff told him that he had to post often to be added. One day later, another guy was added to planet.gnome.org with 3 posts having been done in a 6 months period. That is what I call dictatorship and boycott of my project. This kind of behavior makes me more and more disappointed about the way things are being handled in GNOME and I am about to move my whole stuff to sourceforge.net and go on my own way. By the way, I do not want this thread to degenerate into a flamewar, that is the reason why I will not answer any mail related to the thread I created. I do not want either to offend the 99% of people who are doing a great job, I sincerely thank them for their work (you know who you are). I just wanted to express my opinion, in the hope that something can be done to improve the situation. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Git vs SVN (was: Can we improve things?)
On Sun, 2007-09-09 at 18:49 +0200, Christian Rose wrote: Nothing is ever solved by letting others be responsible for solving problems that may have been introduced by you. Or vice versa. That's a basic fact in SCM. But more often than not the build is left broken by a translator. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 23rd Auguest 2007
On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 09:52 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: I think it's a mistake not to have someone in Boston involved early in the planning process. I asked someone last month if they'd be willing to be involved, and they said yes. Has the board been in contact with them? Hi Dave, We most agree that having someone in Boston early on helps. That's why I asked on boston-social in June. No reply. Also pinged a few people directly, again no response/interest. Yes, we read that you found somebody willing to help, buy by that time Jeff was already negotiating, and Jonathan is in the loop already and looking after it too. So, boston-social residents, please step up earlier than later next time. Cheers behdad Cheers, Dave. PS. Congratulations to Rosanna Jonathan! -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 10:30 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 10:30 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: planet-web already exists, but making it a free-for-all isn't a useful solution. I re-read http://perkypants.org/blog/2005/06/10/1118362980/ and it mentions the possibility of making the SVN module essentially a free-for-all. .. And I quite like that possibility :) We can certainly have some guidelines as to what a suitable blog is (though if we want to keep all the current feeds, simply is vaguely a contributor to GNOME and tends to post in English is about appropriate). For p.g.o I think it has worked really well to *not* have strictly GNOME content; I'm sure many people appreciate ocassional cool pictures from a music festival or sexy recipes. If you are feeling super-paranoid, we can have a Planet module on bugzilla, and we can point people to a page with instructions: 1. Get a bugzilla account. 2. File a bug under the Planet module. 3. A number of Trusted People(tm) get automatically CCed on the bug; this can be yourself and other old fogeys. 4. We debate to death on the bug itself, so that the requester can be aware of why his blog is / is not appropriate. 5. The blog gets added to the SVN module. I like the bug approach. Though I prefer the first option: simply have some guidelines, and let people figure things out by common sense / meritocracy / whatever. Problem is, most hackers do mildly abuse their commit access a couple times first when they get it. Mostly with no bad intention. It typically goes like this patch of mine is so obviously fixing a bug, lets commit it, or this is obviously broken, lets fix it. It takes a couple reverts to get it... So I expect we see quite a few oh I have commit access now, my blog definitely belongs to p.g.o, lets commit it... Jeff has already pointed that for example he has a strict rule on hackergotchis, and I think we all appreciate the uniform style of hackergotchis on p.g.o. Leave it to individuals and for example Zeenix will add one with a GObject shirt ;). [I have a git-svn mirror of the planet-web module now, and my trigger finger is getting twitchy ;) ] Federico -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 14:50 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 14:05 -0400, Claudio Saavedra wrote: Put another way, I would find it uncomfortable to say someone sorry, you don't belong here, so these situations should be avoided. I think that adding a requirement for the applicant to have someone from the community to sponsor her/his request (similar to the approach used in the Foundation membership) would contribute to avoid these situations most of the times. Sure. So we say, Create a bug under the Planet module. CC your sponsor, and in the initial comment write, sponsorname, I want to be added to planet. Can you please vouch for me? The sponsor then goes and adds a comment, this human has been working on $cool_project and has been blogging about it (or other GNOME-related activities); his blog should definitely be syndicated on Planet. That's exactly like how NewAccounts [1] work. So, just use that process for planet. Pros: 1. We already have a trusted team and process for it. The process is inferior to bugzilla some say, but we are fixing it. Someone can also hack mango such that adding to planet and the hackergotchi becomes like enabling @gnome.org address and updating SSH keys. In the future you should be able to change your feed or hackergotchi yourself, like the plan is for SSH keys and other stuff. Baris is working on it. 2. It's not public, like some have said is preferred. Federico [1] http://live.gnome.org/NewAccounts -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 12:21 -0400, Tristan Van Berkom wrote: Well, gnome is people that have a choice to contribute or not - making those people (i.e. you me and everyone else) feel accepted and important is central to having a healthy project where everyone wants to be involved. But if people feel unwelcomed just because their blog is not added to p.g.o as soon as they asked, they are asking too much IMO. It's been customary in GNOME that people join the project, do more and more, and other hackers recognize their effort by asking them to get commit access etc. Same thing about p.g.o. Moreover, Planet GNOME is one of our most important channels of communication to the outside world. Imagine what happens if we let anyone ever contributing a single patch to GNOME on it... Imagine 2000 feeds. It just loses all its importance. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Preliminary results for Membership Vote Regarding Change to Bylaws
On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 23:23 +0300, Žygimantas Beručka wrote: Pr, 2007 10 15 22:54 +0300, Baris Cicek rašė: The results are: yes (125 votes) no (22 votes) Even though I've voted yes, the voting activity level is depressing I must say. Note that not everyone may have an opinion for such a simple change. They can just let others choose by not voting. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]
On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 23:06 -0400, Luis Villa wrote: On 6/10/07, Luis Villa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 6/10/07, Jody Goldberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 08:18:54PM -0400, Luis Villa wrote: On 6/10/07, Glynn Foster [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1) ECMA We have the opportunity of joining ECMA as a non-profit member. Jody has expressed an interest in being a representative for GNOME, and suggested it would also be good to get someone there from Abiword. ACTION: Behdad to contact Jody about the ECMA membership application and find a good candidate from Abiword to attend. Behdad to work on getting a press release for our membership. What would our purpose be there? As a non-profit we (GNOME) would not have voting privileges. The membership will serve as a mechanism to allow interested foundation members to join ECMA committees. I'm advocating this in relation to ECMA376/TC45 aka MS OfficeOpen XML. Committee members have the ability to request clarifications and suggest improvements in the text of the specification. For anyone implementing parts of this format this is a golden chance to get enough documentation to facilitate interoperability. Seems reasonable. Of course, I'd be more comfortable with it if we put out a press release saying something to the effect of 'we see no way to avoid implementing OOXML without screwing our users, so we're joining ECMA to make sure it sucks as little as possible. All other things being equal, we'd much prefer to implement a spec that has a much better patent grant, was developed through a more public process, uses open standards like mathml, etc., but since MS has a dominant market position, we don't have much of a choice in the matter.' So, uh... this apparently didn't happen, and now we're getting flamed (rightfully) for appearing to give a stamp of approval to a deeply flawed standard. So... when is the board making this happen? Right. I should be blamed for not getting the press release out. Not that the flame is correct (it's not) or even would have been prevented by a press release. It's not like anybody cared to contact Jody or the board or foundation before flaming... Luis -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]
On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 23:46 -0400, Corey Burger wrote: On 10/29/07, Jeff Waugh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: quote who=Luis Villa So, uh... this apparently didn't happen, and now we're getting flamed (rightfully) for appearing to give a stamp of approval to a deeply flawed standard. So... when is the board making this happen? Although I disagree with the tone and content of your email, an announcement is pending about a related issue, which may address concerns (legitimate or not) raised about GNOME's involvement in TC45-M. Participation in the TC45-M process does not imply approval or support for ISO standardisation of OOXML. Wait a sec. The simple matter is that we are getting hammered for something that isn't even true. How is the board fixing that? By trying to clarify our position. I agree though that FUD travels much further and faster than facts. Corey -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]
On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 08:30 +, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote: Nonsese, says you. I had direct access to Microsoft representatives as well, and even a Microsoft expert. Microsoft decided to spend their money and time for two and half weeks calling me a liar, on blogs and even on a newspaper here (but this last part didn't go so well for them since I invoked the right of reply and totally shattered their accusation). No wonder, given that you are always very aggressive in discussions. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]
On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 10:19 +0100, BJörn Lindqvist wrote: I think that The GNOME participating in OOXML lends it a credibility it does not deserve. Joining ECMA TC45 would be like joining of the political party you dislike the most to improve their politics. To me, it's more like going to debates and challenging them. -- mvh Björn -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: bounties?
On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 23:26 +0200, Quim Gil wrote: On 11/6/07, Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I guess it's no surprise that money and free/open software have a delicate relationship... I have been putting it in this way: The connection between free software development and money compares to the connection between friendship and sex: you can build a consistent relationship starting as friends or lovers and continuing that way, but if you jump for once to the other side you will probably mess up everything. Umm, never occurred to me... Maybe extend the Friend of GNOMEs program... with Benefits... donno.. jokin', behdad Of course there are exceptions but it's probably not worth to look after them again in the GNOME context. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: academic cooperation
On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 15:42 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: I'm working with a French professor doing a computer science course and using GNOME as a basis for the projects. Also, David Bolter put me in contact with a professor who's interested in having students do some GNOME-related projects. There's also a group of three students who want to do their bachelor degree project on GNOME. The Seneca College in Toronto has a history of great cooperation with the Mozilla Foundation. They even have a conference, FSOSS, that hosts many Mozilla talks. I brought the academia thread from August to their attention. Will bring the list now. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: bounties?
On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 08:02 -0200, Tristan Van Berkom wrote: Interesting way of putting it, we wouldnt ever want patches to be rushed in because of cash incentives, this is indeed risky - on the other hand I dont see why there shouldnt be some external distributed firm of developers working on a bounty system that is only remotely related to gnome (and why not X, the Linux kernel as well) - a bounty hunter could be responsible for writing the code and getting it approved by the appropriate maintainer or reporting back to the firm why it wasnt accepted by a said gnome maintainer. Isn't that what Linux Fund tried to do? and failed? There has been several tries to do exactly that. We even got another offer a few months ago. If anyone's seriously thinking/talking about this, they should do some research first. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: bounties?
On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 10:29 -0500, Liam R E Quin wrote: Gnome Miles. :) Already there. Called Bugzilla points :). -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Elections 2007. Let's start the debate!
On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 22:16 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote: Please do stick to the regular routine. But I guess it's too late for that now. May I suggest that all further questions be sent to the election committee (no CC to foundation-list!) for a second round? -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-23 at 02:10 -0300, Germán Poó-Caamaño wrote: This is new to me. I thought this was the way the board was trying to delegate. Well, more recently it has been. But for most things that are brought up to board, it's either not possible or not feasible to ask for help publicly. The issues eventually become public and go in the meetings. So what we've been doing has been to think of one or two community members that we think can handle it and email them. Most of the times this works, so that's a great thing. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Elections 2007. Let's start the debate!
On Sun, 2007-11-25 at 18:50 -0600, George Kraft wrote: We should then back that up by only providing a oneway OOXML to ODF converter. Doesn't that lock our users in? Isn't that bad by principle? Or is it just bad when our competitors do it? -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: two questions for candidates
On Mon, 2007-11-26 at 10:28 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote: 1. Would you change anything in the GNOME Foundation statement about OOXML? No. (send it out sooner is not a valid answer.) 2. How do you think the GNOME Foundation should support the Free Software Movement in general? By providing what it's good at and aiming for: providing excellent, easy to use, i18nized, accessible, stable desktop software. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
RE: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 20:30 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: I think the foundation could setup (orchestrate) meetings (or interops or however you want to call them) with the different teams. Gather the right people and put them together from time to times. The foundation tries to do that, and you will see more of these meeting this coming year. Note however that while the board tries to be proactive in proposing meetings, foundation members / hackers are the ones who should ask foundation / board for funding. I don't remember ever seeing any such proposal from your side. For reference, GNOME Foundation this year funded a java-gnome summit and an a11y summit. As I said, expect more next year. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: what about next ODF?
On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 17:32 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote: The reason this is not so is that Microsoft is trying to spin the apparent support of GNOME into proof that OOXML is not bad for free software. Such a risk is always there. People who base their information on what one side of a story says are doomed to hear everything but truth in 99% of situations. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME dependent on Mono
Quick reply to say that I pretty much agree with Joe. There are areas that it's very clear to anyone that our code infringing MS patents. And none of that is hidden to anyone. Lemme give a very central and specific example: - GNOME requires at least one of Microsoft Uniscribe, Apple ATSUI, or FreeType to run. There is no way you can run a Gtk+ application without any of those three. And all three have code implementing technology patented by at least two of Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe. Yes, FreeType has at least two features (TrueType bytecode interpreter / hinter, and subpixel text rendering) that are clearly and undoubtedly are infringing on Microsoft patents, and possibly Apple patents. The solution Red Hat and Fedora has taken is to not use those features at the cost of inferior text rendering, but most other distros don't do that. Yes, those features in FreeType are optional. Also to not clutter mailboxes even more, I don't see how an optional dependency on anything can be worse than the fact that GNOME optionally compiles on MS Windows systems. behdad On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 13:05 -0500, Joe Shaw wrote: 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 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME dependent on Mono
On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 18:03 -0500, Joe Shaw wrote: 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. No evidence, but as pointed out by Jamie, the MS-Novell deal is a hint. A strong hint in fact. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 18:42 -0700, Elijah Newren wrote: Hi, As warned about earlier in this election (by someone with better foresight than I have), when there isn't an organized call for questions people will fire off zillions of them at random. This puts an unreasonable burden on not only the candidates who feel obligated to spend time responding to an unbounded and haphazard collection of interrogations, but also similarly burdens the general community with too much email. You also find people asking additional questions based on misunderstandings due to the fact that they simply weren't able to keep up with all the other email (I have seen this in multiple threads, not just this one.) What will you as a candidate do to make sure we avoid this mess in the future? This was a simple issue with the Membership Committee practice this year. It could still be fixed this year too, but seems questions keep coming as long as voting is open :). Anyway, for next year, MC will make sure this doesn't happen, and board will make sure to double check it! behdad Elijah [With apologies to Philip--it wasn't really his fault since no one asked the general membership for questions in an organized fashion...but while his email probably makes some interesting points it very much qualifies as excessively long and spurred my comments.] -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: On Boston Summit organization and delegation [was Re: A question to candidates]
On Sun, 2007-12-02 at 14:53 +0100, Kjartan Maraas wrote: Just a note... I can probably find some good space at the University of Toronto (Canada) if it was ever required. It is generally easier for folks in some countries (like China, and Russia) to get visas to come here, and it is a cheap flight for Bostonians. There is a Red Hat office here, not sure about other GNOMEy elements. Sounds like a great idea to me. Do we have any numbers showing how many non US attendants were there at the previous Boston summits? Don't think so. But I'm all in favor of Boston Summit in Toronto too. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Ga-nome or NOME
On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 10:47 +0530, Ani Peter wrote: Hi All, I have heard a lot of people pronouncing GNOME as Ga-nome and I feel Nome is the correct pronunciation. Appreciate if someone please advise me which is the correct pronunciation. Ga-nome is the correct pronunciation, not Nome. Thanking You Best regards Ani Peter Gnome Malayalam - Cordinator ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: time to (re)consider preferential voting?
On Sun, 2008-02-24 at 08:41 +, Telsa Gwynne wrote: Ar Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 09:10:23PM -0700, ysgrifennodd Elijah Newren: At the risk of sounding like a bad person... [...] Trying to counteract this factor, I've often voted for such people that I thought would be great and would be unknown in the wider community, and omitted voting for people I liked that I knew would make it on the board anyway (often making sure to select fewer people than the maximum I was allowed). I was hoping it would even out the number of votes a little bit, and make those who didn't get elected feel more encouraged to try again. What can be bad about this? I do this too. That if everyone does this the results will be surprising and unstable. Telsa -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME Foundation Announces Program to Sponsor Accessibility Projects
GNOME Foundation Announces Program to Sponsor Accessibility Projects BOSTON, Mass—February 27, 2008 — The GNOME Foundation is running an accessibility outreach program, offering USD$50,000 to be split among individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness among the GNOME community as well as harden and improve the overall quality of the GNOME accessibility offering. The program is sponsored by GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google™'s Open Source Program Office, Canonical, and Novell. This is the second in a series of outreach programs coordinated and run by the GNOME Foundation. “I'm excited about the GNOME accessibility outreach program because it continues the promotion of compelling accessible design as part of the mainstream developer culture. We believe the set of tangible and achievable tasks outlined will help improve the already good accessibility offering of the GNOME desktop,” said Willie Walker, Senior Staff Engineer of Sun Microsystems, Inc. GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility starts accepting applications on March 1st and will run towards the end of the year. There will be two tracks to the program: In the first track accepted individuals will work towards accomplishing one of the major projects nominated for the program, earning US$6,000 and can take up to six months to complete the task. The second track will reward contributors US$1,000 for fixing five bugs out of a pool of accessibility bugs nominated by the program judges. Individuals interested in participating in the program should check out www.gnome.org/projects/outreach/a11y. More information about the program may be found at the same location. Read the full announcement at: http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/gop-a11y.html ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Announces Program to Sponsor Accessibility Projects
On Wed, 2008-02-27 at 11:08 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote: This activity sounds very useful, but there's a problem in the announcement: it doesn't mention free software, but does mention open source. Hi Richard, The only places in the announcement that open source appears is in the Google's office name, and in the About blurbs of sponsors (Mozilla Foundation and Canonical). None of which GNOME Foundation has any control on. Could you revise it so that free software gets equal weight (at least)? I'll keep that in mind for the future, but I don't think changing a PR that is out is a good idea. Cheers, -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A word of thanks
On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 20:19 +0530, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote: Have been meaning to do this for a while. This is just a word of thanks to the Foundation Board for approving a tidy amount that came handy for swag in India. Right through foss.in to a smaller set of events in February (GNUnify, FOSSKriti, freed.in) had GNOME supporters. FOSSKriti was a bit of a success for the Beagle hackfest as well. Might be [OT] for this list, but thought that it is always good to share good news. ~sankarshan That's great news Sankarshan, thanks for sharing. Glad we could help. Always good to see people represent GNOME Foundation in local events. Cheers, behdad ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME @ Lugradio Live USA
On Wed, 2008-04-16 at 11:15 -0400, Jorge O. Castro wrote: Hi everyone, Hi Jorge, Quick trip report from the GNOME Booth @ Lugradio Live USA. First let me thank you for writing this report. Next, for writing it so fast. * Participants: Jorge Castro, Behdad Esfahbod, Roozbeh Pournader and wife (forgot name, sorry!) Elnaz Sarbar. Also, the above list doesn't do justice. You did a lot more than me, with others somewhere in between. Thanks a lot! * The foot stamps were cute, people liked them. Yep. * The annual GNOME Report was popular. I think people were impressed by the quality of the booklet and the articles. People were actually reading them at the booth. Agreed. We should put a bunch in each box. Let me thank Rosanna for sending them overnight. * North American Event Box needs some updates: * A webcam to demo Cheese We did that for the European box. Murray, if you tell me what you bought that worked, I can ask Rosanna to order one. * A way to run a development version of GNOME to show off new features. * I left an Ubuntu Hardy Live CD in the box. I think it would be a great idea for participants who use the box to leave a current Live CD or something so that we can show off the latest and greatest without having to maintain the installation on the computer itself. * Since the box goes to events where there are GNOME-friendly distributors, it's easy to just snag a CD from one of them to live boot and then change the theme to be close to upstream. The GNOME Developer Kit thing may be useful too. * A banner of some kind to hang from the booths. This is a very good point. A shiny flag is a must for booths. Any idea where we can do that? * People are aware of the black shirt on the GNOME Store but I got many queries about where to buy the green shirt (the desktop+gnome=love one) I've got similar requests too. We really should make the green one available online. That's by my nonscientific measure the most popular GNOME shirt ever. * Bottom Line: This show is going to get more popular and it should be considered a good target for a GNOME presence in the future. I would like to get more volunteers next year so I can enjoy the show more. :D * Thanks to Joe Zonker Brockmeier from openSUSE/Novell for ensuring that the box got to UPS on Monday. (I left on a Sunday) Go Team GNOME! * Thanks to Rosanna Yuen for scheduling the shipping of the event box and making that painless. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes for Directors Meeting of Feb. 27th, 2008
On Mon, 2008-04-21 at 12:08 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, Jeff Waugh wrote: [ Dave points out that the offending Reply-To was of course on the announce list email. While entirely intentional, and more effective than setting the Mail-Followup-To header, it certainly engages the no-opt-out damage pointed out in 'Reply-To Considered Harmful'. Anyone moderating a GNOME announce list will know, however, that even that doesn't stop people from replying to the announcement mailing lists. ;-) ] In any case, no harm done. And yay! the board's been talking to KDE eV about co-hosting aKademy and GUADEC! This is no news to anyone who's been following us closely. Anyway, coming out soon. Cheers, Dave. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009 == The GNOME Foundation invites proposals to host GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, during the Summer of 2009. GUADEC is the biggest gathering of GNOME users and developers and includes a three-day conference, the annual general meeting of the members of the GNOME Foundation, and a week of coding, meeting, and discussing. For the first time we also invite proposals to hold GUADEC and Akademy, the KDE community conference, at the same time, in the same location. Proposals should detail plans for hosting up to 800 attendees, with separate facilities available for Akademy and GUADEC planned sessions. The conferences should be held independently, in the same location, with facilities available for joint sessions of interest to both communities. A co-hosted event would constitute one of the largest events on the planet dedicated to free software on the desktop. Proposals for GUADEC-only should be sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED], proposals for a co-hosted event should be sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] as well. Deadline for proposals is June 15th. Key points which proposals should consider, and which will be taken into account when deciding among candidates, are: * Local community support for hosting the conference * The availability and cost of travel from major European cities * The availability of sufficient low-cost accommodation * The budget for infrastructure and facilities required to hold the conference * The availability of restaurants or the organization of catering on-site * Local industry and government support Check out the call-for-bids and the bids from previous GUADECs for more information. Or just contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] The conference will require availability of facilities for one week, including a weekend, during Summer. Dates should avoid other key free software conferences. A few words of advice: organizing a conference of this size is hard work, but there are many people in the community with experience who will be there to help you. Bear in mind that people coming to these conferences do so primarily to meet up with old friends and have fun, and so the hallway track and social activities are very important. Behdad Esfahbod Director, GNOME Foundation ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 03:41 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: quote who=Thomas Thurman Is the rule about having GUADEC in Europe rather than, say, in Bangalore still in play, by the way? The 'E' still stands for Europe, yeah. ;-) Except that we have been advertising it as GUADEC, The GNOME Conference for the past couple of years. Maybe we should make that official. About GUADEC out of Europe, that's fine as long as the place is Ok for travel. Bangalore has the same problem that US has. Too far... That said, I love to see GUADEC '11 in Morocco for example... - Jeff -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation to co-host flagship conferences
The boards of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation have issued a call to co-host Akademy and GUADEC, the flagship conferences of the KDE and GNOME projects respectively, during the Summer of 2009. This would be the first time that the conferences are to be co-hosted. The combined conference is expected to have around 800 attendees, being one of the biggest meetings of free software developers in the world. The content of the conferences will be organized independently, with a number of co-ordinated cross-over sessions with appeal to all attendees. Both organizations have noted, however, that proposals to host the conferences independently are invited as well. The decision about the events will be made in collaboration of the KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation based on the suitability of the available proposals. Read the full release: http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2008-04-22-akademy-guadec.html ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: FISL - summary
On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 12:42 -0300, Jonh Wendell wrote: Hi, folks. FISL - the biggest FLOSS event in Brazil - is over. Thank you bunches John for representing GNOME at the event, blogging regularly about it, and sending this update! Cheers, behdad Thanks to Foundation, GNOME was represented there, with a talk and a booth. Lots of people stopped at our booth to have a chat with us, mainly asking for our presence in other events and asking how to contribute. I would like to thank Foundation for the sponsorship, which allowed us to cover this event. I have written some posts in my blog about the event: http://www.bani.com.br/2008/04/17/fisl-first-day/ http://www.bani.com.br/2008/04/18/lucas-at-fisl/ http://www.bani.com.br/2008/04/18/fisl-second-day/ http://www.bani.com.br/2008/04/19/fisl-third-day/ More photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwendell/tags/fisl/ Now we are looking forward to our V GNOME Brazilian Forum. News on this soon! Cheers, -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 04:38 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: Americans might feel that it is a little unfair that guadec always is in Europe. Couldn't there be two conferences? GUADEC and the Boston Summit. :-) Except that we don't pay for travel to Boston Summit. We are launching GNOME.Asia Summit this year. Would love to see GUADLAC (Latin-American) become a reality too. As for Boston Summit, maybe we should add some sponsorship to it, but it's doing fine at the size it is. My 0.02CAD -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 14:43 -0400, Hubert Figuiere wrote: On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 14:03 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: Except that we have been advertising it as GUADEC, The GNOME Conference for the past couple of years. Maybe we should make that official. About GUADEC out of Europe, that's fine as long as the place is Ok for travel. Bangalore has the same problem that US has. Too far... That said, I love to see GUADEC '11 in Morocco for example... The thing is that so far, having it in Europe makes it more for European people given the price of airfare. Note also that Summer is probably the worst period to get cheaper travel, so all in all it seems to be made to prevent people out of Europe from attending en masse [1]. Not true. Travel finances should not be a decision factor for any regular GNOME contributor. A big bulk of GUADEC money is spent on sponsorship, and the truth is that if the regular contributors don't apply for it, people will end up getting the money that don't have much to do with GNOME other than wanting to go to a week of paid-for vacation... Given that a choice has to be made, I think it would be fair to try to alternate between the various parts of the world. LGM seems to be doing that. Hub [1] the total reluctance for prominent members to reject any alternative just make me thinks that's what it is. If you don't believe me, re-read this thread and the one from last year when somebody ask why not canada. As for me, the reason not pushing for Canada is that a GNOME community in Canada is surprisingly non-existent. Sure, there's you, me, and desrt. But that's pretty much it. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 19:03 +, BJörn Lindqvist wrote: On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: About GUADEC out of Europe, that's fine as long as the place is Ok for travel. Bangalore has the same problem that US has. Too far... That said, I love to see GUADEC '11 in Morocco for example... I wouldn't. GNOME is all about creating more freedom, Morocco is all about taking away those freedoms. It would seem weird if the conference was hosted in a country so diametrically opposed to what GNOME stands for. That and the burning summer heat. :) GNOME is People. Do you have any evidence that the Moroccan *people* are opposed to the values GNOME stands for? We think we in GNOME have a great thing to offer, and any person on this planet deserves being part of this the same as any other one. Those people have an oppressing regime, ignore them is not a really compelling idea to me. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 14:38 -0400, Adam Schreiber wrote: I too would appreciate another North/Central/South America based conference if GUADEC can't be moved across the pond occasionally. However, I suspect that because the GNOME summit is held in Boston every year we will have to make due. Boston Summit can move around. Just come up with proposals for Boston Summit 2009 before this year's Summit. Send to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 15:43 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote: On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 20:34 +0200, BJörn Lindqvist wrote: Usa isn't the only country in North America. Maybe Canada or Mexico has less strict rules about visas? It is not hard to imagine that the Americans might feel that it is a little unfair that guadec always is in Europe. This American views it as a great excuse to go to Europe. I can see Chicago anytime. Istanbul is something special. And while there are differences between American cities, it's nowhere near the differences we get between different European countries. The diversity is awesome. I'm not saying this is necessarily a reason to keep it in Europe. I'm just saying it's why I, in particular, don't care if GUADEC is ever on my side of the pond. Can't agree more... -- Shaun -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 22:57 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: GNOME is People. Do you have any evidence that the Moroccan *people* are opposed to the values GNOME stands for? I think the Moroccan *people* are not the issue. Those people have an oppressing regime, ignore them is not a really compelling idea to me. If the purpose of holding GUADEC in any given place were paying attention to the people who live there, that would be a valid response. However, the purpose of GUADEC is for GNOME developers to meet. I don't think that the response relates to that. One of the deciding factors when considering GUADEC bids is that which user community can better use a boost. So, I wouldn't say that paying attention to local people is not one of the goals of GUADEC. Political endorsement of the government of the country where GUADEC is held is not its purpose either, and I would not suggest choosing the place to hold it by comparing the laws or policies of various European countries. (Thanks to the EU, they are all bad in the areas that most directly relate to us.) But there are some situations where you cannot ignore politics. Recall how people ridiculed the holding of the WSIS conference in Tunisia, a country that imprisons people for what they say on the Internet. Morocco may be a similar case -- I am not sure. Originally coming from a country that definitely fits that bill too, I don't appreciate being exclusive to people based on their government. Moreover, where do you set the limit? What about China for example? We are having a GNOME.Asia Summit there this year... Did boycotting ever solved any problem BTW? -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 22:20 +0200, BJörn Lindqvist wrote: I fully agree. We think that the actions of the gnome foundation has a profound impact on the world, that the choice of venue is important. That holding the conference in morocco lends the moroccian *regime* credibility it does not deserve. Not sure who you mean when you say we. I don't agree with your last sentence, no. 2008/4/22, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 19:03 +, BJörn Lindqvist wrote: On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: About GUADEC out of Europe, that's fine as long as the place is Ok for travel. Bangalore has the same problem that US has. Too far... That said, I love to see GUADEC '11 in Morocco for example... I wouldn't. GNOME is all about creating more freedom, Morocco is all about taking away those freedoms. It would seem weird if the conference was hosted in a country so diametrically opposed to what GNOME stands for. That and the burning summer heat. :) GNOME is People. Do you have any evidence that the Moroccan *people* are opposed to the values GNOME stands for? We think we in GNOME have a great thing to offer, and any person on this planet deserves being part of this the same as any other one. Those people have an oppressing regime, ignore them is not a really compelling idea to me. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
This thread is getting quite off-topic now. Lets end this particular sub-topic here. I'm sure if there's a Moroccan bid for '10 or '11, the board of the time will consider it on fair grounds. That's all that matters. behdad On Thu, 2008-04-24 at 00:18 +0200, Ali Sabil wrote: On 4/23/08, BJörn Lindqvist [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I fully agree. We think that the actions of the gnome foundation has a profound impact on the world, that the choice of venue is important. That holding the conference in morocco lends the moroccian *regime* credibility it does not deserve. Wouldn't you be just spreading some kind of FUD ? What do you know about the Moroccan (not moroccian) regime and history ? What did the Moroccan people did to you ? Did you ever think that you should stop trying to keep the freedom for yourself and start sharing it with those who may not have it ? Maybe should you rethink your We are the good guys, they are the ugly guys kind of mentality ? Respectfully, -- Ali 2008/4/22, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 19:03 +, BJörn Lindqvist wrote: On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: About GUADEC out of Europe, that's fine as long as the place is Ok for travel. Bangalore has the same problem that US has. Too far... That said, I love to see GUADEC '11 in Morocco for example... I wouldn't. GNOME is all about creating more freedom, Morocco is all about taking away those freedoms. It would seem weird if the conference was hosted in a country so diametrically opposed to what GNOME stands for. That and the burning summer heat. :) GNOME is People. Do you have any evidence that the Moroccan *people* are opposed to the values GNOME stands for? We think we in GNOME have a great thing to offer, and any person on this planet deserves being part of this the same as any other one. Those people have an oppressing regime, ignore them is not a really compelling idea to me. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 -- mvh Björn ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 19:00 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, Rodrigo Moya wrote: I wouldn't mind having a joint skiing/hacking conference there :-) Crazy idea (tell me if I've been smoking the wacky baccy): Someone offers to host the Summit at the Summit, say in Utah or Whistler? Travel costs would be an issue, but fitting in some skiing over a holiday weekend in (say) February would be cool. Whistler should work, yeah. I hear there's going to be a huge Firefox summit in Whistler later this Summer. I may be attending, in which case I'll check out the place. *BUT*, we already have Boston Summit scheduled for October in Boston. Having another one just a few months later doesn't make much sense. So, we seem to be talking about '10. Cheers, Dave. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 08:48 +1000, Andrew Cowie wrote: If keeping the costs down is a factor, then perhaps some attempt should be made to return the conference forward in the calendar a bit. Too late for 2008, of course, but something we may want to consider for 2009. GUADEC was pushed into the high-season to avoid conflicts with school exams. It just happens that school exams determine high season too. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
Some good jokes in this thread this morning :). On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 13:33 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote: Seriously, I went once to a ski resort, and some doctors conference was taking place in a hotel there, and I really think it would be a great thing for hackfests (maybe not for a big conference like GUADEC or the Summit), but getting the right people together in a similar place might be much more productive than getting them on a big city, in separated hotels, and no sport activities at all :-) Getting 15/20 people together in a hotel, for some skiing during the morning, and talks and hacking in the afternoon / evening could be a good way of organising hackfests Foundation would be happy to do that for hackfests, yes. We are still waiting for proposals. Go ahead! I'd say keeping hackfests to less than 10 people will be even more productive. When David Bolter, Ben Konrath, and myself met last Summer here in Toronto to discuss the a11y summit, we all agreed that we can hold a very decent and great hackfest for 10 people in cottages two hours drive from Toronto for less than $2000 for accommodation for a week, including both weekends. Compare that to hotels... Add car rentals and food and you're still much below what hotels would cost. And I'm talking about cottages by gorgeous lakes, with kayaking and canoeing options. So yeah, go ahead and propose... The accommodation sharing works even for busy locations like Berlin, but the bigger the group gets the harder it is to find suitable offerings and this is a lesson we learned the hard way during the GTK+ Hackfest last month. Now I have to go finish that hackfest report... will be back. At least, hackers would learn how to ski :-) and the same could be done during the summer, with some biking/hiking activities in the morning. We are all getting old, so we need something else than only hacking :-) -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME Foundation Annual General Meeting, etc
[Resending to foundation-list, for those not subscribed to foundation-announce. Fun, isn't it?] Greetings, A couple quick announcements. First: To better manage organizational aspects of the board, the following roles will by observed by board members: - Chairman: Behdad Esfahbod - Vice-Chairman: Lucas Rocha - Secretary: Luis Villa - Treasurer: John Palmieri Furthermore, to comply with our bylaws, the Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the board will also serve as President and Vice-President of GNOME Foundation respectively. All board members will continue to serve in their areas of expertise as before. Next: The GNOME Foundation Annual General Meeting will be held during GUADEC on July 11th at 16:30 in Istanbul, Turkey [1]. All foundation members are invited to attend. If there are any questions, comments, or proposals you want to see considered before the meeting please send them to [EMAIL PROTECTED] soon. There is also a GNOME Foundation BoF scheduled for July 7th at 14:30. Interested parties are welcome. Regards, Behdad Esfahbod [1] http://guadec.expectnation.com/guadec08/public/schedule/grid/2008-07-11 signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Akademy+GUADEC *2009* Hosting Proposals
On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 00:50 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote: Nonetheless I'm a big fan of Finland (Saunas, forests, Nokia). My personal preference therefore goes to Tampere. My second choice is Coruña in Galicia. The nice guys at Igalia have been telling me a lot about Galicia ... I just think I should visit it for holidays instead of conference reasons. All three proposals look so impressive that makes me sad that we have to turn two down. /me wants to visit them all... -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Akademy+GUADEC *2009* Hosting Proposals
Hi everyone, Quick reminder that we are all ears to hear your comments about the three proposals. Please send them sooner rather than later. Thanks behdad On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 18:17 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: Greetings, The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. boards received three proposals to host Akademy+GUADEC 2009. The bids are available for review here: http://www.gnome.org/~behdad/akademy+guadec-2009-bids/ The boards did not receive any separate bids for Akademy-only or GUADEC-only hosting. At this time we are soliciting comments from the GNOME community and other GUADEC regulars. Please use this thread on foundation-list to submit your comments. The review period closes on July 4th, in preparation for making a decision in Istanbul. Regards, Behdad On behalf of GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. boards -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some Finnish thoughts of Guadec+aKademy 2009
On Sat, 2008-07-05 at 13:52 -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote: On Sat, 2008-07-05 at 20:30 +0300, Petri Räsänen wrote: [...] As a final remark I believe that one factor in the decision making process will be the message that will be read between the lines of the decision. I can speak only speculatively and on behalf of our proposal, but if the choice is Tampere, I believe it can be interpreted as a sign openness to new countries as a location, respecting the diversity of the community and in a way as decision to take a fresh new step in the country where it all more or less got started. Not a bad message, right? A good message, worth exploring... Yep. Questions to ask are (1) where is Free Software in most need of support? The community-building card has been the defining factor for France vs UK for example. But I didn't expect to see it played by Finland or Spain bids, given how integrated Nokia and Igalia are in the GNOME ecosystem. Gran Canaria on the other hand... ;). For example, identify places where there are strong challenges, or where there are new and young communities starting that need to be encouraged; (2) If that is not a strong factor, then identify the key people you want at the conference, and ask which places are they most likely to attend. A survey can be helpful here. (3) If there are no overall clear answers from (1) and (2), where will the conference get good press coverage and media visibility? Of course, the purpose is for Free Desktop People to get together, exchange ideas, boost morale, and admire each other's ankles. But the outreach aspects are also important, and I think are more important than the cost of a pint of beer or a pair of socks in a given location. Liam -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: hiring Stormy Peters as executive director
On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 16:54 +0300, Luis Villa wrote: It is my pleasure to announce that the Board has decided to hire Stormy Peters as Executive Director of the Foundation. Welcome Stormy indeed! In case it's not clear, this hiring was the subject of the several board-confidential meetings we have been having these last couple of months. Cheers, -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GUADLAC - GNOME Users And Developers Latin American Conference
On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 19:59 -0500, Miguel Angel López Hernández wrote: It is my pleasure to inform you all that first GUADLAC (GNOME Users And Developers Latin American Conference) will be held in Veracruz, MX in the 1st quarter of 2009 (almost sure in march), therefore respectfully request the support of the GNOME Foundation and all the GNOME Community to help make it a success. Yes, finally! This is great indeed. So, as it's forming up, we'll have major GNOME events all year round, all over the globe: - January, gnome.conf.au - March, GUADLAC - July, GUADEC - October, Boston Summit - October, GNOME.Asia Summit Umm, where's GNOME.Africa? behdad ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: yay canaries!
On Sun, 2008-07-13 at 12:41 +0200, Andy Wingo wrote: Hey hackers, Hi everyone. Yay, we're going to the Canaries next year! That's great! Yep. A formal press release is on the way. The purpose of this message though is to express disagreement with the way that the announcement was done (at the GUADEC closing), though. It was pretty nasty to Tampere, a place I also wanted to go. I think an apology is in order. Unfortunately it turned out to be so. Needless to say, I did not mean to offend anyone. And I apologize if I did. I believe all three bids were great, and I hope a Finland bid will be submitted again next year. The two boards discussed merits of each bid over a conference call and followed up with a lengthy thread. Each bid has its own unique strengths, but in the end, we decided that the unique opportunity of the Gran Canaria bid to reach out to Africa was something we really want to explore. Besides that, I can't help but think that it should be we of the GNOME Foundation who should choose the GUADEC location, not the board. Next year we should vote on the location. Makes a lot of sense. KDE used to let a membership vote decide the location, but this year they did a non-binding vote because they needed to make the final decision together with us. For next year, we can do something like that. Cheers, Andy Cheers, -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME Job Posting Board
Many GNOME-friendly companies have job openings that they announce on blogs, IRC, or random mailing list. Many GNOME hackers look for jobs and they crawl blogs, mailing lists, or ask on IRC. Now there is a central place that community members can post GNOME-related job openings, and job seekers can subscribe to. Nothing fancy, a good old wiki page: http://live.gnome.org/Jobs Regards, behdad ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Job Posting Board
Calum Benson wrote: On 15 Oct 2008, at 20:31, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: Many GNOME-friendly companies have job openings that they announce on blogs, IRC, or random mailing list. Many GNOME hackers look for jobs and they crawl blogs, mailing lists, or ask on IRC. Now there is a central place that community members can post GNOME-related job openings, and job seekers can subscribe to. Nothing fancy, a good old wiki page: http://live.gnome.org/Jobs Any reason you didn't just set up a gnome-jobs mailing list? 1) Postings on a wiki can be removed, keeping a list of current openings at any time, 2) Keep it simple. This took me ten minutes to set up. A mailing list would have taken at least a few days, 3) Subscribing and unsubscribing to the wiki is much easier and more intuitive, Cheers, behdad There are many things that wikis aren't particularly good for, and this strikes me as being one of them. Cheeri, Calum. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Hardware bought during Barcelona's Guadec in Fluendo's premises
Dave Neary wrote: Hello Julien, Did you ever get a reply to this? Julien Moutte wrote: They are made available to do some buildbots for some projects (elisa, flumotion) but the Gnome buildbot they were intended to run is not really operational from my understanding. I was under the impression that they were being used for the GNOME buildbot, and being maintained by some of the guys from Igalia, and Fred Peters; but I might be wrong? If I am wrong, and they are unused, then I think your idea of shipping them to someone who could do something useful with them is a good one. Agreed. I replied to Julien saying the same thing. I didn't hear back. behdad Cheers, Dave. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009 to be held July 3-11, 2009
The inaugural Desktop Summit, uniting the flagship conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy, will be held in Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain the week of July 3-11, 2009. The conference will be hosted by Cabildo, the local government of Gran Canaria. The GNOME and KDE communities will use this co-located event to intensify momentum and increase collaboration between the projects. It gives a unique opportunity for key figures to collaborate and improve the free and open source desktop for all. Please visit the official web for further information: http://www.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/ This announcement is also available at: http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2008-11-25-grancanaria.html ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Changes to the GNOME board
The GNOME Foundation Board regretfully announces that Jeff Waugh will be stepping down from the board in order to focus on work and other projects. The board thanks Jeff for his years of service to the board and the community, and wishes him success in his future work both inside and outside of GNOME. Jeff leaves big shoes to fill. Diego Escalante Urrelo will be joining the board as a new member for the remainder of this term. Diego was a candidate for the board in the last election, and his energy, new blood, and Latin American perspective will be a great addition to the board. In addition to bringing on a new member, the board continues to expand our capabilities by focusing on delegation, with new committees working on mobile and GUADEC-related issues. Our thanks, again, goes to those who have volunteered their time to help out with these and other efforts, including Dave Neary, Paul Cooper, Alberto Ruiz, and Chema Casanova. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Changes to the GNOME board
Hi Gregory, As I wasn't sure what the procedure was for the board of directors, in the case of a resignation, I went and grabbed a copy of the bylaws from http://foundation.gnome.org/about/bylaws.pdf Section 4 subsection d it states that the board can fill a vacancy by a vote of the remaining directors. Correct. I do have one question about the bylaws, though. I seem to recall a large discussion about changing the term of the directors to be 18 months instead of 1 year. However, Section 3 subsection a still states that directors hold office for one (1) year. I also noticed that the history information at the bottom of the document states that the last change was April 5, 2002. I'm sure that the discussion I recall was more recent than this. Yes, the there was a member vote to change the bylaws to allow each term be between 12 and 24 months, as determined by the board before the elections. This change was proposed to enable us to adjust the beginning of the term to GUADEC. What is the current term of a member of the Gnome Foundation Board of Directors? The term of the current board is 18 months and ends at the end of June 2009. Expect back to 12-month terms after that. What is the official location of the Bylaws governing the Gnome Foundation? If it is the above URL, and the term is not still 1 year, how can we get this copy updated? If it's not this URL, can somebody tell me where it is, and can we make foundation.gnome.org link to it prominently? Luis has been working on an updated draft. I let him answer what the current status is. Thanks, behdad Thanks, Greg [snip] ___ 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
GNOME DVCS Survey Results
In December I ran a distributed version control system survey for GNOME. From the survey opening page: Thank you for taking the GNOME DVCS Survey. This survey is run on behalf of the GNOME Foundation board of directors, release team, and sysadmin team. The GNOME project is planning a possible move from SVN to a distributed version control system in 2009. The contenders for the system to use are bzr, git, and hg. The aim of the survey is to help us better understand familiarity and preferences of our active contributor base regarding the future version control system for GNOME. The survey results will be informational and will be sent to foundation-list and desktop-devel-list upon completion. GNOME contributors with an SVN account who had an SSH key installed on their account were invited to fill in the survey. A total of 1083 account holders were invited, and 579 filled in the survey. The survey results are now available to the public: http://www.gnome.org/~behdad/dvcs-survey/ Elijah Newren did an initial analysis of the data. His analysis also includes the survey questions and answers. Find it at: http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2009/01/03/gnome-dvcs-survey-results/ If you analyze the results, please reply to this thread and also leave a comment on my blog post linking to your analysis: http://mces.blogspot.com/2009/01/gnome-dvcs-survey.html Cheers, behdad ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Sponsorship for hackfests
On 03/30/2009 02:18 PM, Philip Van Hoof wrote: Hi there, In Behdad's mail on gtk-devel-list, Behdad explains on why the foundation has decided to cut back on hackfests. This is a fair and reasonable reason, by the way (his last mail in the thread explains the financial aspect of it pretty well). Hi Philip, Thanks for the note. Just a minor correction: we had to cancel the GTK+ hackfest, which is more like a mini conf, when compared to the other hackfests we run (much smaller and much less expensive to run). We are still looking into and interest to hear proposals about smaller hackfests. behdad http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2009-March/msg00165.html I think that during those hackfests people work on problems that companies, who donate sponsorship-money, are interested in. I fear that we have done a bad job at explaining them what the things were that we worked on. Maybe we didn't make the scope of those hackfests broad enough. I for example remember that in Berlin we had the idea of putting interviews with the hackers online. I never found those. This should be something the Foundation pushes for (given that they funded many hackers' flights I think it's fair that the Foundation gets at least some interviews with the hackers, to put online, in return). I think that if we'd include a few of the young projects into the hackfests, while explaining clearly to companies who are interested in these projects that our hackers work on these projects and that their sponsorship-money is used to for example pay for those hackfests, that we'll get at least some of those 90% sponsor offers back. That way they'll know that their sponsorship has a return of investment in code too (not just advertisement at conferences and on the website). Right now I can imagine that it's not always clear for sponsoring companies to estimate what they get in return. In economic hard times that means your sponsoring gets slashed from their budgets, indeed. Candidate projects that come to my mind include: GObject-introspection, Vala, Clutter, Tracker, GeoClue, Poky, DConf, WebKit, ... I'm sure I'm forgetting about a few hundred projects and I know gobject- introspection has been among the hackfest projects. To decide the projects we need a group that decides on how our horizon towards the future should look like. Which is also something we lack at GNOME in my humble opinion. (for many years) I don't think waiting for better economic times is even an option. Let's instead solve this. Cheers, ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Fundraising Progress
On 04/28/2009 07:20 PM, Andreas Nilsson wrote: Vincent Untz wrote: Hey Shaun, Le mardi 28 avril 2009, à 16:13 -0500, Shaun McCance a écrit : Owen sent an email to the list a short while back about a FoG fundraising drive for a sysadmin: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2009-April/msg00025.html There have been occasional conversations on IRC about having a progress meter we could put on our web sites. I know some other people have been in talks about this. But I decided to JFDI. http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/fog/index.html Cool. As you saw on IRC, Andreas did a mockup which is based on monthly subscribers (instead of total amount of money) -- this is what we were planning to do. We can probably do some mix of the two (assuming we can do it in a non-ugly way ;-)), though, since both views are interesting. Can't we do one of them first, and the other one after? Say we run one campaign for 3 months (or something) and pimp that really hard, and then do the same with the other one for the following 3 months. Heh, funny that you say that. I wrote to board list today: I suggest: - We set our goal to fully funding a sysadmin on subscriptions (say, by next year. So aiming for 360). - 90 a quarter. Count number of new subscribers. If we reach our goal before the three month period, we take the ruler down and add a Thank You note for the rest of the quarter. Like Wikipedia does. - May want to add a note like Be the first Friend of GNOME today! every day. behdad Shaun: Would you like to hack together some code based on the X number of donors as well? svg here: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/184285/gnome-pledge-banner.svg (or do we need one with 90 people on it and make it run for 90 days?) Hats of to Shaun for JFDI, we need more of that! - Andreas ___ 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: GNOME Store
On 05/01/2009 02:07 PM, Gian Mario Tagliaretti wrote: On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Diego Escalante Urrelodie...@gnome.org wrote: best of sri rupert quotes t-shirt I would buy 10. plus another 10 here :) Can you move this thread to #gnome-hackers please :). behdad PS. I'd also order another 10, but don't have to run around shouting :P cheers ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
