Re: GNOME trademarks
On Tue, 2010-12-07 at 10:08 -0700, Stormy Peters wrote: > > > On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 2:36 AM, Dave Neary wrote: > > and also this second live GNOME trademark: > http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4001:mi6n4v.2.40 > > The second one is interesting! > Word Mark: GNOME > Goods and Services: IC 029. US 046. G & S: Processed Hazelnuts > for human > consumption. FIRST USE: 19970331. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: > 20010203 > Owner: Lindsey Family Farm, LLC CORPORATION OREGON 7505 > Windsor Island > Rd. Salem OREGON 97303 > > I don't suppose someone living near Salem in Oregon has seen > GNOME > hazelnuts flying around local farmer's markets or health food > stores, > and would care to post a photo? > > http://www.gnomehazelnutfactory.com/ (I am not a lawyer.) I don't believe there's generally any problem with two companies having the same name for a product if those products are so different. If we ever try to sell nuts then we may have a problem. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Events and merchadising
On Wed, 2010-10-06 at 12:44 +0200, Luca Ferretti wrote: > Hi everyone, > > we are organizing a FOSS related event in Siena (Italy) on October 22 > and 23 and we'll have a little stand dedicated to GNOME. > > I know it could be late, but it could be really great to have some > marketing and/or merchandising material. Not the big and fat event > box[1] (we don't need the included hardware), but just the flags or > posters to expose. Murray, do you think you can send the roll of posters > only? I think we only have the blue canvas poster: http://www.murrayc.com/blog/permalink/2007/07/08/gnome-event-box-flag/ We might still have these, though I doubt it. http://www.murrayc.com/blog/permalink/2007/07/04/gnome-event-box-new-stuff/ We should check what's in the box now and update the information here again: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeEventsBox I guess we can send the flag to you if it gets back to us from Spain in time: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeEventsBox/Schedule > Of course any additional stuff we could expose (or even sell? it's not > simple to buy GNOME stuff here in Italy) as marketing such as t-shirts, > stickers, pin-badges, will be really appreciated. > > > [1] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeEventsBox > > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - July 25, 2010
On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 18:25 +0200, Tobias Mueller wrote: > Hm. Well, there is a German GNOME Foundation Only just, and it's probably not active enough to be still valid. > which, AFAIK, is a proper > German legal entity with all rights and duties, i.e. donations can be > deducted from the tax. No, that much paperwork was never done. This basically never got any where. > German GNOME community doesn't seem to be that active anymore, though. > Bottom line being: I think such a legal entity already exist (in > Germany) and it could probably be used to manage such an account. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Berlin Desktop Summit 2011 proposal
On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 17:50 +0200, Johannes Schmid wrote: > Hi! > > > If you have questions, please let us know. The board will consolidate > > the questions and will be interviewing the teams. > > > > We should try to get some more GNOME people into the organization team. > As pointed out earlier, a bunch of GNOME contributers live in Berlin but > I don't know how aware of the proposal they have been (I wasn't...). The Berlin team asked us (Openismus) about it, via me. I said that Openismus could offer a little support and maybe even a little employee time. But I said we didn't want to get deeply involved in organization work because it can drain such a massive amount of time. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Speaker Guidelines
On Mon, 2010-06-28 at 13:58 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote: > > I'm willing to make it shorter if the sentiment is correct. We could > also have a very short speaker guidelines that doesn't include either > the first paragraph nor this replacement text. It could be accompanied > by more verbose explanations with pointers to other information like > the GNOME presentation template, other GNOME presentations, help on > improving your speaking skills, etc. Well, the whole thing is itself just a secondary comment on the code of conduct. Though I worked on making the speaker guidelines shorter and clearer, I have never been particularly convinced that they are necessary instead of just pointing speakers at the code of conduct (I do think there is a problem with some speakers). I certainly don't think we need an explanation of the explanation of the explanation. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Speaker Guidelines
On Fri, 2010-06-25 at 21:22 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote: > On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 5:25 PM, Joanmarie Diggs > wrote: > > > > As a matter of fact, personally I am not jazzed by the entire ending: > > > >Please keep in mind that the GNOME Foundation is not the right > >forum to debate whether someone should feel offended or not; you > >should simply avoid offending people even if you do not share > >their views. These guidelines do not constitute censorship since > >you have many other forums and opportunities to say whatever you > >wish. > > > > It is neither "positive" nor "welcoming" to would-be speakers -- and > > thus contrasts rather starkly with bullet point 1 under "Guidelines." > > I agree. And it is obviously a reaction and implies that we have problems. > > I also agree with Lefty that it's there for a reason. > > Perhaps we could replace the above text with something like this: > > "If someone in your talk is offended, please try to avoid a > conversation about whether or not they should be offended. Remember > our community is very diverse and while we all share a common mission > to provide a free GNOME desktop to the world, we do not always share > religions, politics and other views. Focus on the subject of your talk > and stick to the issues being discussed without making them personal. > As the speaker, you may have to remind the audience of this. While > it's hard, do your best to do it in a neutral, non argumentative way. > > Suggest that topics not relevant to GNOME (raised by you or others in > the audience) be moved to a more appropriate non-GNOME forum. If you > need help, please contact the GNOME board or GNOME Foundation member. > > But don't worry! These problems do not happen very often - we are just > trying to help you out if they do. Most audiences are very friendly > and welcoming of topics about GNOME. > > Please go out and speak about GNOME and enjoy!" The last paragraph, which I first suggested, was initially very short. I think it was effective without appearing too important. It's main aim was to prevent pointless distracting discussion. That's still possible if we don't turn the paragraph itself into an essay. It's useless to expand the text so much, attempting to explain the explanation, with extra explanation, just repeating the core text with slightly different waffling text. The document should be simple and meaningful, pointing out simple common sense. Please don't ruin it. > Perhaps we could link to a list of skills on how to deal with > difficult questions as a speaker? I don't know of a page like that, > but I've been taught a number of ways over the years, so I could put > one together. Again, I think that's making too much of it. I don't believe we want our speakers to read a huge manual on how to behave. We do want to remind them to be reasonable, and we want attendees to know that we have basic standards. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Speaker Guidelines
On Fri, 2010-06-25 at 10:06 +0200, Fernando Herrera wrote: > Hi, > > As a GUADEC Speaker this year I went through the Guidelines and I'm a > little bit worried about this, because I reviewed my talk at last > GUADEC (GNOME 1,2,3, with the amazing Xan) and I think it failed to > comply all of those guidelines. > > At the end, the document says: "Please keep in mind that the GNOME > Foundation is not the right forum to debate whether someone should > feel offended or not" so I not going to debate it, but I would like > to stand that with every single sentence I can say there are potential > people all over the world that can feel offended, so I just cannot > control or avoid it. I doubt that. However, you should assume some goodwill. The guidelines are vague because we cannot specify in exact detail everything that would offend somebody, and we don't want to become lawyers that spend their time interpreting precise rules, and because that just shouldn't be necessary. It's a simple request to consider peoples' feelings a bit. You are fully capable of doing that. > I also don't think the ending is appropriate: "These guidelines do not > constitute censorship since you have many other forums and > opportunities to say whatever you wish.". That is a pretty evil > justification and probably Governments in Iran, Saudi Arabia or North > Korean can use it. I don't think they do. And leaving your country to escape actual punishment is hardly comparable to adjusting the text of your speech. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - April 1, 2010
On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 03:15 -0500, Brian Cameron wrote: > * Vote on the new Code of Conduct >o Add changes proposed by Brian and Murray and then vote. >o ACTION - Vincent - Announce that the new Code of Conduct > is > approved You mean the Speaker Guidelines, not the Code of Conduct, I think. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Speaker Guidelines
On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 13:23 -0500, Brian Cameron wrote: > > "We do not consider this to be excessive censorship. It does not > stop > > you from offending outside of the community." > > I agree with the above additions. However, I would word that last > paragraph differently. > > "We do not consider this to be excessive censorship since we are only > asking community members to follow these guidelines in GNOME community > forums. People are free to dismiss these guidelines or express > themselves however they wish outside of GNOME community forums. That's long. How about: "We do not consider this to be excessive censorship. It does not limit your behavior outside of the GNOME community." -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Speaker Guidelines
Brian Cameron wrote: > > Oops, missing link here: > > http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct/SpeakerGuidelines I cleaned up some of the text on this page, though I didn't think deeply about the content. However, I think it is currently an invitation to the same old philosophical discussion every time there's a problem. I think we should state our position clearly, so it doesn't have to be said each time, at the end of a long thread. So I would add this text to the "Dealing With Problems" section: "We are not interested in a debate about whether someone should feel offended. You should avoid offending people even if you do not share their views." "We do not consider this to be excessive censorship. It does not stop you from offending outside of the community." -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
On Fri, 2010-03-05 at 11:08 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: > We debaters should decrease our traffic on this mailing list No. Stubborn people who insist on having the last word should stop pointless arguments. It's bad enough when people think they can have a conversation with one of you. It's worse when you start trying to talk to each other. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 11:07 +, Martyn Russell wrote: > I think it is important to do releases when you have progress in the > project not just because you have some new shiny feature to give to > people. Yes, releases are good, but we don't have to call them stable. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 09:03 +, Martyn Russell wrote: > At some point you have to clean up your code base, that's been the > case > in every project I have worked on. I don't think it is a bad thing > that > GTK+ is released just "more cleaned up", but others disagree and want > 3.0 to have x, y and z major new features. The problem is that you'll need another ABI break to do major refactoring. GSEAL() alone won't be enough, even if it's an initial part of it. GSEAL should be part of refactoring, not a reason to release. Now you've done the GSEAL() work then we could do bigger work in a branch before releasing an ABI breaking release (as stable) that gives people nothing but the expectation of another future ABI break, meaning that it won't be used much anyway. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Stormy's Update: Week of December 7th
On Wed, 2009-12-16 at 16:08 -0700, Stormy Peters wrote: > That said, the discussion started because of Clutter and its copyright > assignment and the fact that that is blocking it's inclusion in GNOME > 2.28. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm very ready for someone to just tell me that I'm wrong, but: Clutter's isn't a copyright assignment. It's a copyright waiver, placing the code in the public domain: http://bugzilla.openedhand.com/waiver.html My concern is that code without a copyright holder cannot really be under any license. For instance, nobody could go to court to defend abuse of LGPL code in Clutter: http://git.clutter-project.org/cgit.cgi?url=clutter/tree/COPYING if nobody owns the copyright in that code. I hope that issue can be addressed. Whether I want to assign copyright is a different matter for me. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: "Private Foundation-List" Petition for referendum
On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 13:16 -0600, Jason D. Clinton wrote: > In short: it changes the tone for the better. I have the opposite experience of private mailing lists. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: "Private Foundation-List" Petition for referendum
On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 09:50 -0600, Jason D. Clinton wrote: > This is about signal-to-noise ratio, not > about keeping secrets. So why not just moderate the list? In fact, I thought that non-foundation-members were not even allowed to post here? For instance, I don't understand why RMS's emails even showed up on this mailing list. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: "Private Foundation-List" Petition for referendum
On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 21:05 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: > >> I like to ask for your support in my petition for referendum to make > >> foundation-list archives private and membership limited to actual > >> Foundation > >> members. If we make that change we would be able to discuss matters freely > >> without making lots of news that more often than not are harmful to our > >> image to the world in general. > > > > Can you cite a few examples of where this has been a problem in the > > past? > > Don't have to look much back. Sam Varghese have been making a living > churning > news out of f-l traffic. About the recent thread: You cannot stop silliness on the internet. If you try to hide things then you'll just make the hidden information seem even more interesting and you'll have to argue with random unrepresentative public statements without the benefit of pointing people to the archives for the facts. And I think it's not a real problem. For some reason people still write these articles but I really don't think many people read them. They are dull incoherent rants. Transparency is best. If it shows that we bike-shed too much then it's just our fault for bike-shedding. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership
On Wed, 2009-11-25 at 16:50 -0200, Tristan Van Berkom wrote: > Alternative proposal: lets deal with the problem at hand and get our > story straight about what is planet.gnome.org, what can be posted > there (i.e. no porn and vulgar language etc.) and how we can help > to enforce a reasonably exact policy on an exact resource which > is planet.gnome.org. planet.gnome.org is hard to moderate. Editors can only remove an entire blog. It would be easier if the software allowed the existing editors to remove a single blog post. Then we could have long discussions about censorship instead. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: What do you think of the foundation?
On Mon, 2009-06-01 at 13:43 +, Benjamin Otte wrote: > I have a problem here. I am not sure I have a clear idea of what "type > of > interaction" is causing these issues. I don't know what triggered the discussion this time either, so this might be totally irrelevant: We do have a real problem with being offensive to women on irc. People don't respond to it because most people there don't care much about it. And the men there simply don't expect any women to be within hearing distance. Of course this is self-perpetuating. On the other hand, I don't think there's any conceivable way to manage behaviour in irc. It's a wild corner of the Internet. The people there are not even particularly representative of GNOME. I think the best we can do with irc is warn people whenever we suggest its use. Smaller, well-defined forums such as mailing lists and bugzilla are much easier to manage. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: What do you think of the foundation?
On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 17:45 -0400, Luis Villa wrote: > That's exactly correct. Another term for it is 'volunteer'. :) You're > certainly welcome to volunteer to improve it yourself, of course. It's far beneath her abilities, but can't you delegate the minutes-taking to our paid employee? -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Akademy+GUADEC *2009* Hosting Proposals
On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 13:59 +0300, Zeeshan Ali Khattak wrote: > Hello! >If my vote counts, I'll vote for Finand because: > > 1. I live here. :) > > 2. GUADEC has happened in Spain twice already and it has never > happened in Finland. AFAIK Akademy has never happened in Finland > before either right?. > > 3. Not many GNOMEs have every been to Finland but that is not true about > Spain. I like the idea of a conference (and town) organized with Finnish efficiency. I'd want some reassurance about the accommodation. It can be insanely expensive in Helsinki. Is there some place where lots of people can stay cheaply. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Language on mailing list
I'm glad that moderation or even banning happens sometimes. It's usually obvious when it needs to happen and I often wish that it happened sooner. Thank you. The types of people who need to be moderated are generally going to react very badly to it happening. That shouldn't be a surprise. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Supporting GTK+
On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 10:49 +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote: > What is the preferred list for these kinds of questions? Job postings on gtk-list are considered OK by its list admins. That's not the best place but it will reach most of the relevant people. See "Are job postings OK?" here: http://mail.gnome.org/ -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ 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 14:00 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: > We did that for the European box. Murray, if you tell me what you > bought that worked, I can ask Rosanna to order one. I'd recommend the Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000. The European Event box will actually have the "Creative Live! Cam Optia AF", which works too but doesn't have the integrated USB microphone. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [guadec-list] Re-considering expectnation web service
On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 20:50 +, Alan Cox wrote: > > I agree 100% here, just because we're supposed to have an ideology of > > free software doesn't mean we should be against using non-free software. > > Hell, dreamweaver is an awesome product! This logic extends further that > > if we are able to help Expectnation become open source (as a previous > > post suggested), then the way to do that is to embrace it now... > > Especially as it has features which are invaluable to GUADEC being a > > success in 2008! > > If you rely on proprietary then you need to account for all the bad > things it brings as well as the convenience in this case. Yes. We've already had assurances that all the data will be exportable in standard formats such as XML. I haven't seen the formats, but we aren't talking about spreadsheets or a wordprocessor so I am quite confident that it'll be something simple that we can use. > What happens if Expectnation goes out of business before guadec 2008 ? > What is the backup plan ? I'm not saying Expectnation isn't the right > choice but that you have to do the rest of the work that goes with a > proprietary choice. Luckily, we can consider this as a one-off at first. Most of our previous cobbled-together systems have been unusable soon after the end of GUADEC (or during or before), and we've survived that. If we come to depend on it in the long term, then my answers are: - Don't depend on it in the long term if it continues to be proprietary. 2 GUADECS would be my limit. This would be a harder decision to make at the time, of course, but I'm confident that the pressure to be open will remain. - Use the XML when we need to. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [guadec-list] Re-considering expectnation web service
On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 23:09 +0200, Baris Cicek wrote: > And whatever we do we need to do it quickly You are not going to put together a completely new system in time, using Drupal or anything else. That's not your fault and you shouldn't be punished for it. You probably do have time to try Expectnation and to configure it as you need. If you choose to waste time twiddling with ideologically-sound systems then the masses will blame you (rather than the zealots who persuaded you) for it later. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ 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 01:18 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: [snip] > Taking too much time to decide: it sometimes happen that we wait for a > meeting or for another event to take a decision, while the decision is > pretty trivial. It might be related to my first item, since pinging > people so they say +1/-1 could be enough. [snip] This is generally caused by the habit of only making decisions in meetings, instead of making decisions on the mailing list. And a tendency to think that all decisions must be unanimous. It works like this. Something is discussed. It becomes an unstructured debate and the meeting runs out of time. Someone says "Well, let's make a decision at the next meeting". But everyone knows that nothing will be done in the meantime to make that more likely, and half the meetings are postponed (or don't have the relevant people attending). So the result is that the decision waits for 4 weeks or more, and then probably waits again. By this time, anyone outside the board has probably given up, so the board just lets it drop. Nobody takes the blame for this at the moment, so it's easy to do. A firm chairman needs to stop this from happening. This doesn't happen all the time, but it happens a lot of the time. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ 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 Wed, 2007-11-21 at 11:33 -0500, Luis Villa wrote: > On Nov 21, 2007 11:24 AM, Vincent Untz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > * Find a way to better track what the board is currently dealing with, > > so nothing gets forgotten. I've tried doing this only with mails and > > some notes here and there, but without success. It should be done in a > > much stricter way. I'm starting to believe this should be the (main) > > job of one of the directors (it's a bit different from being a > > secretary, because it implies pinging, pinging, pinging, pinging). I'd > > volunteer to do this. > > I think it probably works best for the secretary to do this- it is > different than the traditional role of the secretary, but it isn't a > problem to add to that role, and since the secretary has to record the > tasks/actions anyway, it seems reasonable to add it to their plate. [snip] This requires authority. Fairly often, after all the niceness has failed, someone will need to say "This must be done. I'm serious" or "We need to reassign this task/role. I'm not waiting any longer". Because the tasks are important. I think that (and progress tracking in general) is the role of a good chairperson. Much as I have loved the various chairpersons we've had over the years, I don't think any of them have done this well enough. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ 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 20:07 +0200, Baris Cicek wrote: > On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 08:30 -0300, Bruno Boaventura wrote: > > I think the members can propose questions and send them to the > > Membership Committee select the best questions. Can the others members > > of MC say something about this? > That's possible, however it doesn't look like necessary. Membership can > direct their questions if they really look for answer, that's why it's a > debate at all. Candidates are free to ignore questions, though they > should consider that would affect membership votes. This generally leads to chaos. Questions will be duplicated, and it won't be easy to see what questions each candidate has actually answered because they will choose not to swamp us with duplicate answers, but they won't reply to the same duplicates. Or they will swamp us. Please do stick to the regular routine. But I guess it's too late for that now. > Current set of questions cover general BoD responsibilities and they are > mostly aggregated questions over years with some popular topics. Voting > will begin in a week so getting questions through gnomedesktop.org or > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list can be time consuming. I > think this should be noted for next elections and preparing question set > should be started earlier than this year so that necessary channels of > communication could be used. > > Either way, we're in a period of knowing prospective board members more, > and it's best to use this time with more productive manner. That means > polemics and things that do not relate with Foundation or Board of > Directors should be avoided during the debate. If you have some > questions you can just wait some days, and/or elaborate on topics in the > middle of this week. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ 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 08:30 -0300, Bruno Boaventura wrote: > On Nov 19, 2007 8:22 AM, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Don't the members get the opportunity to propose questions this year, as > > > in past years? Usually there is a gnomedesktop story & comments. > > I've been posted to gnomedesktop too, but it's not appearing yet... is > there some type of moderation? Yes. I acquired moderation rights at some time, so I can approve it. But you just re-posted your email text there, as if you are asking the candidates to answer on gnomedesktop.org. If you want to put a call-for-questions on gnomedesktop.org then you'll need to write appropriate text. > > I ask only because if members do have questions, it becomes extremely > > time-consuming for candidates to answer 10 or 15 different emails, and > > difficult for members to follow. The idea of a call for questions was to > > reduce the amount of mail people have to reply to & read. > > I think the members can propose questions and send them to the > Membership Committee select the best questions. Can the others members > of MC say something about this? -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: The problem on the foundation front page
On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 08:12 -0300, Bruno Boaventura wrote: > On Nov 14, 2007 2:53 PM, Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > That is a legitimate approach, and it can be helpful as you say. > > However, those precise words are subject to the reading, not intended, > > which Sergey saw in them. Perhaps a rewording, or a link to > > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html, > > would help clarify this. > > I have the same thought. A link to www.opensource.org can bring out > the idea: "Free Software" = "Open Source". I would prefer GNOME to officially withdraw from GNU rather than be repeatedly subject to the thought police. We happily represent a range of opinions and can't possibly be forced to forever avoid any mention of something that you don't agree with and/or be forced to promote exactly what you think is important this week in exactly the words that you dictate to us. No, I don't want to argue with you about it. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Help us prepare a budget for 2008!
On Wed, 2007-11-07 at 23:30 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: [snip] > + there are also the event boxes [3] that are useful (again, would be >nice to have a summary of where they went... Anybody wanting to help >with this? :-)) [snip] I keep everything in the wiki for the European event box: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeEventsBox/Schedule It wasn't used much in 2007, costing only about 300 Euros (already reimbursed to me), but I'll try to promote it a bit more in 2008. I guess that 1000 Euros should cover the costs of delivery and one new LCD. I've given up on the idea of T-shirts for presenters. We probably can't afford to have one per person per event, and that's the only thing that would work. It would be easier if we have official merchandise from an official web shop. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: clarification and apology [was Re: board]
On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 03:11 -0500, Luis Villa wrote: > I am personally much less interested in explanations for the past than > solutions for the future, [snip] That sounds nice, but you won't avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future without recognising the mistakes of the past. Too often, delegation for the board means just that someone said they will do something, that someone does nothing, and the board does nothing about it. Until someone else complains and then that's ignored. Candidates for the board need to show that they can do a better job and really take responsibility. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ 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 22:38 -0400, Germán Poó Caamaño wrote: > On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 18:02 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: [snip] > > What I mean is that once you are syndicated in Planet, you can post > > whatever you want. > > > > That's why we have people posting all sorts of things that are not > > related to GNOME: music festivals, science fiction books, recipes, > > vacation photos, political editorials, the roof of my house, "dear > > lazyweb", etc. > > > > And that's a *good* thing. I'm as annoyed as anyone by certain kinds of > > posts, but I can simply ignore them (or make my tools ignore them - wish > > this were documented). Controlling the topic-ness of posts would be > > fascist. > > You can ignore them using the Johan's tip: > http://www.advogato.org/person/jdahlin/diary/15.html > > I don't where is supposed to be documented. This doesn't actually seem to work. Does anyone have a version that does? -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Hiring a part-time sysadmin?
On Sat, 2007-06-23 at 15:43 +0200, Olav Vitters wrote: > On Sat, Jun 23, 2007 at 12:05:59PM +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: > > Meanwhile, our sysadmins seem overworked, causing understandable delays > > for simple requests. Now seems like a good time to pay someone so that > > requests for new accounts, mailing lists, bugzilla products, etc, get > > done almost immediately. > > New accounts and new bugzilla products are not a sysadmin task. Although > of course new accounts can be done by someone who is hired (or > sysadmins), as long as procedures are followed. > > Mailing list setup is broken. Hiring someone to figure it all out might > be a good idea; because currently I do not setup mailing lists just > because I do not want to figure out how. > > I'd like to know what this person would do in daily tasks (concretely). > The ideal sysadmin just makes existing tasks take less amounts of work. I'm not so interested in the precise job title. I'd just like someone to do a) The simple little administrative things such as accounts, bugzilla additions, new mailing lists, etc. b) Relatively simple installations and updates and other stuff that you are more capable of listing than me. c) Clever unexpected things that syadmins tend to do, if we find someone that wonderful, but a) and b) would be quite enough if don't. Paying someone would mean that their time is reserved for this. I don't mind if they are partly idle because there isn't enough for them to do - the purpose of an employee should be to get things done, not to be busy. I just don't want to wait for things or have to be demanding to volunteers that don't have time. > Note that we do can find enough persons willing to be a part time > sysadmin (without either hiring or specifically requesting). The real > problem is that usually they aren't known. Further, known persons are > usually overworked with other things, so making them a sysadmin would > not help. Don't really see a solution though. Perhaps we should give a > random person the ability to do lots of damage. > -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Hiring a part-time sysadmin?
On Sat, 2007-06-23 at 19:29 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: > Hi Murray, > > Selon Murray Cumming <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > ... > > Meanwhile, our sysadmins seem overworked, causing understandable delays > > for simple requests. Now seems like a good time to pay someone so that > > requests for new accounts, mailing lists, bugzilla products, etc, get > > done almost immediately. > > It's a nice idea, based on a false assumption, I'm afraid. > > > The Board's finances seem to be OK right now, and I know that advisory > > board members have generally been ready to contribute for specific > > things that help the project. > > Our finances are balanced. That means we have roughly the same aount coming in > as we have going out - except for some savings that we've made over the last > year by not having any full-time employee (these are one-off savings, as soon > as > we hire someone we'll be balanced again, but with a slightly bigger bank > account > balance). > > So I don't think we have the money to hire a part-time sysadmin, and I think > we'd have difficulty finding one (to work part-time). It's certainly something > worth thinking about, but the answer will likely be "we can't (yet) afford > it". So, I think you should please ask the advisory board, and then I think you should try to find somebody. They might say No, but in the past they've wanted to be asked more often, because they want to help. There are plenty of part-time student sysadmins at universities and colleges, so you should be able to find someone similar for GNOME. You don't need a genius - you just need someone who is paid to have time to do stuff. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Hiring a part-time sysadmin?
The Board's finances seem to be OK right now, and I know that advisory board members have generally been ready to contribute for specific things that help the project. Meanwhile, our sysadmins seem overworked, causing understandable delays for simple requests. Now seems like a good time to pay someone so that requests for new accounts, mailing lists, bugzilla products, etc, get done almost immediately. It simple stuff, but that's why it's important. It could make a noticeable everyday difference to how we grow and work together. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Fwd: Supporting Gtk+ Maintenance
On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 21:25 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote: > Le lundi 26 mars 2007, à 14:12, Quim Gil a écrit : > > On 3/14/07, Tim Janik wrote: > > > > > > Hello Foundation Board. > > > > Hello GTK+ team. > > > > > The Gtk+ project is in dire lack of new maintainers, mostly to review > > > (...) > > > > Thanks for this report, and actually thanks for the first report you > > sent back in Christmas. On thaty time the board was in transition, but > > we already took your points and since then this has been one of the > > main points in our agenda. > > > > This is why GTK+ was one of the 2 main issues presented to the > > advisory board members this week, together with Documentation. There > > are lots of aspects to fix and improve in the GNOME project, but the > > board has decided to put these two on top of the agenda. > > > > A practical conclusion of the discussion this week was that we need a > > space for discussion where the GTK+ team, the board, the advisory > > board companies and probably any other key GTK+ contributor / > > stakeholder / user can share this discussion. An official channel > > where we can hold a discussion from these different perspectives in > > order to solve the main issues and push GTK+ to the bright horizon it > > deserves. This channel might be online+offline, something like a > > combination of a specific mailing list + meetings in relevant > > conferences + ... > > > > The GTK+ core team has the initiative proposing the space and the > > bootstrapping process of collaboration. Let's use this list to decide > > the new channel. > > I'm wondering if gtk-devel-list is the place where the discussion about > collaboration should be happening: I don't know if having a mix of > technical discussions and collaboration discussions is good or not. > Having a separate mailing list might help, but it might also be a stupid > idea :-) > > What does the GTK+ team think? If it's going to be a public discussion then it should be on gtk-devel-list. It would be silly to create a new mailing list just to discuss this one subject. If it's meant to be a private discussion then a CC list will probably do it, with the advisory and board lists in it. You might also want to arrange an extra conference call with the advisory board if that's more to their liking. But that will probably take 2 or 3 months to arrange. I'm disappointed that this has been turned into a discussion about discussing. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ 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 15:14 +0200, Baris Cicek wrote: > I'll talk w/ our local GUG about if we can organize to host GUADEC next > year in Istanbul. Please, yes. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Regional gatherings ROCK! [Was: GUADEC 2008]
On Thu, 2007-03-22 at 10:12 +0530, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote: > -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- > Hash: SHA1 > > Jeff Waugh wrote: > > > These are a hugely important part of local and worldwide GNOME culture and > > community development. Perhaps a GNOME meeting at FOSS.IN would be a good > > way to kickstart something in India? > > That's a kickstart but I was thinking more on GUADAC :) note the 'A', > although the question does remain to be asked how many of the GNOME > folks from EU also get to or like to travel to India It should be perfectly doable, if there's a team that can make it happen. Particularly if the higher travel costs can be offset by reduced accommodation costs. LCA manages it in Australia despite the costs. I'd love it. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of SoC meeting - 2007/Mar/06
On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 00:07 +0200, Lucas Rocha wrote: > > * ACTION: Behdad to ask mizmo about a poster (DONE) > >Two proposals: > 1. > http://people.redhat.com/duffy/gnome-brand/soc2007/soc2007-poster_a4.png > 2. http://desrt.mcmaster.ca/random/poster-draft.png > >DECISION: Use proposal 1 with "Google Summer of >Code" on it, and mentioning more explicitly the money involved. The poster should probably make it clear that it's about software development, or programming. Not all of the target audience will know that "hack" and "code" mean software development, or know what GNOME is. Or if we think we only want people who understand "hack" then let's at least make that more obvious so that this stands out next to the poster about the anthropology text book swap meet. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of conduct (bis)
On Mon, 2006-12-04 at 20:49 +, Andrew Sobala wrote: [snip] > So let's link to it from www.gnome.org, and we're finished with this. Am > I right? The signatures drive http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct/Signatures was quite successful, so I plan to go ahead with this. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of conduct (bis)
On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 00:58 +0100, Quim Gil wrote: [snip] > Have a look to the archives. Read the CoC threads back in Summer and > the recent ones. Don't you find there the same level of arrogance we > have in tough debates? Do you see the CoC supporters less arrogants > than the rest. Judge for yourself. [snip] I'm sorry about that, though I don't personally see it in those threads. I'll personally bear it in mind in future. Oh, and don't worry about trying to prove the point with links to specific emails - You don't need to prove how you perceived it. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Why no press releases about new AB members?
We seem to have some new advisory board members, such as ACCESS (formerly PalmSource), Intel, and Canonical. This is wonderful. I wonder why there were no press releases to publicize this support, and in some cases, not even an announcement on foundation-list. Or did I miss something? http://foundation.gnome.org/ -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of conduct (bis)
This seems wildly tangential. There's a loss of perspective. The code of conduct is rather unlikely to become the tool of a fascist regime. If you think that is a significant risk then just don't sign the thing. It already has clear language saying that it's not a legal document and there's no enforcement. To me that already seems more explicit that our common sense should need, but it does no harm. But there certainly isn't any need to add "and we really mean it", and then "really we do". -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of conduct (bis)
On Sat, 2006-12-02 at 09:24 +1300, Glynn Foster wrote: > > Anne Østergaard wrote: > > Hi Murray and everyone > > > > I am in favor of a code of conduct. > > > > Here is my go of a text: > > I'm confused - now we have seemingly 2 codes of conduct. Which is the one to > be > signed? The one that's on live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct. I think we've had that discussion in detail. It's done as far as I'm concerned. We've been through 3 drafts of the code of conduct, with plenty of chances long before now to bring up issues and deal with them. > I'd be reluctant to sign anything that is in the process of changing. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of conduct (bis)
On Fri, 2006-12-01 at 19:43 +0100, Danilo Šegan wrote: > Today at 18:44, Murray Cumming wrote: > > > But yes, I'll try the endorsement strategy if I have to. > > I prefer Adrian Custer's suggestion. > > Tell me where to sign! :) Let's see how this works out: http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct/Signatures -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of conduct (bis)
On Fri, 2006-12-01 at 18:31 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: [snip] > The main use of a > code being written down is to ensure that newcomers to the project > know > where they stand, what they can expect, and (if they don't respect the > code) why they're being given out to. [snip] So let's assume this for a moment, though I don't entirely agree. Then the logistical problem for me is How do we get that code of conduct somewhere visible for those newcomers to see? Just having it on the website (in About GNOME, for instance), would have impact before the newcomer even knows who those people are. But the problem is, who gets to say that it can go on the website? If the website maintainer decides to do it then that's not really bottom-up. I think this is so uncontroversial that nobody is going to have a serious problem with a web site maintainer doing it, but I'd generally rather have our elected representatives deciding it, because that's what they are for. But yes, I'll try the endorsement strategy if I have to. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of conduct (bis)
On Fri, 2006-12-01 at 15:02 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: > Hi, > > A while back, Murray asked the board to pronounce itself on the code of > conduct. > > We have had several debates on the issue, both on the mailing list and > on conference calls, and Murray asked me to relay the conclusions to the > membership. > > The feeling of the board (a majority opinion, rather than unanimous) is > that the code of conduct would be more hurt than helped by being pushed > by us. Its adoption really needs to be bottom-up. Thanks for being the messenger. I am deeply disappointed by this. I think it's a failure of leadership and a failure to stand up for our most basic common values. From an otherwise sensible board. This was really the only way that this could be done. It will be logistically almost impossible for me to individually persuade every single mailing list, project maintainer, and sysadmin to endose this explicitly. But "GNOME rejects Code of Conduct" is such an awful signal that I'll try to do that anyway. Or do the new board candidates see this more clearly? http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct > The issue is divisive, even within the board, and I don't think that we > can come out as a group and say "the board thinks we should do this" - > even in an advisory role. Adoption of a code of conduct should be > something that people in the community do as part of their daily work. > Olav has been a shining example of this in Bugzilla. > > If approval for a CoC comes from the top, that will endanger the > bottom-up adoption by giving the impression the board imposing it on the > community, which is an impression we wish to avoid. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ 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 Tue, 2006-11-28 at 03:42 -0500, Sara Khalatbari wrote: [snip[ > I aim to be more effective on issues that need constant follow-up and > communications. [snip] We need lots of this, because just having meetings every two weeks means delays. Based on your GUADEC efforts, I'm confident that you can help. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ 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 Sat, 2006-11-25 at 17:00 +, Joachim Noreiko wrote: > I notice that most recent minutes on the website are > December 2005. Do you want to fix that and ask me > again? ;) Could the board just ask the foundation's administration assistant to keep that list of meeting minutes updated, please? -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Mailing lists (Re: Candidacy: Joachim Noreiko)
On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 12:19 -0500, David Bolter wrote: > Thinking aloud: > I wonder if we could expose the #gnome channel (or similar) as perhaps a > one-click "Get Help" menu item... perhaps under the "Place" menu. The > user could have an automated nick that describes their distro etc. > Friendly #gnome or #gnome-help (or whatever) lurkers could say recognize > the nick as a help-needer and invite their questions. There are already enough people who have the odd idea that irc is a good place to get technical support on very detailed issues and then get upset when they don't get it. I don't know where these people get that idea, but we don't need more people thinking it. Not unless we are going to pay hundreds of people to do technical support via irc. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: My interests in the GNOME Foundation
On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 10:45 +1300, Glynn Foster wrote: > Pushing it out to the new board has the potential risk of a whole > bunch of new > people coming on board who aren't familiar with previous discussion. Yeah, the board generally needs to avoid excuses for inaction. Delays are always long, given the latency involved in how the board works. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: My interests in the GNOME Foundation
On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 21:24 +0100, Anne Østergaard wrote: > > Being a board member is in my view a conflict of interest if a person > wants to apply for the position within GNOME. Being a board employee is mostly incompatible with being a board director. That's why Quim would certainly resign (I expect) if he become an employee. However, it would be quite awkward if board members had to resign just because they were applying to become employees. Then you could lose 5 board members just so you can gain one employee. I think that would be excessive. Not including yourself in the relevant meetings, and not seeing discussion on board-list, should be enough. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 10:51 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote: > On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 11:38 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: > > Sorry, I probably should have summarized the previous discussion. > > > > The idea is to state what we consider acceptable behaviour, in order to > > advertize to newcomers what they can expect when getting involved in > > GNOME, and to reinforce this existing behaviour, so that bad behaviour is > > more clearly unacceptable when it does happen. It says who we are and who > > we want to be and how we'd like people to think of us. > > > > It contains no official means of enforcement and there is no plan to use > > this as a weapon. However, I wouldn't be surprised if, for instance, > > mailing list maintainers referred to it sometimes when dealing with > > unpleasant situations, just to save them writing a lot of text themselves. > > > > This, by the way, is why it's not something that would be forced on > > anyone. It's not new. It's just a tidy statement of an existing consensus. > > In this way, it's a little similar to the release team documents. > > Fair enough. It would be nice to also point to existing etiquette guides > that might be available, and mention the purpose of the code as you just > did. > > > > I can understand Ethics code, but I wouldn't sign this, knowing full > > > well that I'll have bad days, and I call people things worse than nitwit > > > even on a good day. > > > > As do I. And people should know that's not how we are in general. > > Agreed. I tried to boil this down to a couple of sentences. Is it still lacking explanation? http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
On Fri, 2006-08-04 at 15:59 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: > Hi, > > Jeff Waugh wrote: > > > >> Doing the process of updating the charter would be a failure? I don't see > >> why, this process could be healthy for the community, and the result would > >> be stronger and more sounded. In the meantime the list of recommendations > >> could be discussed, tested, improved, applied (it was being applied before > >> being written in a wiki page anyway). > > > > That's precisely the point. Whether it's the charter or a new document, it > > is vastly more interesting to talk about the content and making it relevant > > to the GNOME community than argue about what it should be called and where > > it should go. This is just a diversion. > > It appears the discussion has gotten to the stage where you're both > talking semantics (all three, with Murray). > > Here's the summary, as far as I can tell: > > 1. We have the by-laws and charter. The by-laws are mostly legalese > template, and the charter has been treated mostly as a historical data > (it talks about the board providing technical direction, for example). > > 2. Quim is suggesting that reminding people about the core principles of > those two documents is more useful than making a third document official. > > 3. Jeff and Murray are both proposing that we use the "Code^WGuidelines > of conduct" as a basis to codify existing behavioural expectations of > our community. > > 4. 2 and 3 are the same thing. The GoC will be reminding people about > the core values of our community. Jeff's been asking for a while that we > actually look at the document, and see whether (as it is) it does > represent those core values (which have their basis in our charter). Replying to this bit only: If you mean, look at the Code Of Conduct draft, then bear in mind that I have only intended it to mention conduct, and I'd like to limit it to that for the sake of getting it done. > So can we do that, please? > > Might I suggest killing this thread, it's outlived its usefullness. A > new thread, with suggestions for additions or removals from the GoC , > will perhaps be more productive. > > Cheers, > Dave. > -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
[snip] > The charter contains > already "a set of principles that we, the GNOME community, believe in > and strive to abide by". The by-laws contains already a benchmark > to look to for the board and the rest of bodies officially involved in > the GNOME project. > > These documents reflect already the content and intent of the GNOME > Foundation. They don't need any extra blessing or acceptance, what is in > there is a right, a duty and a guidance for all of us. If they need > updating let's update them. If they need advertisement let's advertise > them. Wow, that would be even more of a stamp of approval than I was asking for. The only downside is that we probably need a refendum to ammend or change the foundations's charter. And I think that a referendum just for these simple guidelines of behaviour would be a sign of failure. Therefore, I don't think I'd ask for quite that much of a stamp of approval. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Content and Intent [Was: Code of Conduct final draft?]
[snip] > I've made a number of suggestions that I think would improve how it is > seen > by members of the community: > > * change the name > * be firm, but lighthearted - I didn't suggest "Be Excellent To Each > Other" Yes. My only objection to that phrase (which I tried in the draft before people complained about it) is that it's a cultural reference that isn't fully understood by many eople whose first language is not English. >as a joke! > * don't be afraid to put more into it > * make sure to mention that it isn't a weapon Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
>> I'm not against producing a list of useful recommendations like Murray >> is doing, to be as accepted as the community wants to accept it. I'd like to avoid lengthy and tedious (to me) discussions about how Murray has forced everyone to be nice, oppressed their rights, abused his (non-existant) authority, etc. If this gets a stamp of approval then those discussions might still happen but at least someone can reply that it's gone through some process, in order to be adopted, by elected representative leaders, as representative of a consensus. Despite the fact that, like most things in GNOME or any group, consensus is never totally unanimous. I wonder what would have happened if the board has simply written this code of conduct and announced it without consultation. Maybe I'm being naive, but I suspect that people would just say "Yeah, OK". Not that I think that would be best, of course. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
[snip] > Therefore I propose to add this point: > > o. Be pragmatic about this code: [snip] Yes, that could be part of an expanded (but still not too long) introduction, as suggested by Bastien. Sorry for not doing that yet. A rename looks likely too, though I'd prefer something that kept its scope restricted to conduct instead of appearing to be a complete summary of GNOME, because then we'd have 10 more things to argue about. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
[snip] > For instance, in any mailing lists that I administer, there a higher > standard of behaviour is demanded. I will not tolerate personal abuse and > some aggressive behaviour, for instance. I imagine that most people > generally feel that's not s/that's not/that's > a right that they are willing to surrender in > order to have a functioning and pleasant group. [snip] and the other typos too. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
>> No-one is suggesting that you are banned from being rude >> (unfortunately). > > It's your "unfortunately" that is now making me think: this might not be > a good idea. If I want to be rude, it's my freedom to do so. It's the > freedom of somebody else to think of that that I'm an idiot. > > "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the > death, your right to say it. â Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire" > >> That list says "Advice" at the top. And the idea is that those are the >> behaviour that Gnome people think we should be following. It doesn't >> say everyone will always be perfect. It's more about setting a standard. > > I dislike standards for persons, behaviour or personalities. There's no > such thing as a standard for personalities, behaviour and persons. We as a community have a right to set standards for behaviour. And anyone who doesn't like those standards has a right not to take part in that community. These standards exist informally already and have been applied informally before now. For instance, in any mailing lists that I administer, there a higher standard of behaviour is demanded. I will not tolerate personal abuse and some aggressive behaviour, for instance. I imagine that most people generally feel that's not a right that they are willing to surrender in order to have a functioning and pleasant group. Anarchies don't function very well. Try Rousseau's social contract if you want to get philisophical about it. Groups of people just choose different contracts, with differing tradeoffs of liberty versus freedom, usually with checks and balances to tradeoff at a sensible point. Abuse and aggression is also incredibly ineffective even if you think you might (theoretically, and maybe I've misunderstood you) think that it's useful sometimes. I, and many others, do not take part in communities which are clearly unpleasant or ineffective. I have a theory that if GNOME gets even better and let's the world know that it's better, then we'll get more people involved. It's not much good saying that we as individuals have no problem, so nothing needs to be done, and nothing can be gained, because we are obviously not that set of people who are not yet involved. It ignores the other set, who we can't of course ask directly, that being the whole point. In the meantime we have a report plus annecdotal evidence that says that there's people who would like to get involved in a welcoming community. Much of the anecdotal evidence unfortunately stays off-list, so you'll have to trust me on that. If you can go as far as trusting me that it exists, you might consider that it's off-list precisely because those people do not feel fully welcome in our community. I'd like to make it clear that they are welcome and that occasional unpleasant behaviour, while unavoidable, is not representative. | have overemailed. I apologise. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
[snip] > At some point, Murray proposed the CoC as "a means of doing something > so that it doesn't look like we're doing nothing" [snip] As well as not being an actual quote, I think that's quite a wild conclusion and one that ignores the rest of this (repetitive) discussion. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Who should get a Sun Ultra machine?
> My vote is for Christian Rose. He's doing hell a lot of job on GTP for > years and without any glitch. > > If it has to be a hacker, then I believe someone from Release Team should > take it. With growing GNOME they will need those CPU cycles. That's a good idea. The release team guys (who take turns doing releases) have to build all of GNOME repeatedly to check that it builds and runs. The faster they can do that, the faster they can tell people to fix stuff. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
> On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 10:08 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: >> I'm fairly happy with the Code Of Conduct draft now: >> http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct >> >> So, now for some process. I'd like the Foundation Board to consider this >> and, all being well, declare it as official. >> >> I leave it up to the board to rename it to "GNOME Ethics" or similar, >> though I personally find that a bit arbitrary while unnecessarily >> broadening its scope. It wouldn't bother me much though. > > I don't really understand who/what is supposed to come out of this. > Do we want to put stamps on people's behaviours? > Do we want to shun someone because he had a bad day and called a user a > nitwit? Sorry, I probably should have summarized the previous discussion. The idea is to state what we consider acceptable behaviour, in order to advertize to newcomers what they can expect when getting involved in GNOME, and to reinforce this existing behaviour, so that bad behaviour is more clearly unacceptable when it does happen. It says who we are and who we want to be and how we'd like people to think of us. It contains no official means of enforcement and there is no plan to use this as a weapon. However, I wouldn't be surprised if, for instance, mailing list maintainers referred to it sometimes when dealing with unpleasant situations, just to save them writing a lot of text themselves. This, by the way, is why it's not something that would be forced on anyone. It's not new. It's just a tidy statement of an existing consensus. In this way, it's a little similar to the release team documents. Sorry for the boring process discussion. > I can understand Ethics code, but I wouldn't sign this, knowing full > well that I'll have bad days, and I call people things worse than nitwit > even on a good day. As do I. And people should know that's not how we are in general. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Code of Conduct final draft?
I'm fairly happy with the Code Of Conduct draft now: http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct So, now for some process. I'd like the Foundation Board to consider this and, all being well, declare it as official. I leave it up to the board to rename it to "GNOME Ethics" or similar, though I personally find that a bit arbitrary while unnecessarily broadening its scope. It wouldn't bother me much though. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Code Of Conduct draft #2
Here's my latest draft of the Code Of Conduct, or whatever we end up calling it: http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct I think the main content is done. More text would make the whole thing less ineresting. But I'm having particular difficulty writing the summary. Ideally it should be short, snappy, and inspirational. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Women in GNOME (Was: Code Of Conduct)
On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 15:59 +0200, Anne Østergaard wrote: > > > Realistically, this plans needs to be written by you. Others will > help you > > > with it, but you need to create it and drive it. [snip] > I will work with the whole of the women in FLOSS community as well as > with the persons who wrote the FLOSSPOLS reports and others who have > written scientific reports and with those of you who are interested. Thanks, Anne. I look forward to reading your suggestions. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Temporaray enlargement of the GNOME Board with 2 persons
Here's a positive reply, just so you don't think it's all negative. I'll never figure out how to request a representative sample of replies while also avoiding too many replies. I trust the board to do this and to know if they need to do it, and I have confidence in the proposed new members. I'd prefer delegation, but even the act of delegation requires suitable chunks of time that they might not have right now. If they can't do that quickly then they need to get on and do this now. I supported the reduced-size referendum because I think the board needs to make faster decisions instead of pondering every possibility until the chances have gone by. So well done. If I could set a condition for my Yes, it would be that the new board members would obsessively care for the Foundation's public wiki pages and keep people informed of possible meetings agendas and minutes of completed meetings. You do quite a lot and people should know about it. You might even start referring to not-public-yet agenda items by codenames if necessary, just so we have an idea of how much you are working on. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board meetings since March (was: Re: Temporaray enlargement of the GNOME Board with 3 persons)
> > Hi, > > Daniel Veillard wrote: >> Okay, what happen at the board meetings since March, time of last >> published >> minutes I could find. I assume it's reasonable request to at least know >> if >> you are meeting, and what are the problems/questions you are facing with >> the details you can share. It then helps getting a sense of how much >> work >> need to be done you can't cope with and hence how necessary increasing >> the >> board size again really is. > > We met on the following dates since the beginning of March: > > March 1st (minutes sent to foundation-list) > March 15th (minutes sent to foundation-list) > March 22nd (minutes sent to foundation-list) > April 5th > April 26th > May 17th It really makes life easier if these are added to the list here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPublic#head-6903d3d78a8eb091678548773e79000fb5c10292 (Although it doesn't need to be a board member that does that. I blame me.) > We also had 2 advisory board meetings (but minutes from those have > typically not gone to foundation-list): > April 12th > May 31st > > There was a scheduled meeting on the 10th of May which was canceled > because of technical problems. The next board meeting is scheduled for > tomorrow, June 7th. > > The minutes for the April 5th and May 17th meetings need to be sanitised > for board private issues and sent to the list. We didn't have any phone > call for the April 26th meeting, and so the only minutes we have are an > IRC log, which again needs to be summarised and sanitised for board > privacy issues. The agendas for all meetings should also be reviewed for > privacy and confidentiality issues, and sent to the list. > > I've been sending the agendas to board-list 48 hours before the meeting > for comments, and preparing a private/public agenda in the wiki and for > the mailing list has proved more effort than I have available for that, > and I must admit that it hasn't been a high priority. > > As an ex board member, you have read-only access to the board wiki pages > - would you like to take on this task and help me out? I believe everyone has write access to the public pages. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Women in GNOME (Was: Code Of Conduct)
>> I think it is a natural step to take after the EU and FLOSSPOLS report >> has shown that women are being excluded from the community.- > > This rubs me the wrong way. It's not like we're actively working to > exclude women, Asians, or Martians from GNOME. Nor are we actively > trying to make GNOME a boys-only club. Simply put, there's no > conscious, malicious intent behind the disproportionate male/female > ratio, or "Western"/Asian ratio. And I think that this matters... Yet it may require conscious intent to fix it. >> If we want to se some change in attitudes and behavior in GNOME and >> FLOSS, and se more women involved in the future in all parts and >> capacities of our projects, we need to find out why only a little more >> than 1% of are women. > > ... because I don't believe that actively pursuing "diversity" for its > own sake is a valid goal. I may sound myopic here, but I don't see > what the goal of recruiting women qua women or Asians qua Asians gains > us as a community. Other than the obvious morally repellent idea that we might be perceived as unwelcoming to arbitrary large groups of people [1], there are plenty of selfish reasons for doing this: - We are a worldwide project aiming to create a project to make the world a better place for humanity, so we really should be trying our best to involve representative parts of the world in that. It makes it more likely that we will create a product that helps with their goals. - Women + Asia are two huge groups of potential contributors. That many contributors can make a huge contribution if we can get them on board. [1] The idea is so awful that we should be doing whatever we can even if we are not sure that it's going to work or that we are the cause, certainly as long as those things are not going to hurt us. What we have to gain is far more than we have to lose. > I refuse to measure diversity based on one's > genitals or skin color. > > [However, (for example) recruiting Asians as an attempt to understand > their needs, skills, and mentality in order to acquire a greater Asian > market share, however, could be ok. Asians are the means. A rockin' > version of GNOME on lots of Asian computers is the end.] > > Instituting open-door policies, non-discriminatory policies/"codes of > conduct", and the like are worthwhile goals in-and-of themselves. They > advertise what the core tenets of our community are, and this is > something we should become better at. But one should not necessarily > abandon established (nay, endearing) traits of our community just to > grow it larger. You'd give up something concretely cool about the > community for some undefined, possibly non-existant benefit. And that > ain't diversity, it's its opposite. > > I'd rather see us resolve to do a better job of marketing how open, > cool, and charismatic we are as a community, and let the chips fall > where they will. Get the word out to as many people as practicable, > welcome everyone, and let the diversity come to us as an organic > result of our general openness and coolness. Where we have some > specific goal in mind, change as necessary to meet that goal. But > don't change for change's sake alone. > > Recruit interesting people. Recruit smart, talented people. Recruit > people useful for your ends. Welcome all people. But don't recruit > genitals and skin colors. They're neither interesting nor useful for > free software's purposes. Justice is blind, and so should we be. This unfortunately ignores the conclusion that many have made that some groups will not feel at home in a community until their are people like them in the community. To get to that critical mass we may need to help the process along a bit. I think Callum said it well: http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/womenoss.html The code of conduct doesn't try to address that directly, however. It's just a small part of it. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Women in GNOME (Was: Code Of Conduct)
On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 14:57 +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > On Iau, 2006-06-01 at 14:33 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: > > Hmm, how about people working together? It just seems that the person who > > most most obviously wants this should be the person trying to make it > > happen. > > I'd be wary of pursuing just the "women in GNOME" issue, because many of > the same things put off far more than just women. Yes, that's why the gender issue is only one (possible) part of the code of conduct, though it's the reason that I got around to finally pushing it. But Anne is asking specifically for a gender policy/plan, apparently separate to that. I'd just like her to make a suggestion. > Running around > shouting "pants off" is not, for example, very compatible with the > Japanese cultural expectations. > > Also if "Code of Conduct" is too strong then "Expected Behaviour" > perhaps. Personally I don't see a problem with "Code of Conduct" in that > it deals with acting for, speaking for, representing or being part of > Gnome, or when using its facilities. > > It isn't too much to ask for people to keep other stuff elsewhere, or to > engage in other incompatible activities from a non-gnome email address > or on a different irc network. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Women in GNOME (Was: Code Of Conduct)
> On 6/1/06, Murray Cumming <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Anne wrote: >> [snip] >> > I do not say this to start a new long debat in this tread. But it has >> > become obvious that the 1% participation of women in FLOSS is >> > embarrassing and we need to have a look at why this is the case and >> make >> > some cultural changes. >> > >> > I know that the Computer Science Department at the University of >> > Gothenburg in Sweden has a gender action plan: >> > http://www.informatik.gu.se/dokument/dokument.xsp?group=jamstalldhet&menu=org >> > >> > I think that many other universities and even GNOME and Ubuntu could >> get >> > a lot of inspiration here. (Provided it gets translated from Swedish >> > into a language you understand.) >> [snip] >> >> Realistically, this plans needs to be written by you. Others will help >> you >> with it, but you need to create it and drive it. > > Such a plan should be written by someone who has actually been > involved in IRC, our mailing lists, bugzilla, etc., *as a developer*- > which, sorry, isn't Anne. It will not work if it is not driven by > someone with such experience. Hmm, how about people working together? It just seems that the person who most most obviously wants this should be the person trying to make it happen. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Women in GNOME (Was: Code Of Conduct)
Anne wrote: [snip] > I do not say this to start a new long debat in this tread. But it has > become obvious that the 1% participation of women in FLOSS is > embarrassing and we need to have a look at why this is the case and make > some cultural changes. > > I know that the Computer Science Department at the University of > Gothenburg in Sweden has a gender action plan: > http://www.informatik.gu.se/dokument/dokument.xsp?group=jamstalldhet&menu=org > > I think that many other universities and even GNOME and Ubuntu could get > a lot of inspiration here. (Provided it gets translated from Swedish > into a language you understand.) [snip] Realistically, this plans needs to be written by you. Others will help you with it, but you need to create it and drive it. As a start, I think we have some definite things to try, based on the Flosspolls report: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-women-list/2006-May/msg1.html At the least, it would be great to read the policies or plans that other science/technical organisations have created, particularly if they have proven successful already. For instance, a list of web addresses, or summaries. In English. You seem like the most well-informed person to do this. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code Of Conduct
On Wed, 2006-05-31 at 10:49 -0400, Dan Winship wrote: > Murray Cumming wrote: > > I wouldn't feel optimistic about a code of conduct that didn't represent > > our current consensus. > ... > > However, there's no shortage of people saying both that > > - Some improvement in behaviour is necessary > > These points don't fit together. If we are just making the current tacit > CoC explicit, then we would expect no change in behavior. Not a radical change in behaviour, but some improvement. More of the good stuff. And we need to show that we are already better compared to other techy communities. > If we are > trying to change behavior, then the CoC can't just represent the current > consensus. > > > I haven't heard any downside even from people who don't agree with either > > of those points. > > The current hackers appear to be at least somewhat content with the > current atmosphere. If we change it too drastically, we run the risk of > pushing existing hackers away, or failing to attract new (western/male) > ones. And I still haven't seen anything to make me believe that this > Code of Conduct would actually attract female/asian/whatever hackers. So > the downside is that a CoC might drive away the current hacker > demographic AND fail to attract any new hacker demographic. Who's going to be drive away by us stating that we generally think it's a good idea not to be nasty? We agree on that so where's the drastic threat? Should our consensus say "Sometime's it's OK to flame people. That's really fun. Oh, and treat people with dismissive contempt sometimes too. They don't matter." Obviously not. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code Of Conduct
Quim wrote: > (To me this is a small tiny proof that the only really operative CoC is > that one assumed internally in our own personal values, attitude and > behavior) [snip] I wouldn't feel optimistic about a code of conduct that didn't represent our current consensus. We have a few rules here and there in GNOME (see the release process, for instance). They grew gradually out of consensus - that's why we very rarely need to enforce them. But just because something is already agreed, it doesn't mean it's not useful to state it and advertise it. It reinforces what we already have, and gives us more of it. So, yes, a little rhetoric is good sometimes. The objections I see so far to this are - It wouldn't change anything or - It's not necessary. However, there's no shortage of people saying both that - Some improvement in behaviour is necessary and - This is a possible way to achieve that. I haven't heard any downside even from people who don't agree with either of those points. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code Of Conduct
> 2006/5/30, Murray Cumming <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 20:15 +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote: >> > I thought the main deterrent was arrogant and dictator-like developers >> > who pat each other in the back and ignore the requests of users. >> > Adding more rules seems pointless there ;) >> >> That's not very nice, and I don't believe that it's accurate. It's this >> kind of aggressive attacking style that I think we should try to avoid, >> and which we usually do avoid. It just upsets people unnecessarily. > > In case it was left unclear, the smiley was for the whole paragraph. Sorry. I didn't see the smiley. It was easy to misunderstand. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code Of Conduct
On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 19:41 +0200, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote: > > > A quick browse of intake statistics for the University of Western > > > Australia says that of 47 BCompSc freshers last year, only 2 were > > > women. For BEng (all majors) the female intake was only 10%. > > > > We seem to be far below 10%. And way below the 25% or so number that > > I've read for general proprietary involvement. > > Well to bring up some anecdotal argumentation here. At Oracle the > consulting department, where I worked, about 70% of the developers where > women. 99% of the male developers I have ever met have the attitude you describe below. > One thing I can say for sure about these women was that they > couldn't care less about GNOME or GNU/Linux in general. They had a vague > general interest in the sense that it influenced their work when > customers deployed on GNU/Linux systems, but even the vaguest suggestion > about spending some personal time on a development project like GNOME > just gave me 'are you from Mars?' looks. The issue of harshness of > language in the community didn't even register as they where never > interested enough to engage on a level where that potentially could have > mattered, we lost them lng before that. > > So you could say, 'so what?', these women are not representative, its a > random example of some women you know and you can't apply their attitude > or behavior to women as a whole. To which I can only answer, I > absolutely agree. > > So why did I bring it up? Well because the claim that harsh/rude > language is the reason Not _the_ reason. A reason. And it's worth a try, given how badly we are doing now. > more women isn't involved with the GNOME > community is based on the same kinda anecdotal evidence. So while I > don't oppose a 'code of conduct' document for GNOME I think we are being > rather naive if we think it will open the floodgates and bring big > amounts of female participation in GNOME projects. > > I would happily support any useful proposal to recruit more women to the > community, but I haven't seen any proposal to date which actually seems > even remotely plausible to accomplish anything. Here are some more: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-women-list/2006-May/msg1.html > Instead we talk about it > a lot and when no good solutions/ideas are produced we instead fall back > to cliches about being a more cuddly community. (I also question the > universal truth of the claims about women being less harsh/rude, I have > known women who could even give Jammie Zawinski a run for his money :). I agree. I think it's more that women are more likely to be beginners, and unfamiliar with this harshness, and we need to welcome beginners more. > So based on Dave's numbers of 2 in 47, it means that even if we manage > to recruit 50% of the women doing IT studies at that University, which > would be a percentage enormously bigger than the percentage we recruit > among male students, we would only manage to recruit 1 woman, which > wouldn't alter the demographic landscape of the GNOME community much. > > The same goes for Asians, our fallback to rude/harsh community as the > explanation for their lack of involvement is more a product of our own > failure to get them involved than a product of a real understanding of > the actual reasons. I think that when we don't fully understand a > problem we have a tendency to start grasping for explanations. > Explanations which tend to say more about ourselves than about the > situation we are trying to explain. This is based on what people who live in Asia have said. It could be wrong. There's no harm in trying it, in the absence of anything better. > So if we are getting a 'code of conduct' document lets do it because we > think its a nice thing to do for ourselves, for the people who are in > the community today, not because we delude ourselves into thinking its > the factor keeping women and asians out of the community. Hence, why there was no mention of gender in my initial email. I mentioned it in backup because it's one group of people who have consistently said that it's a problem. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code Of Conduct
On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 20:35 +0300, Baris Cicek wrote: > On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 19:09 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: > > On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 19:57 +0300, Baris Cicek wrote: > > > I wanted to put my 2 cents on this women involvement issue. > > > > > > Actually women in proprietary software market have a good motivation > > > like earning money from what they do. But in free software world, they > > > hardly have this motivation, and most of time it's volunteer work. > > > > This is true of everyone, regardless of their gender. > > Absolutely. I also think that if number jumps from 1.5 to 23 for > females, similar ratios can be given for tech people working for free > software compared to proprietary software. Erm, that doesn't make sense. Let's say that 77% of the proprietary developers are male. But 99% of the GNOME hackers are male. That's not a similar ratio. I think you are confusing the groups here. A Venn diagram may be necessary. > > > I doubt that female enthusiasm to IT is high in the world. Therefore > > > they need some motivation to get involved. It's something to do with the > > > loving what you do in Free Software world, and women mostly choose other > > > things than staying by the computer for hours. If we go deep into this > > > gender psychology and genetic closeness to particular activities should > > > be considered. > > > > By consider, you maybe mean "use as an excuse". I don't think you have > > the evidence to say that women are inherently incapable or unwilling to > > do technical work. Not so long ago, it was acceptable to say the same > > thing about people of different races. That was wrong, and this is > > wrong. > Being incapable of and unwilling to are different things. "Incapable of wanting to" then. It doesn't sound much better to me, and you are still implying biological/genetic differences as the cause for lack of female involvement in an industry and society that obviously makes involvement difficult. It's not a perfect world so it's not all their fault. > One is > incapability and one is a choice. I'm just trying to say that "from what > I have seen", women do not chose it. Like they don't chose to work at a > construction or at mines. They aren't welcomed there either. My sister is a mine engineer. In many parts of the world she's not allowed to work in mines, and I don't believe she has equal opportunities in any parts of the world. > I do respect that. Really. Also those personal observations would really > change country by country. But numbers you have showed is self evident > that gender difference has something to do with it. It's not self evident. You are confusing cause and effect and leaping to an offensive conclusion. [snip] > But maybe finding > > > some really handsome hackers, and opening a beauty saloon with GNOME > > > installed computers might help. (was a joke :). > > > > You need to recognise that there is a problem and avoid this kind of > > nonsense. It's not necessary and it's not helpful. It should be easy for > > you to understand that it can make someone feel unwelcome. > > I would not want a sentence that I told to undercover my other sayings. > My joke was a general one, similar to boys with cars and girls. But > still if any one find it offensive, I'm sorry. We need to be the solution. The wider society means that women expect not to be taken seriously in GNOME. Try not to prove them right too much. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code Of Conduct
On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 20:15 +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote:
> I thought the main deterrent was arrogant and dictator-like developers
> who pat each other in the back and ignore the requests of users.
> Adding more rules seems pointless there ;)
That's not very nice, and I don't believe that it's accurate. It's this
kind of aggressive attacking style that I think we should try to avoid,
and which we usually do avoid. It just upsets people unnecessarily.
> Seriosly, while a code of conduct is a good thing to follow, having it
> written down somewhere immediately means enforcing it ("officially")
> too.
>
> Which means it will be hacked to pieces with interpetations of it
> ("was this a minor incident or was it a grave mistake? But the other
> guy said this and that"). Which means there will be a need to define
> the correct interpetation of the code...
We need to make it fairly obvious that that kind of pointless
unproductive behaviour doesn't belong in our community. We don't need
more long irrelevant threads.
> ...which will mean assigning a commitee to evaluate the definitions and ...
>
> Ok, maybe I'm being somewhat pessimistic about this.
>
> But then again, isn't the HIG read as a law and questioned in terms of
> interpetations way too often, while its purpose is only to remind and
> suggest known good behaviour?
I think it's mostly used in the correct way. But it's normal for
beginners to take time to understand how best to use it.
--
Murray Cumming
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com
___
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Re: Code Of Conduct
On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 19:57 +0300, Baris Cicek wrote: > I wanted to put my 2 cents on this women involvement issue. > > Actually women in proprietary software market have a good motivation > like earning money from what they do. But in free software world, they > hardly have this motivation, and most of time it's volunteer work. This is true of everyone, regardless of their gender. > I doubt that female enthusiasm to IT is high in the world. Therefore > they need some motivation to get involved. It's something to do with the > loving what you do in Free Software world, and women mostly choose other > things than staying by the computer for hours. If we go deep into this > gender psychology and genetic closeness to particular activities should > be considered. By consider, you maybe mean "use as an excuse". I don't think you have the evidence to say that women are inherently incapable or unwilling to do technical work. Not so long ago, it was acceptable to say the same thing about people of different races. That was wrong, and this is wrong. > From where I live (ie. Turkey) most women in the IT world are only there > for earning money, I have quite a wide experience of the industry. I've worked with hundreds of software developers in tens of companies. I know that most people are only in it for the money. The percentage of I.T. people who love software enough to work on Open Source is tiny. I have not noticed any gender-based differences. However, even my wide experience is probably not statistically significant, so treat it as anecdotal evidence. > and those I doubt they would ever touch computer at > home or elsewhere from their office. Sure thing that there are some who > loves to use computers. But that's really few, which won't exceed > fingers of an hand. > > It's not easy to increase women involvement in that sense. We need to > find motivation, and proprietary world does it by giving money. But > nothing comes to my mind for Free Software world. I doubt it would be > easy to change generic women behavior and eagerness. But maybe finding > some really handsome hackers, and opening a beauty saloon with GNOME > installed computers might help. (was a joke :). You need to recognise that there is a problem and avoid this kind of nonsense. It's not necessary and it's not helpful. It should be easy for you to understand that it can make someone feel unwelcome. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code Of Conduct
On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 23:16 +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote: > On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 04:47:40PM +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: > > > Apparently, yes: This is one plausible explanation for our disastrous (1%) > > female involvement and low asian involvement. That 1% is so scary that I > > can't see how we can make it worse, so I'm for all kinds of crazy > > experiments to fix it. > > Not to dispute that affirmative action is a good thing, but > perhaps we're on the wrong level here. > > A quick browse of intake statistics for the University of Western > Australia says that of 47 BCompSc freshers last year, only 2 were > women. For BEng (all majors) the female intake was only 10%. We seem to be far below 10%. And way below the 25% or so number that I've read for general proprietary involvement. I agree that wider society is the problem, and I think we should be the solution, but we are not quite there yet. > Also of interest, a (female) colleague asked where we're getting our > 1% contribution statistic from. It sounds believable, but is it > people with CVS accounts, or does it include translators who send > translations to their i18n team leader. Did someone just look > through a list of names and guess the genders? Similarly for > "asianness" (sic). Are we just using the domain names on their > email addresses? > > Perhaps we should be looking towards going forces with other groups > for a "women in open source drive" or even a "women in IT" drive. I > know that Pia Waugh has really gotten behind this in Australia. Yes, the current people on [EMAIL PROTECTED] seems to be involved in Ubuntu and Debian. I'm sure they'd welcome ideas. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code Of Conduct
> I would hate to see us resort to written, legalistic rules If your lawyer wrote rules like these then you'd have to fire him. I'm aiming for something warm and friendly. You are right to be wary of rules for their own sake. But I think it's OK to say what standard of behaviour is required in a general way. Even Ubuntu's Code of Conduct is not very legalistic, but I still found it unnecessarily beaurocratic when I first saw it. However, it seems to be very effective, and I'd like some of that effect in GNOME. > (which > encourage gaming and letter-of-law over spirit-of-law) when a strong > culture should suffice, particularly at our size. What it feels like > such a thing advertises is 'we're so weak we need rules where common > sense and politeness should suffice', not 'we care.' > > Additionally, this feels like a solution looking for a problem- have > we ever had significant problems stopping aggressive or rude behavior? Apparently, yes: This is one plausible explanation for our disastrous (1%) female involvement and low asian involvement. That 1% is so scary that I can't see how we can make it worse, so I'm for all kinds of crazy experiments to fix it. I do think GNOME is better than most though. I'd like to use this code of conduct to advertise that we are better. > We haven't had any of it on any of the primary mailing lists since > crazy orb-boy that I can remember, and that was dealt with fairly > promptly. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Code Of Conduct
I would like GNOME to have a code of conduct to: 1. Make it easier to stop aggressive or rude behaviour. This discourages new contributors, though I think we are pretty good compared to some less user-centric F/OSS communities. 2. Advertise to the world that we are already a pleasant welcoming community. I think this is a big part of Ubuntu's success at getting new contributors. But I'd like our code of conduct to be a little shorter and I don't think we need a whole organisation to police it. At the least, it should just be how we expect people to behave on mailing lists and IRC and it could be up to the administrator of that list or channel to decide whether somone's conduct is unacceptable. But maybe some people would be reassured by the existence of some group that they could go to in extreme circumstances. Here's a simple start: http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct What do you think? What else would you like to see there? Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Asking more information to prospective members
On Mon, 2006-05-22 at 19:27 +0300, Baris Cicek wrote: > Hi all; > > Murray asked on membership-committee list if we should ask to > prospective members these questions, which are optional to answer: > gender, to track lack of female involvement; Hopefully, to track increased involvement. > nationality, to track lack of Asian involvement; > > And one more can be: > public key, we can encrypt ballots in future. > > Lastly we recently started asking 'type not-spam in text box ' question > to get rid of spam. > > Encrypting ballots and managing public keys will need more technical > changes in the system, but I just wanted to include this to so as to > start a prior discussion. > > For other questions, I don't see any problem with asking them. Gender > part might be useful for communication as well, as it's not easy to > separate male and female with international names. > > And for nationality we can limit it just for regions instead of all > nations as this thing gets too political when you include one or forget > to include another. > > And finally, what do you think about it? Thanks, Baris. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Event Box for North America
> Could be this be able for Latin America too? [snip] The European box has shown that we have enough difficulty planning when we have to tell UPS about the pick up 2/3 days before the delivery time. People either think of it the day before the event, or just expect the box to magically arrive without their involvement, and then don't plan time to have the box sent back. Unfortunately, I don't think this will be much more fun if we add customs delays. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Notes from the Desktop Architects Meeting
[snip] > One thing that was highlighted by some of the Chinese people during the > discussion about this is that there is, unfortunately, a cultural > difference that makes it hard for lots of Asian people to contribute. So we really need those people to imagine or suggest an environment where they could get more done, working with each other and us. There's a lot of motivation to give them what they need. [snip] Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for comments on where to have GUADEC in 2007
[snip] > The organization of the event > also seems to be supported by the local chamber of commerce. In the > Birmingham bid, the UCE is described as "[...] investigated as a > possible venue". I think as of now, Lyon offers more warranty on the > actual place where the event will take place. [snip] Yeah, the venue (and it's potential price/cost) is the biggest risk. I think that a letter of committment from the venue should be possible before the host city is chosen. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Summer of Code
On Wed, 2006-04-19 at 12:45 +0200, Quim Gil wrote: > Not sure if this is the right place and time to ask this, but I was > curious anyway... > > I haven't followed Glom closely. However, I wonder if you plan to make > it like part of the GNOME Office "suite". Yes, I would like that, though I can't promise to do much integration work very quickly myself. I think it should be there instead of mergeant, because it actually does things. Mergeant is more of a developer's tool, offering easier ways to use SQL, instead of offering higher-level functionality that regular users actually need. > On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 18:56 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: > > I have some Glom tasks that are quite involved. They seem suitable > > because > > a) They need some investigation and hacking time > > b) They don't need development of any fundamentally new techniques or > > technologies. > > > > It's not an official part of GNOME, but I wonder if it would be OK to > > add them to the GNOME list? > > -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Summer of Code
On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 13:35 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote: > Le samedi 15 avril 2006 à 16:52 +0800, Davyd Madeley a écrit : > > Someone has asked if the GNOME Foundation is going to be part of the > > 2006 Google Summer of Code, but I don't know the answer. > > > > Can someone answer this question? > > The answer is yes. I have some Glom tasks that are quite involved. They seem suitable because a) They need some investigation and hacking time b) They don't need development of any fundamentally new techniques or technologies. It's not an official part of GNOME, but I wonder if it would be OK to add them to the GNOME list? -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: How to get involved and may be train for future board service
On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 09:38 +0100, Quim Gil wrote: > On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 15:40 +0100, Anne Østergaard wrote: > > > Some of us on the board are nice persons:) -so don't hisitate to contact > > us. > > Agreed. ;) > > However, it would be helpful a page under http://foundation.gnome.org/ > explaining who is currently in the board, who assumes what > responsibilities, what are the current tasks being done, for which > topics it is good to contact the board, and so on. That'd be good. For now, there's the list of board members here: http://foundation.gnome.org/about/ > If there are already pages in live.gnome.org or somewhere else > explaining this (i.e. links to the minutes), you could simply link them. > > This page should be visible from the Foundation homepage i.e. having a > link in the right column navigation block. > > Sometime I also think it would be good for the board to have a ticketing > system like the sysadmins have, so sender & receiver know that all > requests are stored somewhere. But I don't know if it's worth for the > amount of requests the board gets (do you receive many? or am I the only > spammer?) ;) > -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: How to get involved and may be train for future board service
On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 15:40 +0100, Anne Østergaard wrote: [snip] > You just have to look on the action points in the minutes. [snip] You, or maybe the person writing the minutes, can help by keeping the list of meetings minutes up-to-date here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPublic and linking to it in such emails. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting 2006/Feb/15
On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 13:54 +, Bill Haneman wrote: > On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 13:48, Dave Neary wrote: > ... > > I think it'd be a good idea to get a proper legal opinion on defending our > > marks, and setting up our trademark policy to be as liberal as possible > > without > > losing them. > > I agree. I thought this had already happened, and the lawyers had > replied "we don't know", approximately. Perhaps I am remembering > incorrectly - who was it who has spoken to legal counsel about this so > far? Our current guidelines are based on fairly clear instructions that were communicated to us from our lawyers. However, I don't have much confidence in how that communication happened, so it's probably worthwhile for a legally clueful member of the new board (such as Luis) to double-check it with the lawyers. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: gnome-logos package
On Sat, 2005-12-17 at 18:30 +, Alan Cox wrote: [snip] > Having a logo for a program which is a > "gnome program" and for "gnome developer" ought to be doable given the > right definition, and "foundation member" is definitely one that can be > done today as the foundation has a defined membership. We already have a GNOME member logo, or that start of one. There's also discussion in the wiki about (probably self-policing) certification requirements, though I think it's unnecessarily fine-grained. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME strongly supports open standards including OpenDocument Format
On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 20:51 -0500, Richard M. Stallman wrote: > > > We might even consider a press release explaining our point of view. > > [snip] > > > > Fine with me, though I don't think anybody will notice. > > Just making a statement may not have much effect. However, asking > visitors to the site to write to politicians can have more effect. OK. Who has a draft statement or web page? -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME strongly supports open standards including OpenDocument Format
> I think this is a good idea; however, I'm not sure GNOME developers > agree with this as a group. > > For example, people still feel that by default GNOME should ship with > stuff that makes it easy to encode to mp3 or rip CD's for their hardware > devices that do not support open formats; or that GNOME should play > DVD's. > > Maybe a check with the developer base is needed first ? Putting up such > a statement as the Foundation and then having a lot of developers > disagree with it in practice seems a bad situation to be in. Who's going to be against encouraging open standards? For what possible reason? That's like being against cute puppies. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME strongly supports open standards including OpenDocument Format
[snip] > If the board and the foundation members agree - and I hope we all do - > then we could draft a short statement to show on our website at the same > place where we have expressed that GNOME Foundation is against software > patents. > > We might even consider a press release explaining our point of view. [snip] Fine with me, though I don't think anybody will notice. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [Off Topic] We need "Vendor"s? [was Words to Avoid "Vendor"]
[snip] > I want GNOME to be a free software desktop. And while I welcome 3rd > party developers building software on the platform, I don't think it's > consistent with the goals of the project to encourage it, by putting > this aspect of our platform forward as a major selling point. Does that > make me a ridiculous extremist too? I think it's a bit silly, but the difference is that RMS would be incapable of saying "I welcome 3rd party [proprietary] developers building software on the platform". Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [Off Topic] We need "Vendor"s? [was Words to Avoid "Vendor"]
On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 21:06 -0500, Richard M. Stallman wrote: > > We want to encourage non-free apps to use GNOME, but we don't want to > > appear to grant those non-free apps ethical legitimacy. We have to > > choose our words with care to achieve both goals at once. > > These are your priorities. Other people have other priorities, though they > have the same aims. It's a difference of strategy, not of ideology. > > I think it is a difference of values. I resent the implication. You can't label people as immoral just because they don't blindly agree with you on every little thing. > Not everyone involved with GNOME > thinks that free vs proprietary software is a matter of right vs wrong. > > That is precisely why I'm looking for like-minded candidates to > endorse for the board. Luckily, I don't believe any of the candidates share your ridiculous extremist self-belief. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [Off Topic] We need "Vendor"s? [was Words to Avoid "Vendor"]
> We want to encourage non-free apps to use GNOME, but we don't want to > appear to grant those non-free apps ethical legitimacy. We have to > choose our words with care to achieve both goals at once. These are your priorities. Other people have other priorities, though they have the same aims. It's a difference of strategy, not of ideology. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
