Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:11 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: Alan Cox wrote: I just want to put this in perspective: the foundation has $200,000 in the bank, with guaranteed income of $100,000 a year approx. One employee costs at least $70,000 per year, and depending on the role up to $100,000 or more. Manpower is expensive :) American manpower is expensive. French manpower is equally expensive. And British manpower too. American manpower on the coasts is expensive. People in the middle of the country enjoy the same quality of life for roughly half the income. It's slightly higher in the big cities, but even Chicago is still much cheaper than, say, LA. The price of non-American manpower will depend in part on the exchange rate of the dollar with the respective currency. And right now, the dollar won't get you as much in Europe as it used to. A director, perhaps, is good to have in the Boston area. But a sysadmin could be living anywhere. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Nov 30, 2007 2:30 PM, Philip Van Hoof [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think the foundation could setup (orchestrate) meetings (or interops or however you want to call them) with the different teams. Gather the right people and put them together from time to times. I agree 100% with this, and it is part of mycampaign. I'm not talking about fancy meetings but casual get togethers with no fancy catering. A group of individuals who share the same interests and have the expertise to solve a given issue. Think of what happened during GUADEC when a bunch of guys went out for lunch(?) and hacked on webkit. Cheers, -- Og B. Maciel [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG Keys: D5CFC202 http://www.ogmaciel.com (en_US) http://blog.ogmaciel.com (pt_BR) ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 12:15 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:18 +, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: On 12/1/07, Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Doing that quality control could eat some (human) resources. Also as John says this could easily lead to an unintentioned favouritism. Unintentioned favouritism is a cheap reason to avoid all innovation from now on: o. Let's start with our license: I think that picking the GPL license implies an unintentioned favouritism for GNU. o. We should also not support ODF, because that implies an unintentioned favouritism for a company called Sun, and also for Novell! Please feel the sarcasm. If we are going to try to stop expressing any form of unintentioned favouritism, we might as well just stop at all. This is a completely straw man argument Philip. By restricting competition through favoritism we actually kill innovation. There are times when we will endorse already dominant ideologies that are in-line with our own and reject those that are dangerous, but I have never seen the board stray from our partner neutrality by pushing for something that hasn't already proved itself. i.e The board isn't going to come up with its own license and office format and push those as the one true way of doing things. To that effect if a company is interested or individuals wanted to put together a training program they could come to us and request we overview the course for endorsement and rights to use our trademarks. There are always these details to consider and there are consequences to even the smallest detail. I'm going to call you out here. You come to us with a set of questions which I can sum up to - If elected will you get the board to fund my pet projects? I'll give you this Philip, you have some nice high level ideas. What you lack is the details to get there - the step by step map that considers all the consequences and routes around them. I learned a great deal about this when I went to speak to Representative Barney Frank. I was helping push the Education For All Act which would provide US aid funding for a basic level of education to children around the world. Representative Frank turned around and said that all sounds really good but how do we get there? Where do the funds come from? What is your plan? Lesson learned - it is all about how you get there and not just the end results. If a project is worthwhile it will prove itself by getting itself off the ground and be able to sustain itself. The foundation comes in when such projects need a little push to get to the next level. A project should not rely solely on the Foundation because, lets face it, our resources are limited and there are a number of good project out there that could use our help. We are going to go for the ones that have a high probability of success and give us the biggest bang for our buck. -- John (J5) Palmieri [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
GNOME is based on a philosophy, but it is not just a philosophy. It is a project to develop and maintain a desktop environment. A technical project has to make specific technical decisions. It can't favor all the options that fit the philosophy; often it has to choose an avenue and follow it. Whatever the choices, some might call them favoritism, but that's tough. Choosing can't be avoided. GNOME is a desktop environment, but it is not just a desktop environment. It is also based on a philosophy of free software and freedom. That philosophy sometimes yields specific ethical reasons for making specific technical choices. To someone who thinks only in terms of technology, these might seem like favoritism, but favoring the ethical (or what leads to it) over the unethical is right and proper. The sort of favoritism that would be improper is to make a decision for the sake of profit (rather than the success of GNOME and the triumph of freedom). ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
Hi, Sorry, I'll reply briefly because my free time is limited today. I hope it will be understandable :-) Le vendredi 30 novembre 2007, à 02:51 +0100, Philip Van Hoof a écrit : Hi there, The questions: o. Given that the Foundation of GNOME has plenty of money, will you if elected vote to spend this money on important projects? Hrm. I wouldn't say we have a lot of money, but well, let's answer your questions :-) Being mostly interested in mobile targets and GNOME Mobile, I could certainly come up with some projects that might both increase deployment of our GNOME technologies on mobile devices and increase the amount of contributors. Both reasons are, I think, part of the reason why our Foundation exists. - Development on language bindings, like a binding generator for for example Android and other mobile targets (plenty of our components don't require Gtk+ yet could run on this target) - Funding development on development tools (like the new Anjuta) - Development on a WinCE port of Gtk+ - Development on a P.I.P.S. (Symbian with POSIX) port of Gtk+ - Improve the existing Win32 target of Gtk+ We can do it, but it costs a lot and I'm not sure that's the best way to use our money. If we get some funding for those things, then that'd be great. If you really want this to happen, you can help by looking for funds. Note that having a business development person could help here too... - Employ a maintainer and/or additional developers for Gtk+'s development This has been discussed this year (there's a thread on gtk-devel-list and there was a discussion at GUADEC). The consensus was that it was not the best way to help GTK+. - Pay people to travel to schools and universities to educate students about GNOME (serious educating, not just doing cheap presentations) I don't think that's the right way to do it. The right way is to work with people teaching there. We've started doing this this year, but it needs more help to get results. Volunteers are welcome, contacts in universities are welcome. - ... (for making these decisions we need people who'll make real and hard decisions) o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam I've no strong opinion, so yes, why not. But then, why GNOME Mobile and not GNOME. Also, related to this, I'd more interested in seeing a GNOME Certification to certify applications (we've talked about this a few years ago already). Again, we need a group of people to dive into this and see what should be done to make this happen. o. How are you planning to help the GNOME community overcome the fact that we have relatively few technical leadership? Can you elaborate on this? - By waiting for the integration our softwares to turn into something that looks a lot like that O.S. called CHA-OS? - By letting companies like Nokia, Novell, ... set our goals? I think this is what's happening right now. Might be fine imo. I'd love to have more details on all this. How are they setting our goals? Isn't their goals our goals too anyway? etc. Note that, however, our users sometimes get confused by this: o. People thinking that Miguel De Icaza, Novell and GNOME are one entity. (I love your work Miguel, don't get me wrong. A lot of GNOME people do) o. Too late announcing of GNOME developers joining the OOXML discussions (I think it's great that we are among the people defining this, don't get me wrong. But our technical leadership, the one that we lack, should have made our position clear to the audience (our users) before getting Slashdotted by the religious ones in the land of freesoftware. This is not really about technical leadership, but about how GNOME is seen from the outside. Having one really strong leader would help fix those issues, but fixing our communication is also a reasonable way to achieve this. And it's probably easier :-) How to fix our communication is an interesting topic. I have no magical answer for this, and I'd welcome input. We can of course communicate better (the foundation blog Jeff created can help). We can make people known to the outside, so that the GNOME = Miguel feeling disappears (GNOME Journal interview, etc.). Also, the website rework can play a big role here. I can see the Foundation coordinating all this, but I it's not a topic that is 100% Foundation: it's really about the whole project. (and everybody can help, I know, I'm repeating this every now and then) I think that we are having quite a handicap by this, and that we should do something about it. This year. How will you do that? What is your strategy? Notes on my mind: o. Technical leadership != one person dictatorship, we can work with
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
Hi, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: I still don't think Foundation should get involved into saying place X is an approbed training center, I fear that would go beyond its scope. But the foundation could publish a syllabus and some sample exams, and then licence training institutes and companies to offer the training (with quality control of the training course) - in the way LPI does. In fact, this would be a decent follow-on from the idea that Andy Oram proposed (don't have the link right now) about having quizzes at the bottom of documentation pages to ensure that the material is understandable and that the lessons to be learned are absorbed by the reader - both to help the reader validate their learning, and to get live feedback on documentation quality to identify areas in need of improvement. All of this stuff could do with what Edd Dumbill suggested some time ago - an editor dedicated to maintaining, organising, and improving GNOME's developer documentation. One more thing we don't really have the budget for (yet) :) Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 18:42 -0700, Elijah Newren wrote: Hi, As warned about earlier in this election (by someone with better foresight than I have), when there isn't an organized call for questions people will fire off zillions of them at random. This puts an unreasonable burden on not only the candidates who feel obligated to spend time responding to an unbounded and haphazard collection of interrogations, but also similarly burdens the general community with too much email. You also find people asking additional questions based on misunderstandings due to the fact that they simply weren't able to keep up with all the other email (I have seen this in multiple threads, not just this one.) What will you as a candidate do to make sure we avoid this mess in the future? This was a simple issue with the Membership Committee practice this year. It could still be fixed this year too, but seems questions keep coming as long as voting is open :). Anyway, for next year, MC will make sure this doesn't happen, and board will make sure to double check it! behdad Elijah [With apologies to Philip--it wasn't really his fault since no one asked the general membership for questions in an organized fashion...but while his email probably makes some interesting points it very much qualifies as excessively long and spurred my comments.] -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On 12/1/07, Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: I still don't think Foundation should get involved into saying place X is an approbed training center, I fear that would go beyond its scope. But the foundation could publish a syllabus and some sample exams, and then licence training institutes and companies to offer the training (with quality control of the training course) - in the way LPI does. Doing that quality control could eat some (human) resources. Also as John says this could easily lead to an unintentioned favouritism. I totally agree with him about being against partnering with an entity over another. The cons would outweight the benefits, I think we would get a lot of free problems from stuff like this. I imagine fountains of FUD on every corner. I really don't like the idea. In fact, this would be a decent follow-on from the idea that Andy Oram proposed (don't have the link right now) about having quizzes at the bottom of documentation pages to ensure that the material is understandable and that the lessons to be learned are absorbed by the reader - both to help the reader validate their learning, and to get live feedback on documentation quality to identify areas in need of improvement. This sounds like a nice idea, like a GNOMEpardy :). I think it could take a good ammount of work to ellaborate those questions however. Consider that we would also have to create and maintain some infrastructure for this. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:18 +, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: On 12/1/07, Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Doing that quality control could eat some (human) resources. Also as John says this could easily lead to an unintentioned favouritism. Unintentioned favouritism is a cheap reason to avoid all innovation from now on: o. Let's start with our license: I think that picking the GPL license implies an unintentioned favouritism for GNU. o. We should also not support ODF, because that implies an unintentioned favouritism for a company called Sun, and also for Novell! Please feel the sarcasm. If we are going to try to stop expressing any form of unintentioned favouritism, we might as well just stop at all. The cons would outweight the benefits, I think we would get a lot of free problems from stuff like this. Name one that any one of our technology decisions doesn't have, My project creates opinions from people who prefer MAPI over IMAP, web clients over normal E-mail, XMPP over SMTP, ... Lot's of free problems. Realism! I imagine fountains of FUD on every corner. That's unavoidable for anything we do. -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Sat, 01 Dec 2007 10:11:15 +0100 Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alan Cox wrote: I just want to put this in perspective: the foundation has $200,000 in the bank, with guaranteed income of $100,000 a year approx. One employee costs at least $70,000 per year, and depending on the role up to $100,000 or more. Manpower is expensive :) American manpower is expensive. French manpower is equally expensive. And British manpower too. Even more so. Especially compared to Brazil, India and Eastern Europe. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On 12/1/07, Philip Van Hoof [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:18 +, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: On 12/1/07, Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Doing that quality control could eat some (human) resources. Also as John says this could easily lead to an unintentioned favouritism. Unintentioned favouritism is a cheap reason to avoid all innovation from now on: No, you are misinterpretaing my words, it's quite different to talk about choosing GPL over $something-else and choosing place-X over place-Y. On the current context, choosing to endorse place-X's training courses would imply that we are helping them make profit. Choosing GPL or supporting ODF is a totally different matter. o. Let's start with our license: I think that picking the GPL license implies an unintentioned favouritism for GNU. o. We should also not support ODF, because that implies an unintentioned favouritism for a company called Sun, and also for Novell! Please feel the sarcasm. If we are going to try to stop expressing any form of unintentioned favouritism, we might as well just stop at all. The cons would outweight the benefits, I think we would get a lot of free problems from stuff like this. Name one that any one of our technology decisions doesn't have, My project creates opinions from people who prefer MAPI over IMAP, web clients over normal E-mail, XMPP over SMTP, ... Different matter, I don't think Tinymail could be a source of the same type of problems I'm thinking of. To clarify, I'm thinking more about the social implicances of such decision, lots of people would think we are discriminating some and favouring others, among other things. The quality of what we endorse also worries me a lot, we can try really hard to watch over the quality of the courses or training but it's impossible to guarantee 100% quality, hence we would end with people having papers that have our sign saying yes, this guy knows how to hack GNOME stuff and they don't necessarily would even know how to apt-get something. Lot's of free problems. Realism! I imagine fountains of FUD on every corner. That's unavoidable for anything we do. Nope, I don't think nobody has raised any kind of FUD about a lot of things we do. As an example, let's take Boston Summit: nobody accuses us of favouring Boston because it's just a hacker meeting, no one is making money with it directly. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
Hey On 11/30/07, Bastian, Waldo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam If the examination is offered by a third party, then I would say they are violating the trademark guidelines :). But if you suggest that GNOME via the Foundation could offer a certification, I wouldn't like to see that, sadly certifications tend to mean nothing with time due to people taking them just to pass the test. I think it would be more healthy to have easier ways for contributors to show their work and prove how much they have given to the project, hence showing their possible employer that they surely rock. Although the company that I work for surely employs a few rock stars, more often a project team or company is just looking for someone who knows how to use GTK+ widgets (think bellcurve). I believe the objective here would be to make it easier for commercial companies to develop solutions based on GNOME and part of the problem that such companies face is finding developers that are familiar with the technology. Reducing that hurdle will help to make the technology more popular. I don't think the Foundation should offer certification itself but maybe it could work together with an existing institute on expanding its training offerings around Gnome technology. Just my 2 ct. Interesting, I feel that anyway certifications tend to get worth nothing when people start taking them just to pass them, but still I see your point of letting people not in GNOME but users of GNOME's technology to prove they know that stuff. Certification implemented as training could be a different matter, as long as the real juice of the thing is the training. I still don't think Foundation should get involved into saying place X is an approbed training center, I fear that would go beyond its scope. thanks for your comment, Diego ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 20:28 +, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: Hey On 11/30/07, Bastian, Waldo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam If the examination is offered by a third party, then I would say they are violating the trademark guidelines :). But if you suggest that GNOME via the Foundation could offer a certification, I wouldn't like to see that, sadly certifications tend to mean nothing with time due to people taking them just to pass the test. I think it would be more healthy to have easier ways for contributors to show their work and prove how much they have given to the project, hence showing their possible employer that they surely rock. Although the company that I work for surely employs a few rock stars, more often a project team or company is just looking for someone who knows how to use GTK+ widgets (think bellcurve). I believe the objective here would be to make it easier for commercial companies to develop solutions based on GNOME and part of the problem that such companies face is finding developers that are familiar with the technology. Reducing that hurdle will help to make the technology more popular. I don't think the Foundation should offer certification itself but maybe it could work together with an existing institute on expanding its training offerings around Gnome technology. Just my 2 ct. Interesting, I feel that anyway certifications tend to get worth nothing when people start taking them just to pass them, but still I see your point of letting people not in GNOME but users of GNOME's technology to prove they know that stuff. Certification implemented as training could be a different matter, as long as the real juice of the thing is the training. I still don't think Foundation should get involved into saying place X is an approbed training center, I fear that would go beyond its scope. I also fear it would lead to favoritism though I am all for helping out a company develop course-ware I am very much opposed to partnering with one entity over another. -- John (J5) Palmieri [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]
quote who=Elijah Newren What will you as a candidate do to make sure we avoid this mess in the future? Work with the Membership Committee to document their practices and make sure they perform them more consistently in future years. During the current term, I have already made that you won't have to deal with this again for 18 months. :-) - Jeff -- GNOME.conf.au 2008: Melbourne, Australia http://live.gnome.org/Melbourne2008 Itanium: A synthetic market-group tested plasticised square. - Jamie Wilkinson ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]
Hey On 11/30/07, Elijah Newren [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, (...) What will you as a candidate do to make sure we avoid this mess in the future? I can only think of asking for question much sooner or proposing some topics under which to fill questions. But honestly, I don't know if anything could guarantee people participating more *before* this period. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]
Hi, As warned about earlier in this election (by someone with better foresight than I have), when there isn't an organized call for questions people will fire off zillions of them at random. This puts an unreasonable burden on not only the candidates who feel obligated to spend time responding to an unbounded and haphazard collection of interrogations, but also similarly burdens the general community with too much email. You also find people asking additional questions based on misunderstandings due to the fact that they simply weren't able to keep up with all the other email (I have seen this in multiple threads, not just this one.) What will you as a candidate do to make sure we avoid this mess in the future? Elijah [With apologies to Philip--it wasn't really his fault since no one asked the general membership for questions in an organized fashion...but while his email probably makes some interesting points it very much qualifies as excessively long and spurred my comments.] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]
quote who=Jeff Waugh Work with the Membership Committee to document their practices and make sure they perform them more consistently in future years. Miss one word and it changes the entire tone... and help make sure. They have done a great job this year, though as a result of numerous changes to the volunteer team a couple of things have been dropped on the floor (such as question gathering from the community and linking to the election rules in the announcement). Easy to fix for the future. It's generally a pretty thankless task, so... thanks to the membership committee! :-) - Jeff -- linux.conf.au 2008: Melbourne, Australiahttp://lca2008.linux.org.au/ You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run. - Kenny Rogers, The Gambler ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
RE: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 20:30 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: I think the foundation could setup (orchestrate) meetings (or interops or however you want to call them) with the different teams. Gather the right people and put them together from time to times. The foundation tries to do that, and you will see more of these meeting this coming year. Note however that while the board tries to be proactive in proposing meetings, foundation members / hackers are the ones who should ask foundation / board for funding. I don't remember ever seeing any such proposal from your side. For reference, GNOME Foundation this year funded a java-gnome summit and an a11y summit. As I said, expect more next year. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
Hi, Philip Van Hoof wrote: o. Given that the Foundation of GNOME has plenty of money, will you if elected vote to spend this money on important projects? I just want to put this in perspective: the foundation has $200,000 in the bank, with guaranteed income of $100,000 a year approx. One employee costs at least $70,000 per year, and depending on the role up to $100,000 or more. Manpower is expensive :) - Development on language bindings, like a binding generator for for example Android and other mobile targets (plenty of our components don't require Gtk+ yet could run on this target) - Funding development on development tools (like the new Anjuta) - Development on a WinCE port of Gtk+ - Development on a P.I.P.S. (Symbian with POSIX) port of Gtk+ There are some good project ideas there, and there are certainly bodies who might be prepared to subsidise them. Someone (?) needs to go hunt for money for one or more of those projects to make them happen. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
RE: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 00:43 -0800, Bastian, Waldo wrote: o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam If the examination is offered by a third party, then I would say they are violating the trademark guidelines :). But if you suggest that GNOME via the Foundation could offer a certification, I wouldn't like to see that, sadly certifications tend to mean nothing with time due to people taking them just to pass the test. I think it would be more healthy to have easier ways for contributors to show their work and prove how much they have given to the project, hence showing their possible employer that they surely rock. Although the company that I work for surely employs a few rock stars, more often a project team or company is just looking for someone who knows how to use GTK+ widgets (think bellcurve). I believe the objective here would be to make it easier for commercial companies to develop solutions based on GNOME and part of the problem that such companies face is finding developers that are familiar with the technology. Exactly. Reducing that hurdle will help to make the technology more popular. I don't think the Foundation should offer certification itself but maybe it could work together with an existing institute on expanding its training offerings around Gnome technology. Just my 2 ct. Indeed. -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 02:51 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: Hi there, The questions: o. Given that the Foundation of GNOME has plenty of money, will you if elected vote to spend this money on important projects? Being mostly interested in mobile targets and GNOME Mobile, I could certainly come up with some projects that might both increase deployment of our GNOME technologies on mobile devices and increase the amount of contributors. Both reasons are, I think, part of the reason why our Foundation exists. - Development on language bindings, like a binding generator for for example Android and other mobile targets (plenty of our components don't require Gtk+ yet could run on this target) - Funding development on development tools (like the new Anjuta) - Development on a WinCE port of Gtk+ - Development on a P.I.P.S. (Symbian with POSIX) port of Gtk+ - Improve the existing Win32 target of Gtk+ - Employ a maintainer and/or additional developers for Gtk+'s development So your questions come from the false notion that the Foundation has plenty of money. While we are better off than years past we are in no way flush with resources. We are looking at hiring a full time administrator and perhaps an admin at some point but doing so will be scrutinized to make sure we are properly allocating our resources. For the above scenarios Philip presents, I don't think these types of spending are in the Foundation's interest in funding as he puts it. Helping out when asked by a developer with hardware, contacts with relevant companies or funding to attend conferences are more in-line with how we should allocate resources. Even then a developer would have to come with a detailed proposal which shows the benefits of such expenditures. There are a million things we can put resources into but we only have a limited amount to go around so we need to carefully select which expenditures will give us the most bang for the buck as they say. - Pay people to travel to schools and universities to educate students about GNOME (serious educating, not just doing cheap presentations) Again we should fund peoples travels but creating jobs can lead to major issues. First and foremost is we don't have the money to do this. The second is, jobs, outside of the day to day administration of the Foundation would create conflict with people in the community who don't get payed. Even the job of system administration could cause conflict and the benefits need to be weighed in light of these issues. In other words leave most of the hiring up to the various companies that use GNOME and only hire within the Foundation after careful consideration of the issues. - ... (for making these decisions we need people who'll make real and hard decisions) And even hard decisions some may not like to hear. o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam It is hard to have an opinion on a title. Who is going to make this exam? What does it certify? Does it conflict with our partners programs or favor one partner over another? o. How are you planning to help the GNOME community overcome the fact that we have relatively few technical leadership? I think we have huge technical leadership. I think leaders pop up every day in different areas. I think the Board's role in developing leaders in general is to identify potential leaders and help them contribute to GNOME through resources like travel and conference sponsorship, by delegating tasks to them and by providing other resources such as hardware/hosting to those who can not procure it themselves. - By waiting for the integration our softwares to turn into something that looks a lot like that O.S. called CHA-OS? I have no idea what you are asking here. - By letting companies like Nokia, Novell, ... set our goals? I think this is what's happening right now. Might be fine imo. Well it is individuals within those companies along with individuals who don't have corporate ties who set direction. Add into the mix the wider Free/Open communities which sets various norms and a more dynamic picture emerges on how GNOME direction is set. Note that, however, our users sometimes get confused by this: o. People thinking that Miguel De Icaza, Novell and GNOME are one entity. (I love your work Miguel, don't get me wrong. A lot of GNOME people do) Some people will think what they want to think and you will never be able to change their views however we could be more transparent than press releases and meeting notes. o. Too late announcing of GNOME developers joining the OOXML discussions (I think it's great that we are among the people defining this, don't get me wrong. But our technical
RE: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 00:43 -0800, Bastian, Waldo wrote: o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam If the examination is offered by a third party, then I would say they are violating the trademark guidelines :). But if you suggest that GNOME via the Foundation could offer a certification, I wouldn't like to see that, sadly certifications tend to mean nothing with time due to people taking them just to pass the test. I think it would be more healthy to have easier ways for contributors to show their work and prove how much they have given to the project, hence showing their possible employer that they surely rock. Although the company that I work for surely employs a few rock stars, more often a project team or company is just looking for someone who knows how to use GTK+ widgets (think bellcurve). I believe the objective here would be to make it easier for commercial companies to develop solutions based on GNOME and part of the problem that such companies face is finding developers that are familiar with the technology. Reducing that hurdle will help to make the technology more popular. I don't think the Foundation should offer certification itself but maybe it could work together with an existing institute on expanding its training offerings around Gnome technology. Just my 2 ct. Cheers, Waldo Waldo, this was a very astute observation. Thanks. -- John (J5) Palmieri [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
