Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

On 12/15/09 4:09 PM, "Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)"  wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 11:49 PM, Dave Neary  wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Lefty wrote:
>>> Given the proposition that proprietary software is "illegitimate", and
>>> the statement above, do you believe that the GNOME Foundation and
>>> community should distance itself from companies which produce proprietary
>>> software?
>>> 
>>> Specifically, should the Advisory Board be dissolved, and should the
>>> Foundation refuse further financial support from the companies that
>>> are currently on the Ad Board?
>> 
>> I for one am interested in Richard's position on this. Mine is clear: I have
>> no problem at all working with companies who want to improve GNOME or the
>> GNOME platform, even if they develop proprietary software. And the money they
>> give to GNOME gets used to improve GNOME, so as long as there are no strings
>> attached, I don't care particularly why they give it.
>> 
>> On the other hand, I feel under no obligation to promote their non-free
>> software offerings, or guilt in encouraging free equivalents of their
>> proprietary components & products.
> 
>   I fee like you took thoughts out of my mind but unlike me were able
> to express them very nicely. :)

I'm actually still hoping to get a response on this...



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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[guido iodice]

Hi to all.

I'm not a GNOME Foundation member, then I apologize for this e-mail. But as
enthusiastic GNOME user, I would like to send you my opinion.

First at all: thank you Richard Stallman and Miguel De Icaza for GNOME idea.
Thank you Miguel for GNOME hacking and for Mono too. Thank you RMS for GCC,
Emacs and other packages of GNU system.  Especially thanks to all GNOME
hackers to improve GNOME every day.
If some of you use/develop/love some proprietary software, this not matter.
Thank you for your free code in GNOME.

As user, my vision is that free software is a competitor of non-free
software. It is simple for me: free software was born to replace proprietary
software.

Not only GNU/Linux is a competitor of Mac OS X and Windows, but all FLOSS
are a competitor of its proprietary counterparts. I.e.: Firefox is a
competitor of IE and Safari (and Chrome, that is partially non-free).
GCC is a competitor of proprietary compilers (and GCC won :-) ).
GNOME was born as a competitor of KDE because it was based on a proprietary
framework. Today GNOME and KDE are friends and both free/open source.

So the Free/Open Source Software is - taking it as a whole - a competitor of
proprietary software.

You may be not in agree with me, but many users see the issue in these
terms. They would like to have free/open tools to replace proprietary tools.
They "feel" free/open source software as a proprietary software
alternative/competitor/replacement.

I often read msdn blogs, google blogs, and other corporate and community
blogs and planets. I never read on msdn something to "legitimate" Mac. Oh
yes, you can read about MS Office for Mac, but it is different. You can read
on GNU website about GNU software for Windows or Mac too. For GNU Project it
is better to use Octave on Windows instead Matlab on Windows.

If floss is a non-floss competitor then it is logic do not advertise or
speaking favorably about non-free software in the GNOME Planet.

Obviously, it is good to analyze proprietary software and learn from it.
IMHO GNOME brings the better ideas from Windows an Mac, and it is better
than Mac and Windows.

But GNOME, on top of a free/open OS, is a replacement of Windows and Mac.
And I think that GNOME should "advertise" its "brothers" in virtualization
software, like QEMU and Virtualbox[1], not vmWare.

Then I think RMS suggestion is essentially logic and coherent with GNOME
mission and with what users expect from it.

Thank you and best regards.

Guido

http://guiodic.wordpress.com


[1] it is distributed as free software too.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)]

Hi,

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 11:49 PM, Dave Neary  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Lefty wrote:
>> Given the proposition that proprietary software is "illegitimate", and
>> the statement above, do you believe that the GNOME Foundation and
>> community should distance itself from companies which produce proprietary
>> software?
>>
>> Specifically, should the Advisory Board be dissolved, and should the
>> Foundation refuse further financial support from the companies that
>> are currently on the Ad Board?
>
> I for one am interested in Richard's position on this. Mine is clear: I have 
> no problem at all working with companies who want to improve GNOME or the 
> GNOME platform, even if they develop proprietary software. And the money they 
> give to GNOME gets used to improve GNOME, so as long as there are no strings 
> attached, I don't care particularly why they give it.
>
> On the other hand, I feel under no obligation to promote their non-free 
> software offerings, or guilt in encouraging free equivalents of their 
> proprietary components & products.

  I fee like you took thoughts out of my mind but unlike me were able
to express them very nicely. :)

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Dave Neary]

Hi,

Lefty wrote:
> Given the proposition that proprietary software is "illegitimate", and
> the statement above, do you believe that the GNOME Foundation and
> community should distance itself from companies which produce proprietary
> software?
> 
> Specifically, should the Advisory Board be dissolved, and should the
> Foundation refuse further financial support from the companies that
> are currently on the Ad Board?

I for one am interested in Richard's position on this. Mine is clear: I have no 
problem at all working with companies who want to improve GNOME or the GNOME 
platform, even if they develop proprietary software. And the money they give to 
GNOME gets used to improve GNOME, so as long as there are no strings attached, 
I don't care particularly why they give it.

On the other hand, I feel under no obligation to promote their non-free 
software offerings, or guilt in encouraging free equivalents of their 
proprietary components & products.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
Lyon, France
Email: dne...@gnome.org
Jabber: dne...@jabber.org

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

Non-free software can't even be "favorably mentioned"?

My second suggestion was to post an official GNOME response when it is
favorably mentioned.  My previous suggestion was for a rule
about a much narrower case.

It seems you've grafted part of one onto part of the other, and now
you're criticizing a combination which nobody proposed.

Wow. You and I have extremely different ideas about "freedom", Mr. Stallman.

When it comes to freedom of expression, I am in favor of the freedom
to advocate any views whatsoever, including favoring proprietary
software.  This is why I am an ACLU member.

I don't know how different your ideas are, but I defend your right to
state them anyway.

However, the issue here is not about what people should be free to
say, it is about what position GNOME should take and how to express
it.  People have a right to publish what they wish, but GNOME also has
a right to take a stand and express that stand in its platforms.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

As it says in the footer of Planet GNOME:
...

*Planet GNOME automatically reposts blog entries from the GNOME community.
Entries on this page are owned by their authors. We do not edit, endorse or
vouch for the contents of individual posts."

This might be adequate for legal purposes, but even when readers
remember seeing it, it won't have much effect on the message they
get from reading the site.

Most people take for granted that proprietary software is normal and
legitimate; they have never seriously considered that it might be
unjust.  When they see, on a GNOME-sponsored site, a blog by one of
the developers of Screw-U-sers discussing progress on the new
version, they think that GNOME has the same view.

The existing GNOME Planet disclaimer won't tell them otherwise, But
maybe a different disclaimer would help, one that specifically
addresses this issue.

Here's one idea for a disclaimer that might do the job:

   Some of the postings here way discuss proprietary software in a way
   that says, or takes for granted, that it is legitimate.
   The GNOME Project regrets these postings and invites everyone
   to use only freedom-respecting software.

So this is my third suggestion.  First I proposed a narrow rule,
then a broader polict of posting official responses, and third
a more articulate and clearer disclaimer.

Other methods my work, too.

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

As a specific example, to the question, "Do you agree that viewing
proprietary software as 'illegitimate', 'immoral', 'antisocial' and/or
'unethical' should be a pre-condition for syndication on Planet GNOME?", so
far 151 respondents have answered "No", only 19 have answered "Yes". That's
about an 8-to-1 ratio.

That goes far beyond what I said, and I would not propose it.  It
seems that a significant minority have views on this issue much
stronger than mine.

What worries me is that you presented this question inaccurately here
as pertaining to my views.  The readers here have seen what I said and
can see the difference.  But if you said the same thing elsewhere,
that would constitute misrepresenting my views to the public.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership (Summary)

[Dave Neary]

Hi,

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> I will, except that I don't know what the process to do that is.  Just
> post to f-l?  How would we make a decision?  Or gather 10% to put it to
> vote?

Edit the Code, if a few people complain they can remove their signatures
(and remove their blogs from PGO, if the maintainers decide that
agreeing with the Code is a precondition for blog syndication). If many
people complain, you can revert the change. No need for a song & dance.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dne...@gnome.org
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Juanjo Marin]

El dom, 13-12-2009 a las 13:08 +0100, Peter Hjalmarsson escribió:
> For gentoo, they have two feeds: the "planet", and the "universe", where
> the planet only aggregates those blog posts that are tagged with gentoo,
> and the universe aggregates the rest.
> I cannot understand why GNOME cannot have this system also?


I totally agree with Peter Hjalmarsson 

> Then for the "planet" you can have a code of conduct of what they are
> allowed to tag as GNOME (i.e. upcoming events in OSS-land where GNOME
> will be represented, development in projects blessed/used by GNOME,
> comments about projects being blessed/used by GNOME, projects
> interesting for people interested in GNOME),

Then Planet GNOME will be a window into the GNOME world, what GNOME
community is doing now, what their plans are and how we are conquer and
free the world ;)

This planet will be very useful because it will give a community vision
of our project. And this is useful not only for the community members,
but also for the people outside the community that want to know about
GNOME.

>  and a "universe" with maybe
> an disclaimer that the posts there can have nothing what so ever to do
> with GNOME.
> 

and Universe GNOME will be a window into the world, work and lives of
GNOME hackers and contributors. Basically Universe GNOME will be what
Planet GNOME is now, maybe without the GNOME related posts. You find
interesting people in the community and you want to know more about them
because you share a common hobby, you learn new things, he/she is
brilliant (there are many!) or whatever. 

I think foundation members, I'm not a member yet, should take into
consideration this solution IMHO.

best regards,

   -- Juanjo Marín


-- 
Juan José Marín Martínez
Tlf: 956009437 (Corp. 409437) Fax: 956009445 (Corp. 409445)
Informática. Consejería de Cultura. DP Cádiz.
Junta de Andalucía



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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

On 12/13/09 8:22 AM, "Richard Stallman"  wrote:
> 
> ...I would not encourage anyone to use
> non-free software even to get money to give to a worthy cause.

I apologize to all, but given this, there's a question that _really_ has to
be asked:

Given the proposition that proprietary software is "illegitimate", and the
statement above, do you believe that the GNOME Foundation and community
should distance itself from companies which produce proprietary software?

Specifically, should the Advisory Board be dissolved, and should the
Foundation refuse further financial support from the companies that are
currently on the Ad Board?


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership (Summary)

[Andy Tai]

It seems that a better idea is to consider the Planet not part of GNOME.
That way GNOME does not have to deal with whatever is in the planet, like
slashdot does not control and is not responsible for the messages by its
posters.

GNOME controls the official web page content.  This planet is not part of
that.

Easier for everyone.

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Lucas Rocha  wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> It's quite obvious that the original thread ended up branching into
> several separate topics. I thought it would be useful to summarize
> some of the key points on each topic in an attempt to bring a more
> practical perspective to the whole discussion.
>
> This is not an official message from the Board. It's just me trying to
> make some sense out of the tons of messages in the thread and, maybe,
> bring a more useful (or at least more clear) "closure" to the
> discussed topics.
>
> -- The original topic: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership
>
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership (Summary)

[Andy Tai]

It seems that a better idea is to consider the Planet not part of GNOME.
That way GNOME does not have to deal with whatever is in the planet, like
slashdot does not control and is not responsible for the messages by its
posters.

GNOME controls the official web page content.  This planet is not part of
that.

Easier for everyone.

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Lucas Rocha  wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> It's quite obvious that the original thread ended up branching into
> several separate topics. I thought it would be useful to summarize
> some of the key points on each topic in an attempt to bring a more
> practical perspective to the whole discussion.
>
> This is not an official message from the Board. It's just me trying to
> make some sense out of the tons of messages in the thread and, maybe,
> bring a more useful (or at least more clear) "closure" to the
> discussed topics.
>
> -- The original topic: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership
>
>
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership (Summary)

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/14/2009 07:41 PM, Lucas Rocha wrote:

- Learn to agree to disagree.
- Criticize ideas, not people presenting them.

Pierre suggested that both items are added to the list of example
behaviours under "Be respectful and considerate". This is something
that should be officially proposed for general consideration. Behdad,
maybe you could do that? :-)


I will, except that I don't know what the process to do that is.  Just post to 
f-l?  How would we make a decision?  Or gather 10% to put it to vote?


behdad
noticing that we don't have much process in place, and that may or may not be 
a good thing

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Code of Conduct and Foundation membership (Summary)

[Lucas Rocha]

Hi all,

It's quite obvious that the original thread ended up branching into
several separate topics. I thought it would be useful to summarize
some of the key points on each topic in an attempt to bring a more
practical perspective to the whole discussion.

This is not an official message from the Board. It's just me trying to
make some sense out of the tons of messages in the thread and, maybe,
bring a more useful (or at least more clear) "closure" to the
discussed topics.

-- The original topic: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

The message I sent to start discussion was quite specific: we, the
board, wanted to know the opinion of the community on having the Code
of Conduct[1] as an official document that current/new Foundation
members would have to agree with in order to gain membership. It was
strange to see that several people framed the discussion in the
context of Planet GNOME only. Actually, the intention was to have a
broader discussion on how useful it would be to have CoC as an
official guideline for members, independently on where/how they are
communicating (planet, mailing lists, irc, etc) with the community.
Here's what I could summarize in terms of most interesting points:

- Effectiveness: some questioned the actual effectiveness of having an
official CoC in dealing with conflict situations. A point was made
that more rules doesn't necessarily result in a healthier community.
- Enforcement mechanism: some people think it wouldn't make sense
require all Foundation members to "sign" the CoC if there's no clear
enforcement mechanism.
- Who enforces the CoC: opinions are a bit mixed regarding who would
be responsible for enforcing CoC. Some people think the Board should
do it. Others are absolutely against this idea.

My impression is that the topic has not been discussed properly. The
discussion deviated to parallel (indirectly related) topics. Maybe
it's because it's a very tricky topic (quite hard to reach consensus).
Or perhaps we haven't come up with a good enough solution yet. Maybe
that's something the Board should discuss a bit further and come up
with a more concrete proposal for discussion. Another possibility is
to have a focused group of Foundation members and Board members
interested in the topic to work on a proposal. Opinions?

-- Code of Conduct suggestions

At some point the thread shifted more specifically towards Code of
Conduct itself. Behdad made a suggestion to add two more points to
CoC:

- Learn to agree to disagree.
- Criticize ideas, not people presenting them.

Pierre suggested that both items are added to the list of example
behaviours under "Be respectful and considerate". This is something
that should be officially proposed for general consideration. Behdad,
maybe you could do that? :-)

-- Planet GNOME suggestions

And then the discussion moved to Planet GNOME. I could find some
concrete suggestions to improve Planet GNOME in different ways:

- Rating system on posts Planet. It would be some sort of Digg-like
Planet. Readers would be able to rate posts down or up. Posts with
general positive rating would be appear up on the page. Some people
raised concerns that readers using feed reads would not be able to
quickly rate posts.
- Annual reminder asking people if they still want to be aggregated on
Planet. This would allow editors to remove blogs from people not
willing to be on Planet anymore.

Those are topics that editors (me, Vincent and Jeff) will definitely
be discussing soon. I'm personally in favor of the annual reminder
idea. Not sure about the rating system. Hope to have news about those
ideas soon.

-- GNOME as part of GNU

In response to Stallman's statement that Planet GNOME should not
aggregate content about non-free software (because GNOME is part of
GNU), Philip informally proposed a vote to decide on GNOME's
membership to the GNU project. The idea of the vote have some support.
Concerns were raised about the negative impact that such vote could
cause in the community.

It seems to me that this topic deserves a more careful discussion
before moving forward in any new direction. This is not the kind of
topic that should be decided on in the middle of a long thread that
was supposed to be discussing something totally different. Especially
considering that there is no official call from FSF or GNU maintainers
to remove GNOME as part of GNU project. So, there's no hurry really.
Also, someone would have to officially propose the vote to members,
which hasn't actually happened. It would be useful to know how
generally interested the Foundation members are in this topic.

That's all I guess. Feel free to add stuff I missed in this quick summary.

Cheers!

--lucasr

[1] http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct
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Re: Addition to the Code of Conduct (was Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership)

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/14/2009 05:26 PM, Pierre-Luc Beaudoin wrote:

On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 22:56 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:

Should we just version the Code of Conduct? Or is this
a non-issue?


I believe we don't need to update the Code since those 2 additions are
expected behaviours from the existing "Be respectful and considerate"
element.

Maybe should these 2 additions be added to a list of example behaviours
that serve the code?


Makes more sense.

behdad


Pierre-Luc

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/14/2009 05:26 PM, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

But what if advocating free software means that the minimal support
GNOME should do for GNU, is to claim that proprietary is illegitimate?


Exactly.

I have been supporting Free Software for over ten years, and will probably do 
for the rest of my life.  But, as an Iranian witnessing what's going on in 
Iran right now, I can't agree to any kind of anti-something or 
against-something or death-to-something.  Tolerance is key.  When someone asks 
me "so why should I use GNOME instead of KDE", or "why should I use Linux 
instead of Windows", my only reply is "use whatever works better for you". 
I'm sick of fanaticism, and my friends in Iran are being beaten and killed 
because of it.  I can't justify being a fanatic when it comes to software freedom.


These days, Free Software does many things better than the alternatives.  Many 
of my friends use it because they find it better.  And that simply makes me 
happy.  But when someone chooses to use OS X, I respect their freedom of choice.


behdad
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Vincent Untz]

Le lundi 14 décembre 2009, à 23:26 +0100, Philip Van Hoof a écrit :
> On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 22:34 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> > The GNOME Foundation itself is a free software supporter, and advocates
> > for free software, and I believe this reflects the opinion of the vast
> > majority of the GNOME community.
> 
> But what if advocating free software means that the minimal support
> GNOME should do for GNU, is to claim that proprietary is illegitimate?

As far as I know, the GNU project isn't asking us to do this, so there's
really no issue here. (Richard might be asking us to do such a claim,
and we can respectfully disagree to do so)

And if the GNU project were asking, we could reply "sorry, that's not
the way we want to do things". And going further, assuming the GNU
project would ask this and wouldn't be happy with our reply, then it's
up to the GNU project to decide that maybe we should leave the GNU
project.

I believe the GNOME project is contributing to the GNU project by doing
what we, the GNOME community, think is the right thing, so there'd be no
reason on our side to leave the GNU project.

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 22:34 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Le vendredi 11 décembre 2009, à 17:20 +0100, Philip Van Hoof a écrit :
> > I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.
> 
> So, as far as I can tell, nobody is collecting a list of members who
> support such a vote proposal. I still wanted to reply there.

I'm not planning to collect these members because I fear that doing so
at this time might hurt GNOME as a community.

I wont stop other people from doing so, and I'll support the vote too.

My personal point of view towards the illegitimacy of proprietary
software (I think mine is clear, by now) has no higher priority than the
community of GNOME as a whole.

I do still ask: what to do with this?

> For many of the reasons Dave wrote, I would believe splitting up from
> the GNU project is a bad idea. Let me add a few things...

My opinion isn't that splitting would be bad for GNOME.

We can protect our user's freedoms far better than GNU can. Let's not
lie to ourselves about that.

> The GNOME Foundation itself is a free software supporter, and advocates
> for free software, and I believe this reflects the opinion of the vast
> majority of the GNOME community.

But what if advocating free software means that the minimal support
GNOME should do for GNU, is to claim that proprietary is illegitimate?

This *is* an issue, Vincent. Richard Stallman *is* the leader of the
group that is *urging* us to make up our minds. We can not ignore it.

No matter how emotional it all is.

Well actually, we can ignore it. It does us more harm than good.

> So I would think it's safe to say that this is the position of the
> GNOME project. As such, I think the GNOME project definitely has its
> place in the GNU project, whose goal is to create a free software
> operating system.

GNOME's place in the GNU project is to help create a free software
operating system. And that's it. We're not part of FSF "because" of the
"it" of "that's it".

GNOME has no place in Richard's ideology of 'proprietary software is
illegitimate'. Because ...

A majority of its contributors and users disagree with that ideology:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=_2bTZVPBIOJr2Rh1hPfmoFvNXT0hZZQgd_2fCvvmvOgTgRM_3d

Alienating these people is not right. No matter the hype of today.

> That doesn't mean the GNOME Foundation fights against non-free software
> by saying that non-free software is bad and should not be used nor
> exist. We have a policy of having the GNOME platform LGPL, and so it can
> be used by non-free applications. We're happy this way. Our way to fight
> against non-free software is by writing better code, that is free.

Thank you.

This sums it up pretty well.

"Our way" is by writing better code. Exactly.

> Also, the GNU project is not the FSF. When reading the thread, I have
> the feeling that some people want the GNOME project to not be part of
> the FSF, or to disagree with the FSF. The GNOME Foundation is [not] part of
> the FSF, and we sometimes disagree with the FSF, and we're all fine this
> way.

Good, the FSF can use some criticism.

(You meant "not part of the FSF" instead of "part of FSF". You corrected
this in another reply E-mail. I added it between square brackets. Feel
free to torch me if that's impolite).

> (Note that the FSF is an advisory board member of the GNOME
> Foundation, though, and it's valuable one that we're happy to have). I
> think Andy wrote more on this [1], but I didn't take the time to read
> his post so I won't put words in his mouth :-)


Cheers & concerns,


Philip


-- 
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

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Re: Addition to the Code of Conduct (was Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership)

[Pierre-Luc Beaudoin]

On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 22:56 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Should we just version the Code of Conduct? Or is this
> a non-issue? 

I believe we don't need to update the Code since those 2 additions are
expected behaviours from the existing "Be respectful and considerate"
element.

Maybe should these 2 additions be added to a list of example behaviours
that serve the code?

Pierre-Luc


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Luis Villa]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Behdad Esfahbod  wrote:
> On 12/14/2009 04:34 PM, Vincent Untz wrote:
>
>> Also, the GNU project is not the FSF. When reading the thread, I have
>> the feeling that some people want the GNOME project to not be part of
>> the FSF, or to disagree with the FSF. The GNOME Foundation is part of
>> the FSF, and we sometimes disagree with the FSF, and we're all fine this
>> way.
>
> Humm, *now* I'm confused.  What does it mean that "The GNOME Foundation is
> part of the FSF"?
>
> As for "GNOME being a GNU project", what that means is explained here:
>
>  http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html

Note that we've always ignored about 90% of this page with no ill
effects for either us or GNU.

Which is really my position on the whole thing: the adults in this
project have always treated requests from GNU the same way we treat
requests from any other community member- if it makes sense, we do it;
if it doesn't make sense, we ignore it. Usually we ignore it quietly.
I will try to refrain from speculating as to why this particular
suggestion was ignored so loudly, but I'd suggest that quietly is
better.

Luis
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Vincent Untz]

Le lundi 14 décembre 2009, à 16:56 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod a écrit :
> On 12/14/2009 04:34 PM, Vincent Untz wrote:
> 
> >Also, the GNU project is not the FSF. When reading the thread, I have
> >the feeling that some people want the GNOME project to not be part of
> >the FSF, or to disagree with the FSF. The GNOME Foundation is part of
> >the FSF, and we sometimes disagree with the FSF, and we're all fine this
> >way.
> 
> Humm, *now* I'm confused.  What does it mean that "The GNOME
> Foundation is part of the FSF"?

Gah. I obviously missed the "not". It should read: "The GNOME Foundation
is not part of the FSF". Apologies for the confusion :-)

> As for "GNOME being a GNU project", what that means is explained here:
> 
>   http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html

Thanks for the link, that's something I was looking for and I couldn't
find easily!

Vincent

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Addition to the Code of Conduct (was Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership)

[Vincent Untz]

Le mercredi 25 novembre 2009, à 17:35 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod a écrit :
> I also like to see two more ideas added to CoC:
> 
>   - Learn to agree to disagree.
> 
>   - Criticize ideas, not people presenting them.

I support this change.

I'm just unsure how we can update the Code of Conduct, since people
signed the "old" version and we obviously can't pretend they approved
those additions. Should we just version the Code of Conduct? Or is this
a non-issue?

Vincent

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/14/2009 04:34 PM, Vincent Untz wrote:


Also, the GNU project is not the FSF. When reading the thread, I have
the feeling that some people want the GNOME project to not be part of
the FSF, or to disagree with the FSF. The GNOME Foundation is part of
the FSF, and we sometimes disagree with the FSF, and we're all fine this
way.


Humm, *now* I'm confused.  What does it mean that "The GNOME Foundation is 
part of the FSF"?


As for "GNOME being a GNU project", what that means is explained here:

  http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html

behdad

 (Note that the FSF is an advisory board member of the GNOME

Foundation, though, and it's valuable one that we're happy to have). I
think Andy wrote more on this [1], but I didn't take the time to read
his post so I won't put words in his mouth :-)

Cheers,

Vincent

[1] http://wingolog.org/archives/2009/12/13/gnu-gnome-and-the-fsf


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Vincent Untz]

Hi,

(This is hopefully my last mail for catching up with this thread ;-))

Le mercredi 25 novembre 2009, à 12:48 +, Lucas Rocha a écrit :
> Hi all,
> 
> The Board has recently received some complaints from members of the
> community about certain the inappropriate behaviors. In the context of
> GNOME Foundation, it's really hard to argue about how we expect our
> members to behave if there is no official guidelines that members are
> supposed to comply with. The GNOME Code of Conduct[1] has been serving
> very well as an informal guideline for the community but we'd like to
> make it an official document that new Foundation members are expected
> to explicitly agree[2] with before being accepted. This way we'll have a
> common ground for dealing with certain conflict situations and avoid
> trying to base our discussions on guidelines that certain members
> haven't explicitly agreed on.
> 
> Before deciding on this, we thought it would be useful to get some
> feedback from the community.

This is the first mail of the thread. And I'm really sad of the way the
thread went. I'm certainly guilty myself of not taking time to read it
and participate earlier to try to moderate things, but we should all be
able to step back and moderate a thread when it apparently needs to be
moderated...

First, let me state it: the original proposal has nothing to do with
Planet GNOME. If you have an issue with Planet GNOME, you're free to
state it publicly, of course, but you can also directly contact the
editors. We even put some documentation to answer most questions:
  http://live.gnome.org/PlanetGnome

And if you read that page, you'll see that the editors expect people on
Planet GNOME to respect the Code of Conduct. I'm not aware of a case
where we removed a post or a blog because of this, but if this needs to
happen, then fine, we'll do it.

(and yes, the editors are not perfect, and are not always replying in
time, and are doing mistakes and all that, so keep this in mind please
;-))

Now, back to the original proposal. The idea is that we want the GNOME
project to be a cool place. With great people. Where newcomers feel
welcome. And all that. I'd love a rainbow, and illimited ice cream, btw.

That what is already behind the Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct is
only stating the obvious. There's nothing revolutionary there. There are
surely some cases where it doesn't help us. We can also all have a bad
day and not respect the Code of Conduct at some point -- if this
happens, as long as we can acknowledge that we could have had a more
appropriate behavior, it's fine.

If you think that having a "Yes, I agree that I should try to be polite"
requirement for GNOME Foundation membership is bad, then, well, okay;
that just means you might share one of the values of the GNOME
Foundation. Is it the end of the world? No. Does that make it impossible
to contribute to GNOME? No. (Hint: you don't have to be a GNOME
Foundation member to contribute.)

This is really all about explaining to the world what are values are,
and trying to lead by the example. This is not about adding rules.

Vincent

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Vincent Untz]

Hey,

Le jeudi 10 décembre 2009, à 07:46 -0700, Stormy Peters a écrit :
> My post on hunting comes to mind. I self censor now because I didn't like
> the negative comments directed at my kids. But would you block my whole blog
> because a vocal portion of the community is anti-hunting and people in my
> family hunt?

I read a few times in this thread that people are self-censoring
themselves in their blog. It's possible to avoid that by using a
tag-based RSS feed; so if you want to blog the way you want but not have
everything appear on Planet GNOME, just contact the Planet editors, and
we'll be glad to help you do this.

Vincent

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Vincent Untz]

Le vendredi 11 décembre 2009, à 17:20 +0100, Philip Van Hoof a écrit :
> I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.

So, as far as I can tell, nobody is collecting a list of members who
support such a vote proposal. I still wanted to reply there.

For many of the reasons Dave wrote, I would believe splitting up from
the GNU project is a bad idea. Let me add a few things...

The GNOME Foundation itself is a free software supporter, and advocates
for free software, and I believe this reflects the opinion of the vast
majority of the GNOME community. So I would think it's safe to say that
this is the position of the GNOME project. As such, I think the GNOME
project definitely has its place in the GNU project, whose goal is to
create a free software operating system.

That doesn't mean the GNOME Foundation fights against non-free software
by saying that non-free software is bad and should not be used nor
exist. We have a policy of having the GNOME platform LGPL, and so it can
be used by non-free applications. We're happy this way. Our way to fight
against non-free software is by writing better code, that is free.

Also, the GNU project is not the FSF. When reading the thread, I have
the feeling that some people want the GNOME project to not be part of
the FSF, or to disagree with the FSF. The GNOME Foundation is part of
the FSF, and we sometimes disagree with the FSF, and we're all fine this
way. (Note that the FSF is an advisory board member of the GNOME
Foundation, though, and it's valuable one that we're happy to have). I
think Andy wrote more on this [1], but I didn't take the time to read
his post so I won't put words in his mouth :-)

Cheers,

Vincent

[1] http://wingolog.org/archives/2009/12/13/gnu-gnome-and-the-fsf

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Vincent Untz]

Hey,

Le mercredi 09 décembre 2009, à 13:32 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod a écrit :
> On 12/09/2009 08:48 AM, Lionel Dricot wrote:
> >- Each GNOME member should be able to add his feed to pgo. He might want
> >to change his feed whenever he wants to take a more specialized one or not.

The consensus in the past is that we don't want to have anybody able to
change the planet configuration, and that this is what has enabled Planet
GNOME to stay (relatively) high quality.

> >- Each year, a mail is sent to those member asking if they want to stay on
> >pgo and if they consider themselves still on-topic.
> 
> Lets limit it to a reminder that "you're on PGO.  if you want to be
> removed, email xxx" if we have to do something like that.

I'm fine with this idea. If Lucas and Jeff are fine, we can start doing
it, but I'm sure that help would be welcome to gather the list of mail
addresses to contact. If anybody wants to do that part of the work,
please just contact the planet editors.

Vincent

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Vincent Untz]

Le mercredi 09 décembre 2009, à 19:47 +0100, Dodji Seketeli a écrit :
> Le mer. 09 déc. 2009 à 14:45:55 (+0100), Philip Van Hoof a écrit:
> > This is nonsense. The planet-gnome slogan is:
> > 
> > Planet GNOME is __ a window into the world, work and lives __ of GNOME
> > hackers and contributors.
> > 
> > This is what made the planet a successful project, initiated by Jeff
> > Waugh (who you propose for removal ^).
> 
> The way I understand what Frédéric said is, there is an (yet another
> one?) interesting question not answered by the p.g.o slogan. "What does the
> planet maintainers do with people who stop being involved in the project".

Quoting http://live.gnome.org/PlanetGnome

"I stopped contributing to GNOME two years ago. Can I still stay there?

Sure, no problem. We still love you :-) Past contributors often stay
involved in areas that are of interest to GNOME (even if not directly
related to GNOME), so we're not worried about the content of your blog."

That being said, if the editors know of a blog from a past contributor
who's annoying to most Planet GNOME readers, we can feel free to remove
the blog after contacting the person.

Vincent

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Dave Neary]

Hi,

Lefty (石鏡 ) wrote:
> As a specific example, to the question, "Do you agree that viewing
> proprietary software as 'illegitimate', 'immoral', 'antisocial' and/or
> 'unethical' should be a pre-condition for syndication on Planet GNOME?", so
> far 151 respondents have answered "No", only 19 have answered "Yes". That's
> about an 8-to-1 ratio.

I'm no statistician (well, not any more at any rate), but I know that
you can construct surveys to say anything. If you ask someone "Do you
want to bring our boys home?" in the US, people are anti-war - if you
ask "Should we surrender in Iraq?" they're pro-war. Leading questions
prove nothing.

Your survey, in particular, is not particularly impartial. I would say
that it is somewhere between leading and "push polling". It's the type
of thing you rightly criticise when it is used by Boycott Novell.

Quite honestly, like others, I would just like to see this discussion
end. As I said before the weekend (50 emails ago), no opinions are being
changed, no new information of interest to GNOME Foundation members has
surfaced.

I'd like to ask both Lefty & Richard to refrain from mailing to this
thread again.

Thank you,
Dave.

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dne...@gnome.org
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Andre Klapper]

Am Dienstag, den 08.12.2009, 15:24 -0500 schrieb Dr. Michael J.
Chudobiak:
> Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > Say, any viewer of p.g.o can vote a post +1 or -1.  Then we can gather 
> > two metrics per poster: 1) how impactful his/her posts are (avg / median 
> > / max number of votes).  2) how interested are readers in his/her posts 
> > (avg / median / min/max score.
> > We can then have threshold to hide / collapse unpopular posts.
> 
> Yes, please! Let the system fix itself through trendy crowd-sourcing, 
> rather than having a board spank people who speak foolishly!

Actually the system on Planet Maemo is a bit complexer and is not only
based on thumbs up / thumbs down votes. See
http://maemo.org/community/maemo-community/how_social_news_ranks_news_items/

andre

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Hughes]

2009/12/10 Richard Stallman :
> The presence of articles discussing vmware, for instance,
> conveys the message that GNOME sees nothing wrong with it.

I think you've added 1 and 1 and made 7.

Richard.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> GNOME is not connected with the anti-hunting movement; there's no
> reason it should have any position on the question.  But GNOME is part
> of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free software
> movement.  The most minimal support for the free software movement is
> to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid
> presenting proprietary software as legitimate.

Gnome supports both the free software movement as well as proprietary
developers, and that is why Gnome for years has encouraged the use of
the LGPL license for all of its libraries.

Gnome is a general purpose desktop, but it also recognizes the need for
proprietary applications to use these libraries and to build and
integrate properly with it.

Miguel.

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/13/2009 06:04 PM, Lefty (石鏡 ) wrote:

In the interests of a broader collection of data, I've shelled out of my own
pocket to set up a professional-level SurveyMonkey account (the use of which
I will happily share with the Foundation, at least until the annual
subscription runs out, if it wishes to conduct surveys of its own).


Err.  Next time just let me know!

If people remember, I set up a survey system (LimeSurvey; Free Software) on my 
GNOME account to run the DVCS survey.  We later used that to do the Desktop 
Summit survey.  I'm offering it to all Foundation members now: if you need 
something surveyed Foundation-wide, just ask and I'll set you up with an account.


At some point I may hook it up to LDAP and let people freely use it.  But 
we're currently far from having a single "gnome.org account"...


Cheers,
behdad
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

In the interests of a broader collection of data, I've shelled out of my own
pocket to set up a professional-level SurveyMonkey account (the use of which
I will happily share with the Foundation, at least until the annual
subscription runs out, if it wishes to conduct surveys of its own).

I've set up a survey to collect some data on how people view the suggestions
that have been made regarding the governance of Planet GNOME, and I
encourage anyone who's interested to participate. The survey can be found at

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Z7WHPDF

So far, we've gotten over 170 responses, and public opinion doesn't seem to
be generally running in favor of Mr. Stallman's proposal, at a rate of
roughly four against to one in favor, in the best of circumstances. The
survey attempts to probe a little more deeply, but if the results are
indicative of anything, Mr. Stallman's views here represent a minority
opinion.

As a specific example, to the question, "Do you agree that viewing
proprietary software as 'illegitimate', 'immoral', 'antisocial' and/or
'unethical' should be a pre-condition for syndication on Planet GNOME?", so
far 151 respondents have answered "No", only 19 have answered "Yes". That's
about an 8-to-1 ratio.

I'll publish more detailed results before the week is out.

On consideration, I now believe there's no need to call for a vote of the
Foundation membership.

Since the problem doesn't seem to exist, there's no need to do anything with
Planet. Similarly, I see no need to expend any further energy on the GNOME's
community's part on dealing with this. If the GNU Project finds the current
level of expression on Planet GNOME intolerably unsupportive of the free
software movement, for whatever reasons, they can certainly take whatever
steps they feel are necessary.


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

On 12/13/09 8:22 AM, "Richard Stallman"  wrote:

> That's where the cash for things like my FSF-E
> Fellowship, EFF membership, Creative Commons membership, etc., come from,
> see?
> 
> These are worthy causes, but I would not encourage anyone to use
> non-free software even to get money to give to a worthy cause.

I knew you'd feel that way, which is why I send my money to FSF-Europe,
rather than the FSF.

> However, the issue here isn't about what you use or what I use, it's
> about what GNOME should say to the world about proprietary software.

One more time: Planet GNOME <> The GNOME Foundation <> GNOME

> I don't know how often proprietary software is mentioned favorably
> there.  If the problem happens at intervals of years, maybe very
> little response is needed.  Maybe the GNOME Board should respond by
> posting a response when non-free software gets favorably mentioned.

Non-free software can't even be "favorably mentioned"?

A discussion of the relative merits of GIMP and Photoshop is inadmissible if
it admits, however grudgingly, that Photoshop has some advantages or
features that GIMP does not...? We're disallowed from saying that Xcode on
OS X is, in fact, an excellent development environment...? No one can
comment in a positive way on a new cell phone or digital camera, without the
Board of Directors of the GNOME Foundation coming down on them?

Wow. You and I have extremely different ideas about "freedom", Mr. Stallman.

> I don't know how often proprietary software is mentioned favorably
> there.

I see.

Do you actually ever _read_ Planet GNOME, Mr. Stallman...? Perhaps you
should call for a ban of the use of the term "open source" there, or of
"Linux" unless it's in specific reference to the kernel, as a "minimal"
requirement to "support free software". Those happen a _lot_ more often.


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Tobias Mueller]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Heya,

On 13.12.2009 16:33, Lefty (石鏡 ) wrote:
> To what do you attribute this wide-spread "misunderstanding", if not
> stupidity, ignorance or a general lack of adequate erudition on the part of
> the audience?
> 
Misunderstandings can be a result of many factors, including differences
in language, culture, political views, personal believes, etc.

Having that sorted out, I don't see any good reason why this sub-thread
exists. What's the main question we're discussing here? If there is
none, I'd happily make my MUA kill it.

Cheers,
  Tobi
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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=eNZD
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Paul Cutler]

As it says in the footer of Planet GNOME:

*"Planet GNOME is a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers
and contributors .

*Planet GNOME automatically reposts blog entries from the GNOME community.
Entries on this page are owned by their authors. We do not edit, endorse or
vouch for the contents of individual posts."

It seems to me we already have a disclaimer in place.  I, for one, would
like Planet GNOME to stay as is - no voting, no censoring, no tagging.  I
*am* interested in the work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors
whether or not their work is proprietary or free software.

I know since I was added to pgo earlier this year I tend to self-censor
myself a little bit more, but I don't want pgo to be 100% GNOME (or free
software) specific.  I appreciate knowing the hobbies of my fellow hackers,
whether it's hunting, cooking or what not.

Planet GNOME may be a "GNOME activity" but it's an aggregation of the
*personal" blogs of GNOME contributors and we have a disclaimer in place.
I'd like to see it stay just as it is.

Paul


On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Richard Stallman  wrote:

> Bottom line: Planet GNOME does not exist for
>the sake of "supporting" your, or the FSF's, agenda, and you're
> attempting
>to solve a non-existent "problem".
>
> We launched GNOME to serve the free software movement's aims.  (We
> launched the FSF and the GNU system for the same reason.)  And Planet
> GNOME is a GNOME activity.  So it seems to me that these aims can't
> be a-priori irrelevant to Planet GNOME.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Jonathon Jongsma]

On Sun, 2009-12-13 at 08:33 -0800, Lefty (石鏡 ) wrote:
> On 12/13/09 8:22 AM, "Richard Stallman"  wrote:
> > 
> > "Unable to come up with" and "too dumb" are your own additions,
> > which clearly were not present in the events themselves.
> 
> Clearly, a lot of "misunderstanding" was "present in the events themselves".
> To what do you attribute this wide-spread "misunderstanding", if not
> stupidity, ignorance or a general lack of adequate erudition on the part of
> the audience?


This is fast becoming among the least productive email threads I've read
in a long time.  Can we please bring it to a close?

Thanks
Jonathon

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

On 12/13/09 8:22 AM, "Richard Stallman"  wrote:
> 
> "Unable to come up with" and "too dumb" are your own additions,
> which clearly were not present in the events themselves.

Clearly, a lot of "misunderstanding" was "present in the events themselves".
To what do you attribute this wide-spread "misunderstanding", if not
stupidity, ignorance or a general lack of adequate erudition on the part of
the audience?


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

> You're also stretching the term "censorship" and related terms to an
> area where it does not pertain.  For an organization to stand by its
> values, and not say things which conflict with those values, is not
> censorship.

Fine. We can simply call it "prior restraint" if you prefer, then.

Neither one fits.  "Prior restraint" is US legal terminology for a
particular kind of censorship.  For an organization to stand by its
values is not censorship at all.

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

I made an accusation against Apple which was false, so I owed an
apology.  Being misunderstood, falsely accused, and vilified by some
does not in my view mean I owe an apology.  Instead I took steps to
avoid similar misunderstandings.

Your words impute spurious negative emotions to the events:

 have been unable to come up with one for those of us who
were too dumb to be able to adequately comprehend your humor at the Gran
Canaria Desktop Summit.

"Unable to come up with" and "too dumb" are your own additions,
which clearly were not present in the events themselves.

Imputing negative emotions creates an added obstacle to resolving any
issue.  Thus, the draft GNOME Code of Conduct is wise to ask people
not to do so.













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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

We wanted Gnome to be a free software stack, and that was our 
requirement.  Gnome itself was assembled out of the available
components plus the requirements of the community that emerged early on.

GNOME was made out of available components and new components.  In
particular, we discussed plans for new libraries, and decided how to
license them.

We didn't include Red Hat in that discussion, since it was a GNU
Project matter.  However, from what you said, the decision we made
for free software reasons would also have satisifed what Red Hat wanted
for its GNU/Linux distribution.

   The individual pieces of Gnome are no longer just
used by Gnome, or designed merely to be part of Gnome, they are 
built to be reusable not only by KDE, but also by server applications, or
mobile applications;   And they are licensed to allow proprietary developers
to use them.  

I hope that you are making an overstatement when you claim that GNOME
has lost all influence over the licensing of components developed for
GNOME.  It would be a shame if GNOME can only drift with the current.

I also hope it is an overstatement to say that all GNOME components
have been licensed in ways that fail to give any advantage to free
software packages over proprietary software.  If true, that would mean
useful opportunities to boost other free software have been wasted.

But even if those things are true, they can be changed in the future.
GNOME can recover influence on licensing decisions.  New components
will surely be developed for GNOME, and GNOME can ask developers to
follow licensing practice designed to help the free software cause.

The motives for the policy we decided in 1997 or 1998 are still valid:
we want proprietary programs to be able to work with GNOME, and we
want to help free software developers compete technically with
proprietary software.

Thus, libraries needed for an app to work with GNOME should be
licensed so proprietary apps can use them.  Libraries that help people
develop apps, or help the apps work better, should be limited to use
within free software, so as to give our fellow free software
developers an advantage.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

That's where the cash for things like my FSF-E
Fellowship, EFF membership, Creative Commons membership, etc., come from,
see?

These are worthy causes, but I would not encourage anyone to use
non-free software even to get money to give to a worthy cause.

However, the issue here isn't about what you use or what I use, it's
about what GNOME should say to the world about proprietary software.

The Planet is not "GNOME" and it is not an "advocacy" organ; it doesn't
"advocate" anything,

Maybe it wasn't set up specificy for the purpose of advocacy, but it
is a major part of GNOME's face to the world.  What it says has have a
substantial effect on what people think GNOME is all about.  This
includes its implicit messages as well as explicit statements.

The communication of a statement is not limited to what it formally
states; the fact that it was made, and made in a certain place and
time, implies other meanings.  For instance, if you talk about
something and make no criticisms, people take that to mean you have no
strong disapproval of it.

I don't know how often proprietary software is mentioned favorably
there.  If the problem happens at intervals of years, maybe very
little response is needed.  Maybe the GNOME Board should respond by
posting a response when non-free software gets favorably mentioned.



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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

 Bottom line: Planet GNOME does not exist for
the sake of "supporting" your, or the FSF's, agenda, and you're attempting
to solve a non-existent "problem".

We launched GNOME to serve the free software movement's aims.  (We
launched the FSF and the GNU system for the same reason.)  And Planet
GNOME is a GNOME activity.  So it seems to me that these aims can't
be a-priori irrelevant to Planet GNOME.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Peter Hjalmarsson]

fre 2009-11-27 klockan 10:53 +0100 skrev Murray Cumming:
> 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.
> 

Personally I stopped reading planet.gnome.org because I wanted to know
what was happening in GNOME-land, not about the developers pets, kids
and snowboarding preferences.

For gentoo, they have two feeds: the "planet", and the "universe", where
the planet only aggregates those blog posts that are tagged with gentoo,
and the universe aggregates the rest.
I cannot understand why GNOME cannot have this system also?

Then for the "planet" you can have a code of conduct of what they are
allowed to tag as GNOME (i.e. upcoming events in OSS-land where GNOME
will be represented, development in projects blessed/used by GNOME,
comments about projects being blessed/used by GNOME, projects
interesting for people interested in GNOME), and a "universe" with maybe
an disclaimer that the posts there can have nothing what so ever to do
with GNOME.


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

On 12/12/09 5:33 AM, "Richard Stallman"  wrote:
> 
> What happened there is that some people misunderstood a joke in my
> speech, and others mistakenly accused me of intentionally disparaging
> people.

I personally find it telling that you somehow managed to find it within
yourself to provide an apology to Apple for talking unsupported nonsense
about OS X, but have been unable to come up with one for those of us who
were too dumb to be able to adequately comprehend your humor at the Gran
Canaria Desktop Summit.

I'd suggest providing a detailed explanatory handout in advance next time,
in order to avoid any future misunderstanding. (I can only assume that
Apple's legal department is at least as grim, humorless, and error-prone as
I am.)

I don't think there's anything more to be said on this score.


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

On 12/12/09 5:34 AM, "Richard Stallman"  wrote:
> 
> I think GNOME activities should not grant legitimacy to non-free
> software.

You're entitled to your opinion, but not to impose it on unwilling others.

> This is a minimal form of support for the cause of software
> users' freedom -- minimal in the sense that anything less would hardly
> be support.

Again, in your own terms, perhaps, but not (it seems) in the terms of the
actual contributors to Planet GNOME. No one (other than yourself) is calling
for "rules" governing contributions to the Planet, and no one can
(apparently) point at any actual instances of the sort of thing you claim to
be attempting to address here. Bottom line: Planet GNOME does not exist for
the sake of "supporting" your, or the FSF's, agenda, and you're attempting
to solve a non-existent "problem".

> You're also stretching the term "censorship" and related terms to an
> area where it does not pertain.  For an organization to stand by its
> values, and not say things which conflict with those values, is not
> censorship.

Fine. We can simply call it "prior restraint" if you prefer, then. The irony
of your attempts to throttle people in the name of "freedom" is a marvel to
behold.

> I would not trade my freedom for convenience like that.

No one's demanded that you do so, happily for you. Nor is it a question of
"convenience", Mr. Stallman: it happens that it's my _job_. It's one of the
things I get _paid_ to do. That's where the cash for things like my FSF-E
Fellowship, EFF membership, Creative Commons membership, etc., come from,
see?

I wouldn't trade your _idea_ of "freedom" for that, as I happen to quite
enjoy what I do. (I suppose that a complete inability to do film editing,
since there's no "free" equivalent of Final Cut, and the consequent failure
to do what I'm paid to do, followed by my subsequent dismissal and
unemployment would indeed constitute an "inconvenience" for me, yes. Few of
us enjoy the luxury of being president-for-life of some foundation or
other.)

> However the
> issue here is not what you use, or what would I use; it is what GNOME
> should advocate.

The Planet is not "GNOME" and it is not an "advocacy" organ; it doesn't
"advocate" anything, other than its various contributors' various interests
and activities, whatever they happen to be. You have utterly misunderstood
its purpose: to provide a window into the activities of people involved in
GNOME; not just the "free software" activities; not just the activities of
which the FSF chooses to approve.

> Thus, GNOME should not present a program as legitimate if it requires
> users to choose in that way.

You're conflating "GNOME" and "Planet GNOME" in an unreasonable fashion.

One more time: Planet GNOME is not presenting anything as anything. It does
not have an editorial stance to espouse, nor a political position to
promote. It's about people, not polemics.

That the FSF would attempt to impose its own politics on the multiple,
various and diverse contributors to the Planet--among which it must be noted
that you do not number, Mr. Stallman--demonstrates that the FSF has no
problem with monoculture, just so long as it's the monoculture the FSF
endorses.

As I've said, the GNOME Foundation doesn't support, endorse or stand behind
any posting on Planet GNOME, and no one seems to be under the impression
that it does, other than, possibly, yourself. The Planet, in my experience,
seems to be quite amply self-policing; in any case, no one's asked for
"help" in this area.

If you, or the FSF, feel a need to express your opinions on Planet GNOME,
get a blog up and have it syndicated there, just like everyone else. Please
don't attempt to impose policy in an area where you don't even participate.


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

We _were_ attempting to finalize a Code of Conduct which could be provided
to speakers, in the hope of avoiding future instances of the sort of
"harmless fun" we experienced during Mr. Stallman's keynote at the Gran
Canaria Desktop Summit, as I recall.

What happened there is that some people misunderstood a joke in my
speech, and others mistakenly accused me of intentionally disparaging
people.

Rules of conduct can't prevent misunderstandings, but they can help us
deal with them better.  If those who accused me had followed the draft
Code of Conduct (http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct), particularly
this rule

Disagreement is no excuse for poor behaviour or personal
attacks. Remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable
is not a productive one.

and this one

If something seems outrageous, check that you did not misinterpret
it. Ask for clarification, but do not assume the worst.

they might have responded differently to the misunderstanding,
and things would have been over very quickly.

All the points in the draft Code of Conduct seem good to me.
 
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

I believe Stormy was quite clear and on point: It sounded to me as though
she were arguing against the sort of "prior restraint" that you seem to be
attempting to impose here.

I think GNOME activities should not grant legitimacy to non-free
software.  This is a minimal form of support for the cause of software
users' freedom -- minimal in the sense that anything less would hardly
be support.

However, the implementational ideas you are attacking did not come
from me.

You're also stretching the term "censorship" and related terms to an
area where it does not pertain.  For an organization to stand by its
values, and not say things which conflict with those values, is not
censorship.

My use of Final Cut is completely legitimate.

I would not trade my freedom for convenience like that.  However the
issue here is not what you use, or what would I use; it is what GNOME
should advocate.

We're working for a world in which software users aren't asked to
choose between freedom and convenience, and GNOME should support that
goal, as well as being a collection of programs which help make it so.
Thus, GNOME should not present a program as legitimate if it requires
users to choose in that way.




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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

Is GNOME part of any anti-proprietary software movement?

that terminology didn't come from me.  I would rather describe what we
are doing in positive terms: GNOME is part of the free software
movement, which strives to give users freedom.

I don't think so and I've never seen it like that.

I guess you have not heard how GNOME came to be.  We launched GNOME to
defend the free software community against a particular proprietary
program, Qt; against the danger that people might come to regard that
proprietary program as essential for a usable GNU/Linux system.

So GNOME not merely part of a system that we developed for the sake of
freedom.  GNOME was developed specifically to protect freedom.  There
are no clearer examples of software which exists for the sake of
freedom than GNOME.

I think the GNOME Foundation should do more to inform the community
about this.  Currently, it seems, the message is not getting across.
If people can look at Planet GNOME, and the rest of what the
Foundation says, and get the impression that neutrality on this issue
is one of GNOME's founding principles, it behooves us to do more to
inform people what the founding principles really are.

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

Gnome supports both the free software movement as well as proprietary
developers, and that is why Gnome for years has encouraged the use of
the LGPL license for all of its libraries.

The decision you and I made, in the early days, was to use the LGPL
for the more basic and general libraries, so that proprietary programs
could work with GNOME, but to use the GPL for more advanced libraries
so that they would give an advantage to free applications.

We decided this, not as a way to "support proprietary developers", but
rather to compete with KDE and Qt.  Proprietary software developers
could use Qt (by buying a license).  If they could not use GNOME's
basic libraries, that would put GNOME at a disadvantage, and the
result could be that KDE with proprietary Qt might triumph.

Now that Qt is free software, beating it in competition is less
crucial.  We might not have a reason to use the LGPL for some of
these libraries if we were deciding it now.

So I hope that the GNOME policy about library licensing has not moved
towards more use of the LGPL than in the past.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/11/2009 01:14 PM, Stormy Peters wrote:



On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Dave Neary mailto:dne...@gnome.org>> wrote:


There is precedent for a membership petition for an election. I ran one
to have the board size reduced some years ago:
http://live.gnome.org/BoardSizePetition

At the time I was told I needed 10% of the membership:

http://foundation.gnome.org/about/charter/ says 10%. I couldn't find a
reference to either number in the bylaws.


You're right.  My bad.  I was misremembering.  The bylaws say 5% is needed to 
call for a meeting, something like that.


behdad



Stormy

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Andy Wingo]

Hello Lefty,

On Fri 11 Dec 2009 16:37, "Lefty (石鏡 )"  writes:

> On 12/11/09 7:12 AM, "Richard Stallman"  wrote:
>> The most minimal support for the free software movement is
>> to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid
>> presenting proprietary software as legitimate.
>
> This is simple nonsense. Software is software, and people write about what
> they do. 
>
> I use free software, and I also use things like Final Cut Pro, for which
> there's no equivalent. You seem to feel I should be barred from writing
> anything about film-editing, since it involves "proprietary" software.
>
> My use of Final Cut is completely legitimate. There's no equivalent piece of
> free software, and even if there were, surely my tools are my choice, are
> they not? Your attempts to control what gets posted are completely out of
> line.

The four points in the code of conduct are:

# Be respectful and considerate
# Be patient and generous
# Assume people mean well
# Try to be concise

Lefty I think you are doing well regarding the fourth :) I would submit
that Richard has behaved in accordance with these rules[*], but always
after I read your mails or blogs on the subject, it ends up sounding
very combative.

I know you probably don't mean it that way, and I don't want to put you
on edge. I'm just sayin'.

And in the interest of *topic*, well, I think we have strayed from the
initial proposal.

Best regards,

Andy

[*] I consider the GCDS incident as adequately atoned for by Richard's
apology. YMMV.
-- 
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

On 12/11/09 10:13 AM, "Les Harris"  wrote:
>
> His position as I understand
it is that it is bad publicity for the FOSS
> movement if such a public
facing venue like Planet GNOME is used to promote
> proprietary
software.

I have not noted "promotion" of proprietary software on Planet GNOME. Can
anyone point me to some instances of what's causing this great concern? For
that matter, has there actually been any call on Planet GNOME for the sort
of "rules" for which Mr. Stallman seems to See A Great Need? Dave Neary's
message seems to suggest that there simply aren't any, either way.

For my part, I'd be as unhappy with a lot of postings "promoting" _any_
company's products, whether they were "proprietary" or "free". Commercial
sales pitches are inappropriate on Planet, in my view, whether the software
being peddled is "free software" or not. I strongly doubt, however, that we
need "rules" to deal with it, since it appears to be a complete
non-situation.

The Planet isn't for marketing, it's for getting a window into the lives of
other folks in the community, just as it says, and many of those lives
involve working with both free and proprietary software. That's a simple
fact, and to attempt to muzzle people on this basis is divisive to the
community and destructive to the Planet.

It's not for marketing a political agenda, either, in my view. The concern
seems to be utterly unfounded, and the need for "rules" is non-existent.

I would certainly appreciate any efforts Mr. Stallman might care to make to
communicate in a way that does away with the apparent need for third-party
hermeneutics of his utterances.


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Dave Neary]

Hi,

Richard Stallman wrote:
> Stormy, we seem to be miscommunicating.  I said that people should not
> promote non-free software on Planet GNOME.
[snip]
> But GNOME is part
> of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free software
> movement.  The most minimal support for the free software movement is
> to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid
> presenting proprietary software as legitimate.
> 
> I think Planet GNOME should have a rule to this effect.  There are
> many ways to implement such a rule, of which "block the whole blog" is
> about the toughest one we might consider.  I'd suggest rather to try a
> mild approach; I'm sure that can do the job.

To put this discussion in perspective, the question does not come up
very often (if at all).

The last case I can think of where a proprietary piece of software got
substantial attention on pgo was the release of the free ($0) VMWare
client 3 years ago I think?

Aside from that, proprietary software is mentioned all the time, but I
would not consider mentioning (say) that Adobe Acrobat Reader is using
GTK+ on Linux is promoting Adobe - if anything, it's promoting GNOME.

The "problem" is restricted to sporadic mentions of new releases of
proprietary software using substantial components of the GNOME platform,
developed by people who are members of the GNOME community. As you say
in the last paragraph above, a mild case by case approach is more than
sufficient to handle the problem.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dne...@gnome.org
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Stormy Peters]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Dave Neary  wrote:

>
> There is precedent for a membership petition for an election. I ran one
> to have the board size reduced some years ago:
> http://live.gnome.org/BoardSizePetition
>
> At the time I was told I needed 10% of the membership:
>

http://foundation.gnome.org/about/charter/ says 10%. I couldn't find a
reference to either number in the bylaws.

Stormy
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Les Harris]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Lefty (石鏡 )  wrote:
> On 12/11/09 9:32 AM, "Behdad Esfahbod"  wrote:
>>
>> Quick procedural note: If you really want to pursue this, according to the
>> bylaws you need support of 5% of the membership IIRC to put something to 
>> vote.
>>   I'm not sure the vote would be binding though.
>
> Is there anything in the bylaws as to how this support might be collected
> and demonstrated? If not, I doubt _anything_ will ever get put to a vote...

Presumably it is assumed you use the resources provided by the gnome
project including but not limited to mailing lists and irc.  Also the
Foundation publishes a full membership list with contact information.
According to that list there are 357 members of the GNOME foundation.

If you can't get 17 or 18 people to agree that your idea is worthy
enough to put up to a vote given the community orientated nature of
the GNOME project, then maybe the idea isn't worth considering or at
least not a priority for the project.

> I don't think anyone--with the possible exception of Mr.
> Stallman--subscribes to the notion that the GNOME Foundation approves of,
> endorses, or supports every posting syndicated to Planet GNOME. Nor have I
> noticed conspicuous calls on Planet for this sort of "rule" to address a
> looming threat posed by the inappropriately unfree.

I do not believe RMS thinks this is so.  His position as I understand
it is that it is bad publicity for the FOSS movement if such a public
facing venue like Planet GNOME is used to promote proprietary
software.  Obviously we all have our own positions which is what this
discussion has been addressing.

Les
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Dave Neary]

Hi,

Lefty (石鏡 ) wrote:
> On 12/11/09 9:32 AM, "Behdad Esfahbod"  wrote:
>> Quick procedural note: If you really want to pursue this, according to the
>> bylaws you need support of 5% of the membership IIRC to put something to 
>> vote.
>>   I'm not sure the vote would be binding though.
> 
> Is there anything in the bylaws as to how this support might be collected
> and demonstrated? If not, I doubt _anything_ will ever get put to a vote...

There is precedent for a membership petition for an election. I ran one
to have the board size reduced some years ago:
http://live.gnome.org/BoardSizePetition

At the time I was told I needed 10% of the membership:
http://foundation.gnome.org/referenda/2005-10/ (37 signatures) - in the
end, 42 members and some non-members signed to have the debate & vote.

The foundation membership is now just under 360 people according to
http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/members.php requiring 18
signatories to go over 5%. With 20 signatories, you would have some
margin for error.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dne...@gnome.org
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Stormy Peters]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Lefty (石鏡 )  wrote:

> On 12/11/09 9:32 AM, "Behdad Esfahbod"  wrote:
> >
> > Quick procedural note: If you really want to pursue this, according to
> the
> > bylaws you need support of 5% of the membership IIRC to put something to
> vote.
> >   I'm not sure the vote would be binding though.
>
> Is there anything in the bylaws as to how this support might be collected
> and demonstrated? If not, I doubt _anything_ will ever get put to a vote...
>

I am *not* saying we should do this.

But in the interest of making sure people feel empowered.

The list of members is here:
http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/members.php. So you can easily figure
out how many 5% is (~20).

You could then create a live.gnome.org wiki page with your proposal and ask
people to "sign" it much like we do the Code of Conduct.

I assume any votes (once they had enough support) would then be conducted by
the Membership Committee.

Stormy
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

On 12/11/09 9:32 AM, "Behdad Esfahbod"  wrote:
> 
> Quick procedural note: If you really want to pursue this, according to the
> bylaws you need support of 5% of the membership IIRC to put something to vote.
>   I'm not sure the vote would be binding though.

Is there anything in the bylaws as to how this support might be collected
and demonstrated? If not, I doubt _anything_ will ever get put to a vote...

In any event, it's entirely unclear to me what the actual meaning of such a
vote might be, beyond "Stop trying to dictate what people can and can't post
on Planet GNOME. Please." Perhaps it would be enough to simply say that.

> I thought I point that out since that's your rights as members of the
> foundation.  That said, I agree with Dave.

I don't disagree with any particular thing that Dave said, but as I've
pointed out, I'm not the one who brought up this demand for prior restraint
on the Planet. I find Planet GNOME to be just fine the way it is, and I
suspect most readers who have mastered a degree of critical thinking and
some facility in the use of a scroll bar probably feel similarly.

I don't think anyone--with the possible exception of Mr.
Stallman--subscribes to the notion that the GNOME Foundation approves of,
endorses, or supports every posting syndicated to Planet GNOME. Nor have I
noticed conspicuous calls on Planet for this sort of "rule" to address a
looming threat posed by the inappropriately unfree.

I certainly encourage the FSF to set up their very own planet, run it as
they see fit, and exclude whomever and whatever they please: they can feel
entirely at liberty to start with me. There seems, as well, to be a nice
starting list of "traitors" and "enemies" available already, including the
originator of Planet GNOME...


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 12:32 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On 12/11/2009 11:32 AM, Lefty (石鏡 ) wrote:
> > Philip van Hoof writes
> >>
> >> I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.
> >
> > I'd second this.
> 
> Quick procedural note: If you really want to pursue this, according to the 
> bylaws you need support of 5% of the membership IIRC to put something to 
> vote. 
>   I'm not sure the vote would be binding though.

Okay, thanks for the information.

> I thought I point that out since that's your rights as members of the 
> foundation.  That said, I agree with Dave.

I'll support whoever proposes this as a vote. Being a member I'd like to
propose this vote (but apparently I need '5% - 1 person' of the other
members, I don't know how they can officially support the proposal).

As a reply to the legitimate concerns you and Dave have:

o. I don't think being afraid of that is sufficient reason to sidestep
   the issue. We're an intelligent group of people. We can deal with
   this.

o. I think we should be intellectually honest. We owe it to ourselves.


-- 
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/11/2009 11:32 AM, Lefty (石鏡 ) wrote:

Philip van Hoof writes


I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.


I'd second this.


Quick procedural note: If you really want to pursue this, according to the 
bylaws you need support of 5% of the membership IIRC to put something to vote. 
 I'm not sure the vote would be binding though.


I thought I point that out since that's your rights as members of the 
foundation.  That said, I agree with Dave.


behdad
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

On 12/11/09 8:40 AM, "Dave Neary"  wrote:
> 
> Don't we have more concrete issues to address?

We _were_ attempting to finalize a Code of Conduct which could be provided
to speakers, in the hope of avoiding future instances of the sort of
"harmless fun" we experienced during Mr. Stallman's keynote at the Gran
Canaria Desktop Summit, as I recall.

It seems that Mr. Stallman would prefer to discuss ways and means to
throttle contributors to Planet GNOME of whose postings he happens not to
approve, however.

I understand your interest in "pouring oil on troubled waters" here, Dave,
but neither Philip nor I are the ones who raised this "issue".



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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 17:40 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:

Hi Dave!

(Are you coming to FOSDEM? We need another of those IRL chats, no?)

> Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> > I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.
> 
> Such a vote, whatever the outcome, would have little effect on the GNOME
> project.

I'd agree.

> The debate during the vote could cause a lot of harm & discord for the
> GNOME community.

I actually do agree, yes.

I don't think being afraid of that is sufficient reason to sidestep this
issue We're an intelligent group of people. We can deal with this.

> An outcome whereby GNOME is no longer a GNU project could cause a lot of
> harm to the free software and open source movements in general - there
> would be massive negative publicity.

I agree but we cannot be blind when the leader of the Free Software
Foundation is requesting that the "minimal" thing GNOME should do, is to
support it by, and I quote, "avoiding presenting proprietary software as
legitimate".

I fully understand that ignoring Richard's request is the easy way. But
his request cannot be ignored any longer. He really wants this as a
"minimal" commitment from GNOME.

No matter what feels good for us. We've been ignoring this for too long.

Such a commitment is, as far as I understand our community, not entirely
compatible with the current mindset of a lot of its members, so ...

I think we should be intellectually honest; by doing this vote.

> Since there is very little up-side and substantial down-side, both real
> and in terms of image (which is an important consideration, I think), I
> do not think that we should vote on this issue.
> 
> Don't we have more concrete issues to address?

I ask the same about the apparent necessity to address certain moral
issues like policing the behaviour of our members and introducing a set
of punishments for bad behaviour.

That doesn't mean it can't be discussed. It can.


Cheers,


Philip

-- 
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home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Dave Neary]

Hi,

Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.

Such a vote, whatever the outcome, would have little effect on the GNOME
project.

The debate during the vote could cause a lot of harm & discord for the
GNOME community.

An outcome whereby GNOME is no longer a GNU project could cause a lot of
harm to the free software and open source movements in general - there
would be massive negative publicity.

Since there is very little up-side and substantial down-side, both real
and in terms of image (which is an important consideration, I think), I
do not think that we should vote on this issue.

Don't we have more concrete issues to address?

Cheers,
Dave.

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GNOME Foundation member
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

Philip van Hoof writes
> 
> I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.

I'd second this.



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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Philip Van Hoof]

(repost, I didn't use the right E-mail address)

On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 10:12 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:

> But GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free 
> software movement. The most minimal support for the free software movement
> is to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid presenting
> proprietary software as legitimate.

I understand your position. I think you might not understand the
position of a lot of GNOME foundation members and contributors.

Their position isn't necessarily compatible with your position that
GNOME should "avoid presenting proprietary software as legitimate".

The way I see it is that most members want GNOME to stay out of that
philosophic discussion. Although GNOME usually advises to "work
upstream" and to "do things opensource when possible, as much as
possible". This is just a personal point of view, of course.

You, as one of the key FSF people, appear to be keen[1] on enforcing a
strict policy on how GNU's member-projects should behave. So ...

I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.

> I think Planet GNOME should have a rule to this effect. 

I think it's clear that I disagree. Philosophically.

> There are many ways to implement such a rule, of which "block the 
> whole blog" is about the toughest one we might consider.  I'd suggest
> rather to try a mild approach; I'm sure that can do the job.

Let's first get a consensus from our members on GNOME's status as being
or not being a well-behaving GNU project, or having its own identity.


Cheers,

Philip


[1] You write "minimal support". "Minimal" to me means: either you do
this, or you're out. Feel free to correct me.

-- 
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


-- 
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home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
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http://codeminded.be

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 10:12 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:

> But GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free 
> software movement. The most minimal support for the free software movement
> is to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid presenting
> proprietary software as legitimate.

I understand your position. I think you might not understand the
position of a lot of GNOME foundation members and contributors.

Their position isn't necessarily compatible with your position that
GNOME should "avoid presenting proprietary software as legitimate".

The way I see it is that most members want GNOME to stay out of that
philosophic discussion. Although GNOME usually advises to "work
upstream" and to "do things opensource when possible, as much as
possible". This is just a personal point of view, of course.

You, as one of the key FSF people, appear to be keen[1] on enforcing a
strict policy on how GNU's member-projects should behave. So ...

I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.

> I think Planet GNOME should have a rule to this effect. 

I think it's clear that I disagree. Philosophically.

> There are many ways to implement such a rule, of which "block the 
> whole blog" is about the toughest one we might consider.  I'd suggest
> rather to try a mild approach; I'm sure that can do the job.

Let's first get a consensus from our members on GNOME's status as being
or not being a well-behaving GNU project, or having its own identity.


Cheers,

Philip


[1] You write "minimal support". "Minimal" to me means: either you do
this, or you're out. Feel free to correct me.

-- 
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

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Dave Neary]

Hi,

Lionel Dricot wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:12:16 -0500, Richard Stallman  wrote:
>> GNOME is not connected with the anti-hunting movement; there's no
>> reason it should have any position on the question.  But GNOME is part
> 
> Is GNOME part of any anti-proprietary software movement?

I don't think this discussion is particularly helpful.

It does not look likely that anyone's mind will be changed, or that
Planet GNOME's policy will evolve.


All that we can hope for and advocate is that people whose blogs are
aggregated to Planet GNOME are people who adhere to the principles of
the free software movement. And if that's the case, there is no reason
that they would use their (Planet GNOME aggregated) blog to promote
software which does not measure up against those principles.

If people feel that they cannot separate their professional lives from
their personal lives on their blog, then perhaps it is appropriate that
they tag posts to do with their professional work on non-free software
with a different tag to that which is aggregated on Planet GNOME.


Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dne...@gnome.org
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lefty (石鏡 )]

On 12/11/09 7:12 AM, "Richard Stallman"  wrote:
>
> Stormy, we seem to be miscommunicating.  I said that people should not
> promote non-free software on Planet GNOME.  You seem to be arguing
> against something different.

I believe Stormy was quite clear and on point: It sounded to me as though
she were arguing against the sort of "prior restraint" that you seem to be
attempting to impose here.

> GNOME is not connected with the anti-hunting movement; there's no
> reason it should have any position on the question.

GNOME is not connected with the anti-VMWare movement, nor (that I'm aware
of) any "anti-proprietary software" movement.

> But GNOME is part
> of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free software
> movement.

It does support free software, and does an effective job of it.

> The most minimal support for the free software movement is
> to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid
> presenting proprietary software as legitimate.

This is simple nonsense. Software is software, and people write about what
they do. 

I use free software, and I also use things like Final Cut Pro, for which
there's no equivalent. You seem to feel I should be barred from writing
anything about film-editing, since it involves "proprietary" software.

My use of Final Cut is completely legitimate. There's no equivalent piece of
free software, and even if there were, surely my tools are my choice, are
they not? Your attempts to control what gets posted are completely out of
line.

> I think Planet GNOME should have a rule to this effect.  There are
> many ways to implement such a rule, of which "block the whole blog" is
> about the toughest one we might consider.  I'd suggest rather to try a
> mild approach; I'm sure that can do the job.

This suggestion, which verges on a demand for "censorship in the name of
freedom", is completely appalling. I have no interest in seeing Planet GNOME
turned into a outpost of "Bad Vista", thanks.

If muzzling people is a condition of being "part of the GNU project", then
maybe we should rethink _that_ aspect of things. Maybe the FSF should start
its own planet and set its own rules there rather than attempting to impose
its various litmus tests on the contributors to Planet GNOME.

I haven't got even the slightest interest in seeing this "job" get "done",
and I'd be opposed to anyone's trying it.


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lionel Dricot]

On Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:12:16 -0500, Richard Stallman  wrote:

> GNOME is not connected with the anti-hunting movement; there's no
> reason it should have any position on the question.  But GNOME is part

Is GNOME part of any anti-proprietary software movement?

I don't think so and I've never seen it like that. If it's the case, then
GNOME should reject contribution from any contributor that work with or for
proprietary software. We should also be sure that any GNOME technology is
definitely not possible to use within a proprietary software.

> of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free software
> movement.  The most minimal support for the free software movement is
> to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid
> presenting proprietary software as legitimate.

Supporting something was never meant as "fighting something else". *Never*

That's maybe your may of supporting free software but it's not mine,
meaning neither yours or mine is the official vision of GNOME. And it's
definitely not *THE* way of supporting free software.


> 
> I think Planet GNOME should have a rule to this effect.  There are
> many ways to implement such a rule, of which "block the whole blog" is
> about the toughest one we might consider.  I'd suggest rather to try a
> mild approach; I'm sure that can do the job.

As I said earlier, I think that "the less rules, the better". But it seems
that we have different goals. I don't believe that planet.gnome should be
planet.anti-proprietary-software. I think it should be the planet of the
people involved in the GNOME project, punt on de lijn.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

Stormy, we seem to be miscommunicating.  I said that people should not
promote non-free software on Planet GNOME.  You seem to be arguing
against something different.  For instance,

My post on hunting comes to mind. I self censor now because I didn't like
the negative comments directed at my kids. But would you block my whole blog
because a vocal portion of the community is anti-hunting and people in my
family hunt?

GNOME is not connected with the anti-hunting movement; there's no
reason it should have any position on the question.  But GNOME is part
of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free software
movement.  The most minimal support for the free software movement is
to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid
presenting proprietary software as legitimate.

I think Planet GNOME should have a rule to this effect.  There are
many ways to implement such a rule, of which "block the whole blog" is
about the toughest one we might consider.  I'd suggest rather to try a
mild approach; I'm sure that can do the job.


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Julien Puydt]

Behdad Esfahbod a écrit :

On 12/07/2009 01:32 PM, Frederic Crozat wrote:

Le 27/11/2009 10:53, Murray Cumming a écrit :

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.


Let's be honest too : there are a bunch of people which used to be
active GNOME members, who changed their focus to other projects and are
still in Planet GNOME for no reason. Maybe PGO editors should start
cleaning "the old cruft" (no offense intended)..


But I find it interesting to know, say, what Miguel is up to these days.
I don't think it's just me...


What about a "Planet Old Gnome Farts" ? People would get there from PGO 
one year after their last active contribution.


JP

PS: this idea is a little rough and may need some patching... at least 
the name, please!


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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Stormy Peters]

Planet GNOME is about people and we display everyone's full blog feed as it
represents them. There are people that work on proprietary software as well
as GNOME and that's who they are. I don't think we should reject people
because they don't agree with us 100% of the time.

My post on hunting comes to mind. I self censor now because I didn't like
the negative comments directed at my kids. But would you block my whole blog
because a vocal portion of the community is anti-hunting and people in my
family hunt?

Now, if they aren't doing any GNOME work and all they talk about it
non-free, non-GNOME software, that's different.

Stormy

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Richard Stallman  wrote:

>The people who work at VmWare also very often posted (and still post)
>about their work and appear on Planet GNOME.
>
> They should not do this, unless VmWare becomes free software.  GNOME
> should not provide proprietary software developers with a platform to
> present non-free software as a good or legitimate thing.
>
> Perhaps the statement of Planet GNOME's philosophy should be
> interpreted differently.  It should not invite people to talk about
> their proprietary software projects just because they are also GNOME
> contributors.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Frederic Crozat]

Le 09/12/2009 20:35, Brian Cameron a écrit :



I think we are mashing together a bunch of issues. So, in effect, are
we looking for:

[0] a way to measure what could be appropriate content for Planet GNOME
[1] a way to prevent non-free or equivalent software being "marketed"
via the Planet
[2] a way to handle the consequences if there is either inappropriate
content
[3] a way to handle the consequences if there is a pitch for software
that is orthogonal to GNOME values


Is it possible to provide filters so that people who are interested in
different types of blog entries can focus on what is interesting to
them? Some people may only be interested in seeing technical
information, and others may not want to see distro-specific things,
etc.


If it is done on the browser side (which cookies and some JS magic), it 
would exclude RSS readers. And to have it at the Atom/RSS level, it 
would mean having two different planets configuration.


--
Frederic Crozat
Mandriva
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

> Richard said that Planet GNOME shouldn't be used to promote non-free
> software (i.e. software that denies freedom by witholding source code or
> witholding permission to use/modify/distribute).

But mono *is* Free Software according to the FSF definition!

Yes, it is.  There's nothing wrong with Mono itself.
What we need to be careful of is depending on C#.
(See http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono.)
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

The people who work at VmWare also very often posted (and still post)
about their work and appear on Planet GNOME.

They should not do this, unless VmWare becomes free software.  GNOME
should not provide proprietary software developers with a platform to
present non-free software as a good or legitimate thing.

Perhaps the statement of Planet GNOME's philosophy should be
interpreted differently.  It should not invite people to talk about
their proprietary software projects just because they are also GNOME
contributors.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

Is it possible to provide filters so that people who are interested in
different types of blog entries can focus on what is interesting to
them?

This could be a useful feature for many reasons, but it doesn't
address the issue of articles that grant legitimacy to non-free
software.  The presence of articles discussing vmware, for instance,
conveys the message that GNOME sees nothing wrong with it.
Unless we can count on all readers to filter those articles out,
the filters don't deal with the issue.

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 13:32 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On 12/09/2009 08:48 AM, Lionel Dricot wrote:

> > I know some planets that choose to have a "code of conduct" about what
> > should be posted or not (like planet Ubuntu-f or planet-libre.org). They
> > all ended by not selecting the people on a quality basis but selecting
> > posts that "respect the subject of the planet". It results in very-low
> > quality planet, not interesting and, more importantly, without any soul,
> > any spirit.
> >
> > Planet.gnome has a spirit. There's something (called it "soul" if you
> > want). Don't break it. Remember planet.climate-change joke? That was huge
> > and enjoyable.
> 
> EXACTLY.  EXACTLY.  EXACTLY.

EXACTLY

+1, and a big "whatever"

> > - Each year, a mail is sent to those member asking if they want to stay on
> > pgo and if they consider themselves still on-topic.
> 
> Lets limit it to a reminder that "you're on PGO.  if you want to be removed, 
> email xxx" if we have to do something like that.

I fully agree with this solution.

Thanks, behdad.

You hereby have my vote and support for next board elections. As usual.
Because you're one of the few people who's pragmatic and realistic to
earn my vote. Not one of those crazy people.

Sorry for being direct. It's just my personality.

Thank you.

Let's now go back to solving some real problems in GNOME.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
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END OF THREAD PLEASE (was: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership)

[Olav Vitters]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 12:48:45PM +, Lucas Rocha wrote:
> Before deciding on this, we thought it would be useful to get some
> feedback from the community.

Seems thread is becoming
1) heated
2) repeating

So, see subject.

-- 
Regards,
Olav
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Dan Winship]

On 12/09/2009 01:47 PM, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
> The way I understand what Frédéric said is, there is an (yet another
> one?) interesting question not answered by the p.g.o slogan. "What does the
> planet maintainers do with people who stop being involved in the project".
> 
> Sometimes people who are not anymore active in a project declare
> clearly that they are no longer willing to be involved because of x,y,z
> reason. That's the easy situation. But what happens when nothing is said?

So, I'm still syndicated on Monologue even though I haven't blogged
anything about Mono since July 2006. I wouldn't care if they kicked me
off, but I've never felt compelled to actually figure out how to make
that happen on my own.

Assuming there are other people who behave like that, it's entirely
possible that if we just sent mail to everyone on PGO once a year saying
"Hi, you're on PGO, we just want to make sure you still want to be. If
you don't want to be there any more, just let us know" that this would
get rid of some of the extra-crufty people.

-- Dan
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Brian Cameron]

I think we are mashing together a bunch of issues. So, in effect, are
we looking for:

[0] a way to measure what could be appropriate content for Planet GNOME
[1] a way to prevent non-free or equivalent software being "marketed"
via the Planet
[2] a way to handle the consequences if there is either inappropriate content
[3] a way to handle the consequences if there is a pitch for software
that is orthogonal to GNOME values


Is it possible to provide filters so that people who are interested in
different types of blog entries can focus on what is interesting to
them?  Some people may only be interested in seeing technical
information, and others may not want to see distro-specific things,
etc.

If it were possible to tag and categorize the entries and let people
focus on what they want, that would likely help.

Brian
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Dodji Seketeli]

Le mer. 09 déc. 2009 à 14:45:55 (+0100), Philip Van Hoof a écrit:
> This is nonsense. The planet-gnome slogan is:
> 
> Planet GNOME is __ a window into the world, work and lives __ of GNOME
> hackers and contributors.
> 
> This is what made the planet a successful project, initiated by Jeff
> Waugh (who you propose for removal ^).

The way I understand what Frédéric said is, there is an (yet another
one?) interesting question not answered by the p.g.o slogan. "What does the
planet maintainers do with people who stop being involved in the project".

Sometimes people who are not anymore active in a project declare
clearly that they are no longer willing to be involved because of x,y,z
reason. That's the easy situation. But what happens when nothing is said?
Maybe this question is worth examining. I think it's a tough question
because it hard to not make it become an emotionnal topic.
In any case, if the answer is "People who were once involved keep their
related attributes ad vitam eternam", we must say it clearly to avoid this
confusion.

> If you want to fundamentally change the planet, why don't you start your
> own planet and convince the world that yours is better?

To me, saying this is just like saying "go die elsewhere, I don't want to
listen to you". I don't think trying to fix what mostly works already is
necessarily fundamentally a "bad" thing. Nobody is asking you to agree, but
it can be interesting nonetheless to let people expose their opinion
without asking them to shut up, basically.

Dodji
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/09/2009 08:48 AM, Lionel Dricot wrote:


I don't agree at all with the current direction of the discussion. For me,
pgo is about people.

Yes, I'm interested to learn that Nat will soon get married. Yes, I'm
interested to hear about Mandriva on Frédéric's posts because I don't use
it at all but at least I keep an eye on it thanks to his blog. Even the
mono-bashism of Miguel is sometimes interesting : it allows me to know what
is happening when I want to know. I like to practise my Dutch by reading
Reinout's post and to see if UTF-8 works correctly when seeing Indian's
poems.

I'm happy to meet a fellow GNOME developer at FOSDEM and saying : "So, you
like Karaté/Running/Vegan Cooking ?".

I know some planets that choose to have a "code of conduct" about what
should be posted or not (like planet Ubuntu-f or planet-libre.org). They
all ended by not selecting the people on a quality basis but selecting
posts that "respect the subject of the planet". It results in very-low
quality planet, not interesting and, more importantly, without any soul,
any spirit.

Planet.gnome has a spirit. There's something (called it "soul" if you
want). Don't break it. Remember planet.climate-change joke? That was huge
and enjoyable.


EXACTLY.  EXACTLY.  EXACTLY.



My solution is the following :

- Each GNOME member should be able to add his feed to pgo. He might want
to change his feed whenever he wants to take a more specialized one or not.

- Each year, a mail is sent to those member asking if they want to stay on
pgo and if they consider themselves still on-topic.


Lets limit it to a reminder that "you're on PGO.  if you want to be removed, 
email xxx" if we have to do something like that.


behdad


But don't clean whiter than white. There's always off-topic stuffs or
stuff you don't want to read. Just don't read them. Richard don't want to
read stuffs about Mono? I understand, it's his choice and I respect it.
He's not forced to read them. GNOME is about people. Sometimes, people are
doing other stuffs than free software coding (aren't you?). When I'm at
work, I often talk with co-worker about sports, about what I will eat
tonight. When I go to #gnome-hackers, often the discussion is completely
off-topic. Last night, on #gtg, I discussed about chocolates with someone
arguing that there's good chocolate in Italy (can you believe that?). It
was fun. I'm in GNOME because it's fun. GNOME is fun. PGO is fun.

Please, please, please, keep the fun. World is collapsing? It's doing that
for 2.000.000 years already! So, keep the fun…

Lionel


On Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:27:43 +0100, Frederic Crozat
wrote:

Le 08/12/2009 16:08, sankarshan a écrit :

2009/12/8 Pierre-Luc Beaudoin:

On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 03:23 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

But I find it interesting to know, say, what Miguel is up to these
days. I don't think it's just me...


I don't believe Frederic was pointing at Miguel.  There are people who
have left the Gnome community working on products that don't use any
Gnome technology posting blog post/ads for said product on PGO.


[0] Unless specific names are pointed out to the Board or, on this
list, the shadow boxing will be more harmful


So, let's start (this is list done quickly by me and I haven't contacted



anybody from it), as basis:

- Robert Love
- Christopher Blizzard
- Miguel De Icaza
- Nat Friedman
- Daniel Veillard
- Edd Dumbill
- Glynn Foster
- James Henstridge
- Jeff Waugh
- Mark McLoughlin
- Scott James Remnant



[1] How does one define that they have "left the GNOME community" ?


this list is based on people either no longer blogging at all or not
blogging about GNOME and not being active in GNOME. I don't have any
problem about people who blogs about non-political oriented things in
their life, as long as GNOME is one of those things...

I'm not even sure I should still be on Planet GNOME (even if I'm release



team member), since most of my posts aren't about GNOME but about the
distribution I work on. And I sometime feels those posts could be seen
as propaganda for my distribution.

Regarding what bedhad said, nothing prevent people to read those people
blog outside Planet GNOME (like Planet Mono or anything else).

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/09/2009 09:07 AM, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:



about their work and appear on Planet GNOME. There's nothing wrong with
that. Same goes for Nokia and many other companies involved.


I wonder if there's a misunderstanding here.  No one said that companies
shouldn't be allowed to post.

Richard said that Planet GNOME shouldn't be used to promote non-free
software (i.e. software that denies freedom by witholding source code or
witholding permission to use/modify/distribute).


But mono *is* Free Software according to the FSF definition!

behdad
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 14:07 +, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
> > about their work and appear on Planet GNOME. There's nothing wrong with
> > that. Same goes for Nokia and many other companies involved.
> 
> I wonder if there's a misunderstanding here.  No one said that companies
> shouldn't be allowed to post.
> 
> Richard said that Planet GNOME shouldn't be used to promote non-free
> software (i.e. software that denies freedom by witholding source code or
> witholding permission to use/modify/distribute).
> 
> This means some software from Nokia shouldn't be promoted on Planet GNOME,
> but Nokia (like many other companies) also develops and distributes lots of
> free software.  No one's objecting to promoting Nokia's work on free
> software for GNOME.

That's why I wrote "talk about their work". There's no misunderstanding.

Mentioning that they are using some piece of LGPL software to build a
closed source component is fine. Personally I most definitely want to
know about such things.

As for what Miguel works on (to go back to the origin of the proposal):

The vast majority of what he's blogging  and working on *is* free and/or
opensource software or about free and/or opensource software being used
in the field.

Making it forbidden to use planet-gnome for that is like wanting to deny
a reality. If GNOME wants to be relevant, it must not boycott reality.


-- 
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

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

> about their work and appear on Planet GNOME. There's nothing wrong with
> that. Same goes for Nokia and many other companies involved.

I wonder if there's a misunderstanding here.  No one said that companies
shouldn't be allowed to post.

Richard said that Planet GNOME shouldn't be used to promote non-free
software (i.e. software that denies freedom by witholding source code or
witholding permission to use/modify/distribute).

This means some software from Nokia shouldn't be promoted on Planet GNOME,
but Nokia (like many other companies) also develops and distributes lots of
free software.  No one's objecting to promoting Nokia's work on free
software for GNOME.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan, +32 487 64 17 54, http://ciaran.compsoc.com

Please help build the software patents wiki: http://en.swpat.org

   http://www.EndSoftwarePatents.org

Donate: http://endsoftwarepatents.org/donate
List: http://campaigns.fsf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/esp-action-alert
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Lionel Dricot]

I don't agree at all with the current direction of the discussion. For me,
pgo is about people.

Yes, I'm interested to learn that Nat will soon get married. Yes, I'm
interested to hear about Mandriva on Frédéric's posts because I don't use
it at all but at least I keep an eye on it thanks to his blog. Even the
mono-bashism of Miguel is sometimes interesting : it allows me to know what
is happening when I want to know. I like to practise my Dutch by reading
Reinout's post and to see if UTF-8 works correctly when seeing Indian's
poems.

I'm happy to meet a fellow GNOME developer at FOSDEM and saying : "So, you
like Karaté/Running/Vegan Cooking ?".

I know some planets that choose to have a "code of conduct" about what
should be posted or not (like planet Ubuntu-f or planet-libre.org). They
all ended by not selecting the people on a quality basis but selecting
posts that "respect the subject of the planet". It results in very-low
quality planet, not interesting and, more importantly, without any soul,
any spirit.

Planet.gnome has a spirit. There's something (called it "soul" if you
want). Don't break it. Remember planet.climate-change joke? That was huge
and enjoyable.


My solution is the following : 

- Each GNOME member should be able to add his feed to pgo. He might want
to change his feed whenever he wants to take a more specialized one or not.

- Each year, a mail is sent to those member asking if they want to stay on
pgo and if they consider themselves still on-topic.

But don't clean whiter than white. There's always off-topic stuffs or
stuff you don't want to read. Just don't read them. Richard don't want to
read stuffs about Mono? I understand, it's his choice and I respect it.
He's not forced to read them. GNOME is about people. Sometimes, people are
doing other stuffs than free software coding (aren't you?). When I'm at
work, I often talk with co-worker about sports, about what I will eat
tonight. When I go to #gnome-hackers, often the discussion is completely
off-topic. Last night, on #gtg, I discussed about chocolates with someone
arguing that there's good chocolate in Italy (can you believe that?). It
was fun. I'm in GNOME because it's fun. GNOME is fun. PGO is fun.

Please, please, please, keep the fun. World is collapsing? It's doing that
for 2.000.000 years already! So, keep the fun…

Lionel


On Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:27:43 +0100, Frederic Crozat 
wrote:
> Le 08/12/2009 16:08, sankarshan a écrit :
>> 2009/12/8 Pierre-Luc Beaudoin:
>>> On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 03:23 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 But I find it interesting to know, say, what Miguel is up to these
 days. I don't think it's just me...
>>>
>>> I don't believe Frederic was pointing at Miguel.  There are people who
>>> have left the Gnome community working on products that don't use any
>>> Gnome technology posting blog post/ads for said product on PGO.
>>
>> [0] Unless specific names are pointed out to the Board or, on this
>> list, the shadow boxing will be more harmful
> 
> So, let's start (this is list done quickly by me and I haven't contacted

> anybody from it), as basis:
> 
> - Robert Love
> - Christopher Blizzard
> - Miguel De Icaza
> - Nat Friedman
> - Daniel Veillard
> - Edd Dumbill
> - Glynn Foster
> - James Henstridge
> - Jeff Waugh
> - Mark McLoughlin
> - Scott James Remnant
> 
> 
>> [1] How does one define that they have "left the GNOME community" ?
> 
> this list is based on people either no longer blogging at all or not 
> blogging about GNOME and not being active in GNOME. I don't have any 
> problem about people who blogs about non-political oriented things in 
> their life, as long as GNOME is one of those things...
> 
> I'm not even sure I should still be on Planet GNOME (even if I'm release

> team member), since most of my posts aren't about GNOME but about the 
> distribution I work on. And I sometime feels those posts could be seen 
> as propaganda for my distribution.
> 
> Regarding what bedhad said, nothing prevent people to read those people 
> blog outside Planet GNOME (like Planet Mono or anything else).
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 14:27 +0100, Frederic Crozat wrote:

> So, let's start (this is list done quickly by me and I haven't contacted 
> anybody from it), as basis:
> 
> - Robert Love
> - Christopher Blizzard
> - Miguel De Icaza
> - Nat Friedman
> - Daniel Veillard
> - Edd Dumbill
> - Glynn Foster
> - James Henstridge
> - Jeff Waugh
> - Mark McLoughlin
> - Scott James Remnant

Many of these people are and have been top GNOME people.

You'd be insane if you wanted to remove them from the planet.

If you want to destroy GNOME as a community, you're on the right track.

> > [1] How does one define that they have "left the GNOME community" ?
> 
> this list is based on people either no longer blogging at all or not 
> blogging about GNOME and not being active in GNOME. I don't have any 
> problem about people who blogs about non-political oriented things in 
> their life, as long as GNOME is one of those things...
> 
> I'm not even sure I should still be on Planet GNOME (even if I'm release 
> team member), since most of my posts aren't about GNOME but about the 
> distribution I work on. And I sometime feels those posts could be seen 
> as propaganda for my distribution.

This is nonsense. The planet-gnome slogan is:

Planet GNOME is __ a window into the world, work and lives __ of GNOME
hackers and contributors.

This is what made the planet a successful project, initiated by Jeff
Waugh (who you propose for removal ^).

If you want to fundamentally change the planet, why don't you start your
own planet and convince the world that yours is better?

> Regarding what bedhad said, nothing prevent people to read those people 
> blog outside Planet GNOME (like Planet Mono or anything else).

Nothing prevents you from starting your own planet.

I'm pretty sure that you can even get a neat subdomain under GNOME's
from the admins.

-- 
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

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 08:19 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > I don't believe Frederic was pointing at Miguel.  There are people who
> > have left the Gnome community working on products that don't use any
> > Gnome technology posting blog post/ads for said product on PGO.
> 
> I wonder whether these products are free software.
> If not, they certainly shouldn't promote them on Planet GNOME.

Nonsense.

The people who work at VmWare also very often posted (and still post)
about their work and appear on Planet GNOME. There's nothing wrong with
that. Same goes for Nokia and many other companies involved.

Forbidding those contributors to talk about their work goes directly and
philosophically against the "Planet GNOME is a window into the world,
work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors" slogan of the project.

You see that word "work" there? Right.



-- 
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

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Frederic Crozat]

Le 08/12/2009 16:08, sankarshan a écrit :

2009/12/8 Pierre-Luc Beaudoin:

On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 03:23 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

But I find it interesting to know, say, what Miguel is up to these
days. I don't think it's just me...


I don't believe Frederic was pointing at Miguel.  There are people who
have left the Gnome community working on products that don't use any
Gnome technology posting blog post/ads for said product on PGO.


[0] Unless specific names are pointed out to the Board or, on this
list, the shadow boxing will be more harmful


So, let's start (this is list done quickly by me and I haven't contacted 
anybody from it), as basis:


- Robert Love
- Christopher Blizzard
- Miguel De Icaza
- Nat Friedman
- Daniel Veillard
- Edd Dumbill
- Glynn Foster
- James Henstridge
- Jeff Waugh
- Mark McLoughlin
- Scott James Remnant



[1] How does one define that they have "left the GNOME community" ?


this list is based on people either no longer blogging at all or not 
blogging about GNOME and not being active in GNOME. I don't have any 
problem about people who blogs about non-political oriented things in 
their life, as long as GNOME is one of those things...


I'm not even sure I should still be on Planet GNOME (even if I'm release 
team member), since most of my posts aren't about GNOME but about the 
distribution I work on. And I sometime feels those posts could be seen 
as propaganda for my distribution.


Regarding what bedhad said, nothing prevent people to read those people 
blog outside Planet GNOME (like Planet Mono or anything else).


--
Frederic Crozat
Mandriva
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[sankarshan]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 6:49 PM, Richard Stallman  wrote:
>    > I don't believe Frederic was pointing at Miguel.  There are people who
>    > have left the Gnome community working on products that don't use any
>    > Gnome technology posting blog post/ads for said product on PGO.
>
> I wonder whether these products are free software.
> If not, they certainly shouldn't promote them on Planet GNOME.

I think we are mashing together a bunch of issues. So, in effect, are
we looking for:

[0] a way to measure what could be appropriate content for Planet GNOME
[1] a way to prevent non-free or equivalent software being "marketed"
via the Planet
[2] a way to handle the consequences if there is either inappropriate content
[3] a way to handle the consequences if there is a pitch for software
that is orthogonal to GNOME values

I can certainly agree to the need to have a Code of Conduct,
communities have one, either implicit or, explicit. But, unless there
is a clearly delineated process to handle the exceptions, a Code of
Conduct is just a document.



-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay

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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Richard Stallman]

> I don't believe Frederic was pointing at Miguel.  There are people who
> have left the Gnome community working on products that don't use any
> Gnome technology posting blog post/ads for said product on PGO.

I wonder whether these products are free software.
If not, they certainly shouldn't promote them on Planet GNOME.
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[sankarshan]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Behdad Esfahbod  wrote:
> On 12/09/2009 02:25 AM, sankarshan wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Behdad Esfahbod
>>  wrote:
>>
 Coming back to the starting point - what is the problem to which the
 solution is being discussed ?
>>>
>>> Read the thread?
>>
>> I have been following the thread since the inception. The intent of
>> the (rhetorical ?) question was to bring forth the fact that we are
>> discussing solutions of myriad variety without looking at whether it
>> can be solved non-programmatically. Hence, the question.
>
> The immediate question I was responding to was whethere/how blog posts of
> people not involved with GNOME anymore / not part of the GNOME community
> should be removed from PGO.  I think what I proposed is an adequate solution
> to that.
>
> Sure it doesn't fix many other problems raised in the thread.

Agreed. One of such problems is the fact that there is a CoC that has
been put forth at the very beginning of this thread, which is well
crafted. However, that specific mail does not state how the
implementation of a policy against the CoC will happen. How does one
complain ? What evidence would one need to gather to raise a complaint
and so forth. The process parts need to be thrashed out.

-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay


Sent from Brisbane, Qld, Australia
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/09/2009 02:25 AM, sankarshan wrote:

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Behdad Esfahbod  wrote:


Coming back to the starting point - what is the problem to which the
solution is being discussed ?


Read the thread?


I have been following the thread since the inception. The intent of
the (rhetorical ?) question was to bring forth the fact that we are
discussing solutions of myriad variety without looking at whether it
can be solved non-programmatically. Hence, the question.


The immediate question I was responding to was whethere/how blog posts of 
people not involved with GNOME anymore / not part of the GNOME community 
should be removed from PGO.  I think what I proposed is an adequate solution 
to that.


Sure it doesn't fix many other problems raised in the thread.

behdad
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[sankarshan]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Behdad Esfahbod  wrote:

>> Coming back to the starting point - what is the problem to which the
>> solution is being discussed ?
>
> Read the thread?

I have been following the thread since the inception. The intent of
the (rhetorical ?) question was to bring forth the fact that we are
discussing solutions of myriad variety without looking at whether it
can be solved non-programmatically. Hence, the question.


-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay


Sent from Brisbane, Qld, Australia
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/09/2009 01:56 AM, sankarshan wrote:

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Behdad Esfahbod  wrote:

On 12/09/2009 01:37 AM, Sankar P wrote:


Say, any viewer of p.g.o can vote a post +1 or -1.  Then we can gather
two
metrics per poster: 1) how impactful his/her posts are (avg / median /
max
number of votes).  2) how interested are readers in his/her posts (avg /
median / min/max score.

We can then have threshold to hide / collapse unpopular posts.  That part
can even be done using JavaScript and you can the threshold on the page
and
more posts will collapse/uncollapse...



Really ? Most people read posts in Google reader (offline) and may not
even be interested to vote for every author.


No one *has* to vote.  And we can have different feeds for different
thresholds.


Coming back to the starting point - what is the problem to which the
solution is being discussed ?


Read the thread?

behdad
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[sankarshan]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Behdad Esfahbod  wrote:
> On 12/09/2009 01:37 AM, Sankar P wrote:
>
>>> Say, any viewer of p.g.o can vote a post +1 or -1.  Then we can gather
>>> two
>>> metrics per poster: 1) how impactful his/her posts are (avg / median /
>>> max
>>> number of votes).  2) how interested are readers in his/her posts (avg /
>>> median / min/max score.
>>>
>>> We can then have threshold to hide / collapse unpopular posts.  That part
>>> can even be done using JavaScript and you can the threshold on the page
>>> and
>>> more posts will collapse/uncollapse...
>>>
>>
>> Really ? Most people read posts in Google reader (offline) and may not
>> even be interested to vote for every author.
>
> No one *has* to vote.  And we can have different feeds for different
> thresholds.

Coming back to the starting point - what is the problem to which the
solution is being discussed ?


-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay


Sent from Brisbane, Qld, Australia
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/09/2009 01:37 AM, Sankar P wrote:


Say, any viewer of p.g.o can vote a post +1 or -1.  Then we can gather two
metrics per poster: 1) how impactful his/her posts are (avg / median / max
number of votes).  2) how interested are readers in his/her posts (avg /
median / min/max score.

We can then have threshold to hide / collapse unpopular posts.  That part
can even be done using JavaScript and you can the threshold on the page and
more posts will collapse/uncollapse...



Really ? Most people read posts in Google reader (offline) and may not
even be interested to vote for every author.


No one *has* to vote.  And we can have different feeds for different thresholds.

behdad
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Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Sankar P]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 1:46 AM, Behdad Esfahbod  wrote:
> On 12/08/2009 10:08 AM, sankarshan wrote:
>>
>> 2009/12/8 Pierre-Luc Beaudoin:
>>>
>>> On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 03:23 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

 But I find it interesting to know, say, what Miguel is up to these
 days. I don't think it's just me...
>>>
>>> I don't believe Frederic was pointing at Miguel.  There are people who
>>> have left the Gnome community working on products that don't use any
>>> Gnome technology posting blog post/ads for said product on PGO.
>>
>> [0] Unless specific names are pointed out to the Board or, on this
>> list, the shadow boxing will be more harmful
>>
>> [1] How does one define that they have "left the GNOME community" ?
>
> Exactly.  The more I think about the issues raised in this thread, the more
> I believe a voting system (similar to what maemo is doing perhaps) may be
> all we need.
>
> Say, any viewer of p.g.o can vote a post +1 or -1.  Then we can gather two
> metrics per poster: 1) how impactful his/her posts are (avg / median / max
> number of votes).  2) how interested are readers in his/her posts (avg /
> median / min/max score.
>
> We can then have threshold to hide / collapse unpopular posts.  That part
> can even be done using JavaScript and you can the threshold on the page and
> more posts will collapse/uncollapse...
>

Really ? Most people read posts in Google reader (offline) and may not
even be interested to vote for every author.

-- 
Sankar P
http://psankar.blogspot.com
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