Re: Board of Directors Elections 2019 - Candidacy - Jeremy Allison

[Jeremy Allison via foundation-list]

On 5/31/19 4:43 PM, James wrote:

> Hi Jeremy!
> 
> Really glad to see that you're running for the board!
> 
> Assuming I'm correct in that we're allowed to ask questions to
> prospective candidates here, I'll throw in a few...
> (Other candidates are welcome to answer as well.)
> 
> 1) What distribution(s) do you use on your personal and work laptops
> and desktops?

Work desktop uses a custom distro based on debian (gLinux). Can't
go into more details due to corporate rules :-). The
desktop here is based on Cinnamon, which is a Gnome3
fork I believe.

At home I have several Ubuntu machines (laptops and desktops).
The family generally use Canonical's Unity as that's what
they got used to. I bounce between Unity and Gnome3 as
distributed on the latest Ubuntu release (19.04 is the
latest I upgraded).

> 2) What's the biggest technical difficulty you've had with modern GNOME?

Hmm. Mostly it "just works (tm)" :-). The things I
used to complain about with Nautilus got re-added
back in the latest releases. Would be nice to see
Wayland finished and become the default display
server but that's not Gnome's project.

> 3) How will you help GNOME succeed on modern mobile devices where the
> hardware is often very locked down or difficult to get running on?

That's a really hard one :-). As you may know, I'm
really not a fan of DRM, but we had some success
on Chromebooks which have a developer mode allowing
non-Google code to be installed due to the requirements
of GPLv3 code - so GPLv3 anti-drm features (which I had
a hand in adding to the license) are very important.

Locked down environments are unpleasantly susceptible
to security holes which can't be fixed other than
by the vendor.

At a recent CERT meeting in San Francisco I attended
I did make the point that license compliance is the
first step in being able to report a software Bill
Of Materials which is the basis of tracking any
security problems in the Free Software/Open Source
components a company may ship (and *everyone* ships
FLOSS code these days).

To cut a long story short, we won't fix this overnight,
but patience and education to vendors is our only
possible path forward.

> Thanks and good luck! You have my support =D
> James

Thanks !

Jeremy.





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Re: Board of Directors Elections 2019 - Candidacy - Jeremy Allison

[James via foundation-list]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 7:35 PM Jeremy Allison via foundation-list
 wrote:
>
> Name: Jeremy Allison
> Email: j...@google.com, j...@samba.org
> Affiliation: Google
> IRC: Don't use it - I'm too old so I use email instead :-).
>
> I'd like to run for the Gnome Foundation Board of Directors
> on behalf of Google.
>
> I've used Gnome for as long as it has been available
> as a GNU/Linux desktop.
>
> I don't currently contribute other than helping the
> gnome-vfs maintainers use one of the libraries (libsmbclient) of
> my primary project, Samba to access SMB1/2/3 servers.
>
> I have a long (25+ years) experience with Free and Open
> Source Software, mostly to do with my primary project
> Samba.
>
> I am on the Board of Directors of the Software Freedom
> Conservancy, and on the Advisory Board of the Document
> Foundation (LibreOffice).
>
> I perform my board duties diligently as required.
>
> I'd like to help support Gnome and promote it as a
> desktop environment within Google and outside of
> Google.
>
> I've had my differences with some of the design
> decisions in the past (as Karen Sandler can attest :-),
> but I would really like to help add my experience
> and enthusiasm for Free and Open Source Software
> to the project.
>
> Thank you for your consideration.
>
> Jeremy Allison,
> Google Open Source Programs Office,
> Co-Author of the Samba project.

Hi Jeremy!

Really glad to see that you're running for the board!

Assuming I'm correct in that we're allowed to ask questions to
prospective candidates here, I'll throw in a few...
(Other candidates are welcome to answer as well.)

1) What distribution(s) do you use on your personal and work laptops
and desktops?

2) What's the biggest technical difficulty you've had with modern GNOME?

3) How will you help GNOME succeed on modern mobile devices where the
hardware is often very locked down or difficult to get running on?

Thanks and good luck! You have my support =D
James
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Board of Directors Elections 2019 - Candidacy - Jeremy Allison

[Jeremy Allison via foundation-list]

Name: Jeremy Allison
Email: j...@google.com, j...@samba.org
Affiliation: Google
IRC: Don't use it - I'm too old so I use email instead :-).

I'd like to run for the Gnome Foundation Board of Directors
on behalf of Google.

I've used Gnome for as long as it has been available
as a GNU/Linux desktop.

I don't currently contribute other than helping the
gnome-vfs maintainers use one of the libraries (libsmbclient) of
my primary project, Samba to access SMB1/2/3 servers.

I have a long (25+ years) experience with Free and Open
Source Software, mostly to do with my primary project
Samba.

I am on the Board of Directors of the Software Freedom
Conservancy, and on the Advisory Board of the Document
Foundation (LibreOffice).

I perform my board duties diligently as required.

I'd like to help support Gnome and promote it as a
desktop environment within Google and outside of
Google.

I've had my differences with some of the design
decisions in the past (as Karen Sandler can attest :-),
but I would really like to help add my experience
and enthusiasm for Free and Open Source Software
to the project.

Thank you for your consideration.

Jeremy Allison,
Google Open Source Programs Office,
Co-Author of the Samba project.



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Re: Minutes of the board meeting of April 29, 2019

[Carlos Soriano]

Hi Ben, Tobi,

You raise good points and ideas, they are pretty valid, let me try to go
through them.

First of all, I think one of the reasons for this understanding gap is that
we didn't explain well how the work of the board has changed. I wrote a blog
post

to try to improve that, read the section "How does the work of the board
look nowadays?". Might not explain everything, but it will at least lay a
shared common ground for the discussion.

On Mon, 27 May 2019 at 19:42, Tobias Mueller  wrote:

> Hi Carlos, Rob,
>
> thanks for the fantastic answers :)
>
>
> You've written:
>
> On Wed, 2019-05-22 at 14:18 +0200, Carlos Soriano wrote:
> > While my duty if I want to continue this work is to apply again and
> > convince the membership to vote for me, this have a non-negligible
> > overhead. In my case, the uncertainty is making me focusing more on
> > preparing for a possible full hand off in less than a month than on
> > keep working on it. This is not healthy, and this doesn't work well.
> First of all: I agree.
>
> But: I think we'd be better off if we can establish that your work will
> still be valuable even if you are not a director (any more).
> (And for completeness sake: the "you" is the general "you", not second
> person singular.)
>
> I think we'd rather want to enable members to do valuable work for the
> Foundation than to limit ourselves to letting Directors do it.  Then,
> your premise "if I want to continue this work" does not hold, because
> you could just do the work.  My memory is fading, but I think there was
> a time where Board wanted to be more like facilitators than executives.
>

Indeed, and I believe this should continue to be a goal, and we have worked
on that by creating new committees. Specially around execution based tasks.

However, we have already reached a point where the tasks that the board do
nowadays are pretty standard for a board, while the other tasks are done
either by staff, committees or community members.


>
> As an aside: The scenario that you described is that you are running
> again, present your work to the membership as part of your platform and
> tell them that they should vote for you in order for you to get that job
> done.  Then the membership does not give you their vote.
> Now considering the proposal at hand, it seems to enforce the director
> being in power against the will of the membership.  That seems like a
> change the members should not like.
>
>
I think this point of view is stretching it a bit. You can think the
current year term is "enforcing a director for a year" too. I believe a
better way to look at this is that terms are about finding the right
balance between making sure directors can perform their work effectively
and keeping the terms as minimum as possible to give members the ability to
choose. The key here is that this balance has changed over the last year,
and seems 1 year terms are not enough anymore, but 2 years terms might.


>
> > At the end of the day is a matter of balance, and between the minimum
> > term of 1 year and the other extreme of no elections, we can find a
> > middle ground that works better with the new responsibilities and kind
> > of work the board needs to do nowadays.
> yeah, absolutely. I guess we're in the process of finding out :)
>
> >
> > It worth to mention that it's easier for any any person to commit to
> > just one year
> Yes!
> So I don't understand the logic that prolonging the term makes it easier
> for candidates to step up.
>

Indeed, it's the downside of a 2 year term (or longer), and it's something
we have discussed and concerned us too. Even with that, I think the general
agreement is that the change to longer terms will make the work of
directors more palatable and effective, which should be a good point
towards members thinking about stepping up for directors.


Benjamin,

Your ideas are indeed solutions.

However the goal is also to reduce the overhead of directors and make their
work more effective, while your ideas would ensure the work can be done
they most probably won't help or even make worse this overhead that we are
already experiencing with the new kind of tasks that we have.

In any case, the board needs to discuss the topic more, so your points and
ideas are helpful to us.

Cheers
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