Re: GNOME now
> Do you have any evidence of that? My tablet doesn't have a fast graphics > card (integrated Intel on Atom CPU), but certainly not one as bad as in > your tablet (GMA600), and it's plenty usable. I guess "usable" is in the eyes of the beholder. > If you try to use it as you would a high-powered laptop, you could be > disappointed, but I don't see this resource hunger you speak of. If I run the same workload with xfce on my netbook or tablet then its way faster and it feels snappy even with things like libreoffice open. If I do it with Gnome 3 then the battery life dives, the machine is sluggish, sometimes the UI stalls and jerks (I guess the compositor) and it becomes unpleasant to use, This is even after a few minutes before the resource leaks in the current Gnome shell become a factor too. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
> This is especially true given that there is NO tablet that can run a > completely free operating system. Only desktop and laptop machines This is not quite true. The options are very limited and in some cases you cannot use all the hardware (often the 3D acceleration) but there are a few such devices which are as free as a PC (and some which are PC devices as well as tablets). On the PC class devices the usual problems are the 3D graphics (only 2D is available for some graphics devices),and the minor downloadable firmware detail for some peripherals. I would not count Gnome3 as usable on such device anyway - it is too resource hungry even on a typical x86 tablet. (I have a Fujitsu Q550. The open graphics support is 2D only, the onboard wireless needs downloadable firmware if I remember rightly, but other than that there are no problems and no proprietary drivers). It's not a very good machine but it is as free as a typical PC 8) Some of the Atom N450/5 type PC tablet devices also support free 3D graphics, although battery life is generally very poor on this generation of hardware compared with the recent stuff. > can do that. Thus, those of us who want to live in freedom need to > avoid tablets. GNOME must not abandon the desktop and laptop machines, > must not consign them prematurely to the dustbin of history. The latest Ultrabook type devices that have been shown at technology shows are basically a combination of laptop and tablet, with touchscreen and optional use of keyboard. A good touch interface will matter on those devices too. There is another reason that desktop/laptop/ultrabook-tablet type devices matter. Most tablets are completely unusable for development work. A user posessing only a tablet has very limited ways to use the freedom they have been given. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
> Your TV allows that: > http://prolost.com/blog/2011/3/28/your-new-tv-ruins-movies.html > > I don't think we want to compare GNOME to TVs with awful UIs. There is nothing awful about the TV UI. Look at the facts. The problem with TV settings is the same as the benchmarketing game in computing - it has bugger all to do with the UI. The picture defaults are purposefully crap in order to sell televisions. The UI is fine. In the Gnome case the defaults are purposefully set by people with the intention that they are a *good* choice but limited by the fact you've got to pick some consistent uniform default. It's just that the UI for twiddling them is broken. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
> > Lets be intellectually honest - a command line client editor is *NOT* > > user-friendly. > > I don't agree at all with this assessment: it depends entirely on the > audience it is targeting. If the goal is freedom then presumably the goal is freedom for all not freedom for the special elite who speak gconf. > because the amount of available options is, currently, not something > that should even be exposed; applications use the settings machinery > to save state, as well as user preferences, and that should not be > exposed to any user - including the one of tinkering tendencies. Why not ? > that is not entirely our decision, considering that GNOME is currently > shipped by distributions downstream of us. the most that GNOME as > project can do is saying the the tweak tool is part of the project. The tweak tool is not integrated. If you look at say a modern digital TV - which is a product that notoriously has to deal with everyone from the totally tech clueless to the video nuts who want to hand adjust everything then it is all in the settings. Most of it you don't notice because there are usually options in the settiings that basically look like Audio Balance: Standard Clear Voice User Defined and only if someone goes and selects user defined does the page of configuration material actually show itself. That's good design because it is discoverable, it is easy to back away from and also because it means the user defined settings can be fiddled with and are not lost when you flip back to a safe default. Rather they are kept and flipping back to user defined goes back to them as left. Much of this stuff in Gnome IMHO belongs in settings in that same kind of way. My TV is insanely configurable, but while I personally don't fiddle with the configuration much it doesn't get in the way. At worst the user experience is a one off "I wonder what 'user defined' is click ooh not what I wanted click" and only while exploring the settings by choice > as a personal opinion, I don't agree that the tweak tool should be > installed by default; it can be pointed out in the documentation as a > way to get more options, but it's really up to the user to decide > whether or not she should install it. the user experience should stand > by itself. Well it doesn't - clearly as is evidenced by the fact people are forking it and shipping the forks in major distros. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
On Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:33:26 + Emmanuele Bassi wrote: > hi; > > On 28 November 2012 11:02, Alan Cox wrote: > >> What I took from that is that the freedom to modify your computing > >> environment is only meaningful in the first degree to programmers. > > > > And if GNOME continues to bury all the configuration in secret corners > > without a UI, and even the basic stuff only by an add on (tweak tool) > > you'll continue to fail to empower users to modify their computing > > environment. > > yes, because we all know that Freedom means Tweaking configuration > options, or *having* to modify your environment in order for it to > work. Freedom means having the ability to do these things. Enhancing the freedom of users means giving them the ability to do these things if they wish. Nothign to do with having to modify your environment and you know it. > having options everywhere in your face and in your UI is not > empowering anyone: let's drop this fallacy. There is a difference between having options in your face and being able to find them as a non-technical user. At the end of the day the market size for "people who agree exactly with the Gnome defaults" is smaller than "people who kind of like it but want to tweak a couple of things". Our way or the highway doesn't work very well with UI. I'm surprised the fact that there's only one distribution of note still defaulting to Gnome 3 hasn't woken people up a bit more. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
> digress). The goal we should be aiming for is freedom for all computer > users, and like it or not, the majority of computer uses in the next 5 > years will be on phones and tablets. > > To pretend otherwise and focus on PC-style devices is trying to gain > traction in a shrinking market, which outside of business use will > soon be irrelevant. In which case Gnome needs to seamlessly run Android apps or it will be irrelevant. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
> What I took from that is that the freedom to modify your computing > environment is only meaningful in the first degree to programmers. And if GNOME continues to bury all the configuration in secret corners without a UI, and even the basic stuff only by an add on (tweak tool) you'll continue to fail to empower users to modify their computing environment. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
> Actually I think Richard made a really helpful suggestion - a screen > built in to the desktop that explains the goals. Can the desktop by > default at least have such a document on it for people to read? One place to put it is part of an introductory first run tutorial which also explains things like the top left corner, some basic keybindings etc. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!
> What has changed since the initial GNOME 3 release and now ? The software rendering in Mesa improved dramatically and also has some limited ability to use GEM to optimise data paths on certain cards. > Is gnome-shell now optimized and usable on said, older hardware ? Some of the problem hardware is quite current. On netbook type devices with Imagination graphics (and thus unaccelerated) for example it's sort of usable but feels sluggish, while other desktops are quite snappy. On the x86 tablet with Imaginationg graphics I have its horrendous (especially when doing 1080p external video) Even on a decent x86 box the inability to run without a compositor is a killer for doing some kinds of graphics work as the latency it adds is sufficient to be painful. If you've got a fast CPU and reasonable but unusupported graphics hardware then it's usable but not great. No idea what Gnome 3 is like on a Raspberry Pi which would be the most useful other guide as its got fairly snappy graphics but naff CPU and relatively limited memory (512MB now) > Perhaps what we need is not a person/group of people working > for 'good press' and telling people that we have their best interests > at heart, but rather a bit more transparency in how we make our You can do all the telling you like. It's the listening and explaining which matters. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Readability publisher sign-up for *.gnome.org
On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:22:14 -0500 "Jason D. Clinton" wrote: > On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 13:45, Alan Cox wrote: > > People asked to have their blogs included on it and placed them on > > it by choice. It's under CC-NC licensing (*). So they've agreed to NC use > > but the foundation exploiting it commercially (or indeed any site > > reformatting it and making money from doing so) would appear to be a > > breach of copyright. > > We have agreed to an grant a copy of our blogs under no license > whatsoever; it's a one-time grant of copy, non-transferable as long as > we agree to continue to be aggregated. We are not implicitly licensing > anything. > > The Foundation cannot grant a license to anyone else because it has none. Then I suggest the web site is fixed because it says very clearly: "This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0." at the bottom of various pages, which sounds to me like a fairly explicit grant of rights to the work. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Readability publisher sign-up for *.gnome.org
> > I would be surprised if the Gnome Foundation had legal authority and > > ownership rights to authorise any redesign of such material as it isn't > > the rightsholder in question. > > Well, we are reformating and republishing already. How's that different? > Just wondering. People asked to have their blogs included on it and placed them on it by choice. It's under CC-NC licensing (*). So they've agreed to NC use but the foundation exploiting it commercially (or indeed any site reformatting it and making money from doing so) would appear to be a breach of copyright. Alan (*) which is btw utterly broken because "non-commercial" has no defined and common meaning ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Readability publisher sign-up for *.gnome.org
> I suspect the most likely sub-domain to be read via Readability is > blogs.gnome.org, which would raise the question of whether it's right > for the Gnome Foundation to accept the money from people reading > Foundation-hosted blog posts. I think it's probably reasonable, but I'm > just one person writing mundane things. ;) I would be surprised if the Gnome Foundation had legal authority and ownership rights to authorise any redesign of such material as it isn't the rightsholder in question. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: proposal to change GNOME's trademark guidelines
> I'm not the world's foremost expert in trademark law but I am a lawyer and > have worked in this area in my tenure at the Software Freedom Law Center. > The language that I proposed was reviewed in other contexts by other > lawyers at SFLC as well as lawyers at various companies that were involved > in the projects that adopted policies with this language in it. (That > said, I'd be happy to get other lawyers involved if it's not overkill.) That answers my question, and from the rest of the reply it seems my other worries are addressed, thought about and dealt with. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: proposal to change GNOME's trademark guidelines
> This section is quite broad, and is only modified by the somewhat vague > "Fair Use" section. Unfortunately, if taken literally, it would prevent The "Fair Use" section has another problem btw when someone is looking at this. "Fair Use" has no meaning in most legal systems outside the USA. > I'm proposing this additional language (which is based on text in other > free software trademark policies) to be added in the same section, after > that paragraph: And that should be reviewed by someone experienced in trademark law. I'm sure some of the corporate members can help. I know how much fun Red Hat had trying to get the Fedora mark right. > > This requirement is waived in all contexts where such marks are not > > normally included, such as email, online discussion, package names, > > non-graphical advertisements (when permitted), and academic papers. > > We encourage the use of the symbol whenever possible, but recognize > > that many non-commercial and informal uses will omit it. This for example allows the use of "gnome" for packages which are not gnome packages or to advertise products that are nothing to do with Gnome using google adwords (eg buying the Gnome word and pointing it at xfce.org 8)). Careless, and why a lawyer should be involved in such work because once you've trashed your trademark it's near impossible to undo the damage. > We want to make sure that people can use GNOME software and talk about it > freely without unreasonable restrictions. The aim is to adopt this > amendment to the policy in two weeks if there are no objections. Public > discussion here about it would be great, and folks can contact me > privately too if they want to. This seems the wrong tack to me. Giving clear examples of fair use, and clear, tight ones so you don't make the package mistake would sort this out. Trademark requirements are quite specific and defining some examples would provide clarity and assurance surely ? It's really essential such changes go through lawyers. Sad the world works that way but in the case of trademark that's how it happens to be. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Wiki text licensing
On Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:25:17 +0100 Dodji Seketeli wrote: > Richard Stallman a écrit: > > > (I changed the Subject because I recommend that we not describe > > potentially useful works of software documentation works as "content". > > That term denigrates the works. > > > > See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html@Content for the > > reason.) > > I believe the aforementioned URL is incorrect. The correct one would be > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Content. I am slightly confused - is there no intent to relicense and diagrams ? ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GTK+/MeeGo Handset integration work, call for bids
On Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:35:13 -0700
"C.J. Adams-Collier KF7BMP" wrote:
> I'm raising a red flag:
>
>
> W: Failed to fetch
> http://download.meego.com/live/devel:/tools:/sdk:/host/${distribution}/Sources.gz
> 404 Not Found
Seems to work for me.
${distribution} in the URL looks a bit umm - odd. Perhaps your tools are
too old or something somewhere didn't do a substitution ?
Fortunately since its all http based you can just use a web browser
http://download.meego.com/live/devel:/tools:/sdk:/host/
(and file a bug...)
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Re: GNOME Speaker Guidelines
> minorities have not had a large role in free software community. So that > joke might have worked with a lot of people back then but not so much now. > Since you're a celebrity people are willing to probably overlook such > things that might normally offend them. Of course the opposite is true as > well, because you're a celebrity people might be even more offended > depending on how sensitive they feel your role is. Worse unfortunately, because he is a celebrity people will copy what he does and think its 'cool'. Which when it comes to sexist jokes is not what the free software community needs. Richard, remember the freedom to modify code requires the knowledge to do it - which is something you mostly learn and share within that community by being part of it. Driving half of the human race out of that community though behaviour they find obnoxious and threatening isn't just a matter of poor taste, its a direct attack on the very freedoms the FSF and GPL are meant to be about. It's not a question of what the law permits but what is ethically right. Is it ethically right for the leader of the free software movement to drive people away from free software ? We want to replace the proprietary software world with free software for all, not for mostly male, thick skinned folks because everyone else feels unwelcome and threatened - whether for cultural or other reasons. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Speaker Guidelines
> That's completely irrelevant. Do we need to write a list of "no bag > stealing", "no puppy strangling" etc.? Sexual assaults are supposed to > be dealt with using law enforcement, not speaker guidelines. Assault is - but where for example would you draw the line given a speaker appearing in a swastika t-shirt and making jewish jokes (which in most of the world would merely be very offensive not a crime) and "not being our problem" That is the same question but put in blunter terms about an issue over which there is more consensus and awareness. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Speaker Guidelines
> It would be better if GNOME defined a precise set of rules (ie. "don't > mention religion"). As for the hazy areas, common sense is a better That is hardly a precise rule. I think quite a few people would describe certain posters attitude to the letters G N and U as 'religion'. The social sciences don't have an effective definition for religion so I doubt Gnome does. > judge than a set of written rules. If someone does something grossly > inappropriate just don't invite them to further events. "Policy is a poor man's substitute for common sense." -- David Woodhouse I think says it all Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
> sillies :-) Lets not forget some of the low-level sillies found in the > kernel and base-syste, recently: software resume processes that > synchronously read huge chunks of the swap partition to checksum the > disk, single big kernel locks held for all module insertions, Modules is not showing up on profiles.. > de-compressing the initrd twice, hal parsing huge files multiple times > etc. etc. ;-) IMHO no-one has the monopoly on writing bad, high-latency, > poorly serialised code. Oh indeed. > compared to the ~70% I/O latency caused primarily by shoddy, obsolete > pointer-chasing-with-10ms-latency-each-time filing systems :-) Some of it comes from user space reading a zillion tiny files some from file system design. Media latency is a huge issue. You see how huge when you realise that a high end NFS server witha huge battery backed cache can often beat a local SATA disk on latency. > [ hopefully with some success ]. Indeed, most of the really startling > boot-time / performance wins come from trying, often at great expense, > to defeat the kernel's lame approach to I/O and get data from the disk > faster. That is where most of the ~50% magnitude speedups I've seen come > from. I'd be interested to know more about this (off list ?) and how it looks from the OO.o end of things. > perhaps that helps them today wrt. reducing IPC latency: but I'm unsure > how much of a win it is on a local machine; is it not the case that > context switches are amazingly cheap these days ? is it not the case Thread switches are. Process switches and IPC can be more costly than you might think because of data moving between cores. The kernel isn't entirely without blame on that one. In the ideal case the server and the client are running on two cores in the same package. At that point latency will matter simply because the X server takes time to respond to a request and reply - and the server amplifies this with its own execution model and assumptions. If you have parallelism then the server and client thread (or threads increasingly I suspect) will execute in parallel. > outside that. Of course last I looked Google seem to suggest writing in > Java and compiling to Javascript (which might work better). The logical step beyond that then becomes "the javascript vm doesn't suck, so why are we not providing an interface to provide javascript vm apps". > The HTML5 canvas is inadequate for doing most of the precision font > rendering that is necessary for big (eg. WYSIWYG) office apps. I would > love to read the writer layout and spreadsheet re-calculation algorithms > re-written in Javascript. That in essence is part of the challenge. It's usually easier to take a low featured app and move it to a higher featured environment than the reverse. Locally executing web apps is a different ball game to web enabling existing local apps, as several people have found out to their cost. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
> In my opinion you solve latency more by making services capable of > pipelining, than by compressing data. And by making clients that make > use of the remote service's pipelining capabilities. Thats a bit naïve. They two solve totally different problems and it is dependant upon the behaviour of the pipe which matters. Compression reduces latency by lowering time from initiation of transmit to completion of receive. Pipelining removes some of the other overheads but only if causality permits it, which can often be a big problem. Now if you do look at serious mobile and web applications its not pipelining thats a key part of the design at all. It's understanding the transaction seequences, making bandwidth/latency tradeoffs and being able to figure them out on the fly. As bandwidth rises over latency you start to answer questions that are not asked - just in case. So for a typical "3G" phone user you get some benefit from dumping chunks of info to the client to avoid round trips. Serious developers of these tools can actually show you the graphs of each transaction, and the decision trees for different transaction patterns that have been carefully plotted out to minimise the number of events. I've seen some of that with low level X toolkits, and nothing much with the GNOME desktop. Its taking people like Arjan and the Moblin startup work to turn up all the real uglies and dubmness in the desktop. > UI and client developers should learn to build state machines instead of > threads that work like (where [...] is ~ an IP frame): Doesn't need to be a state machine, you just need enough parallelism to fill the pipe. Exceeding that can actually reduce performance for other reasons. But yes I think this is what the low level graphics people have been trying to tell the desktop people for years and where some work on the UI toolkits happened. It's what the kernel people have been trying to tell the Gnome people for years about disk I/O patterns, its what the component people tried to tell everyone years ago about Bonobo - which was ignored with horrible consequences that knocked GNOME performance way back, and again about gconf (go admire the stats on a nautilus startup) which still makes more round trips that a corporate sales executive. > This, however, isn't always simple with the newest "HTML5 + Javascript" > technologies. Meaning that GNOME's desktop technologies has an advantage > here. I don't see that as being the case. GNOME has a lot of horribly latency inducing code in it much of which needs a serious effort to get back out. It was designed for a different world. I think the advantage is actually with the opposition. They have designed from day one for latency, they have avoided inheriting dumb latency heavy models and they don't have the compatibility legacy that GNOME has to worry about in solving them. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
>A solution that IMHO has much better chances of success is to > create a free alternative to facebook. However, who is going to do it > and more importantly who is going to pay for this effort? :( You would have the same problem as taking on ebay or replacing the internet. The economic value of a network is armwavingly proportional to the square of the number of members. (Metcalfe's law) It would make more sense perhaps to ask why you need a centralised web site for this rather than tying it together distributed sites and people together through links in the same way that rss permits news to be aggregated without there being some central repository of the world's news. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Thanks, and a Brief Survey
> 2. not legitimate; not sanctioned by > law or custom. I don't see what the fuss is about. "Not sanctioned by custom" precisely describes Richard Stallman's belief that Free Software as a concept does not include considering proprietary software as acceptable in most cases. Whether that is true of the majority use of the term today is open to debate, but it was his term in the first place 8) The EU uses "Free, Libre and Open Source Software " when it wants to talk about the general space and ensure that the usual misinterpretations of 'free' do not occur and that nobody is offended, mislabeled or wastes all their meeting time with stupid arguments. A bit cumbersome but a good deal more all embracing. Given GNOME has always tended to keep core libraries LGPL that's perhaps also more descriptive too. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership
>1. People speak on their own behalf, not on behalf of GNOME. Unless they > ARE talking on behalf of GNOME (say, board, release team, etc), On things like the planet that can be addressed by suitable tags and styling (as could "inappropriate" content - if there is a 'rant filter' option or similar) >4. In any kind of discussion and/or medium, one should learn who's words > matter. "Is he the maintainer of the module? Is he a developer? Does he > generally offer useful insight? Does he know what he's talking about? Do > others take this person seriously?" When you learn to ignore the noise, life > is beautiful again. With the kernel hat on this is why LWN and Jon Masters summaries are so important. They distill the relevant material from the bloodbath that is linux-kernel (and which btw does put off a lot of people and cause big issues with some cultural groups). Please btw don't use Linux kernel as a shining example of why rules are not needed. The kernel works despite not because of the list attitude. Also there may be no code of conduct but certain people have at times been taken aside at conferences and "educated" on how they are coming across. >- Learn to agree to disagree. > >- Criticize ideas, not people presenting them. > And perhaps also - Remmeber that different cultures have different attitudes, styles and touchy subjects. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Stormy's update: Week of July 13th
On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:20:22 +0200 Philip Van Hoof wrote: > On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 21:43 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: > > Another problem with trying to find an issue here is that, depending on > > the point of view, Amazon acted within their own Terms (point iii under > > "Subscriptions"). > > > > Legally, that would make a difference; ethically, it is beside the > > point. Some people are willing to sign away their freedom for some > > sort of convenience. > > I don't see it as signing your freedom away. I see it as receiving a > convenience in exchange for an agreement. That is because you think only of yourself perhaps. I could equally characterise things such as "spying on your neighbours and reporting them to a corrupt state" as "receiving a convenience [no hassle, better housing etc] in exchange for an agreement" Neither looks at the full picture. I am not sure however the list is the right place to debate ethics. I strongly agree with Ciaran about instead working with sellers such as bookzilla.de ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Stormy's update: Week of July 13th
On Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:41:36 -0400 Richard Stallman wrote: > Created some Amazon affiliate accounts in US, UK, Canada and Germany so > tha= > t > Jaap can set up stores and a Firefox widget that will enable people to > direct Amazon referral fees for their purchase to GNOME. > > It is not a good thing for the GNOME Foundation to support Amazon in > this way. Amazon is one of the main perpetrators of DRM > (see http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/07/orwell-2009-dystopia). And stupid patents ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: What do you think of the foundation?
On Sat, 30 May 2009 10:27:00 -0400
Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On 05/30/2009 08:10 AM, Stormy Peters wrote:
>
> > (And we have lost members of our community because we haven't enforced
> > that Code of Conduct.)
>
> How accurate is that statement?
I know of at least one example therefore it is accurate.
Anyway it's a mistake IMHO to mix up "freedom of speech" (which even the
US only means 'political speech' not rights to scream hatred) and what
gets to all intents and purposes published and branded by the foundation.
Any right I may have to have a loud rant about someone stops well short
of a right to have it appear in the New York Times. Ditto
planet.gnome.org, which is effectively a foundation site and should have
a policy that makes Gnome actually look responsible and grown up.
What happens on some other site ("ranters.pants-off.org" seems free) is
another matter, but if its Gnome branded it ought to be handled
responsibly.
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Re: Call for hackfest ideas
> More specifically, some pixbuf loaders (png and tiff) load the entire > image, and then scale it. This leads to huge memory usage (bug 142428) > loading the image. Yes - I reported this a a Gnome security problem about eight years ago. Quite a few gnome apps fed small compressed images explode. > Worse, after the initial pixbuf is loaded, the gtk+ scaling routines > collapse for high scaling ratios (bug 80925). A 20 kilobyte png file can > bring Nautilus to its knees (bug 522803). Yes - well known, never fixed > I don't have the expertise to fix any of this, but I do want to make the > problems known... Unfortunately they are well known but nobody seems to care. I'll forward your message to the vendor security list and we'll see what happens. Probably the bug just needs to be made *very* public to incentivise people to fix it 8) Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [guadec-list] Re-considering expectnation web service
> I agree 100% here, just because we're supposed to have an ideology of > free software doesn't mean we should be against using non-free software. > Hell, dreamweaver is an awesome product! This logic extends further that > if we are able to help Expectnation become open source (as a previous > post suggested), then the way to do that is to embrace it now... > Especially as it has features which are invaluable to GUADEC being a > success in 2008! If you rely on proprietary then you need to account for all the bad things it brings as well as the convenience in this case. What happens if Expectnation goes out of business before guadec 2008 ? What is the backup plan ? I'm not saying Expectnation isn't the right choice but that you have to do the rest of the work that goes with a proprietary choice. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Sat, 01 Dec 2007 10:11:15 +0100 Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Alan Cox wrote: > >> I just want to put this in perspective: the foundation has $200,000 in > >> the bank, with guaranteed income of $100,000 a year approx. One employee > >> costs at least $70,000 per year, and depending on the role up to > >> $100,000 or more. > >> > >> Manpower is expensive :) > > > > American manpower is expensive. > > French manpower is equally expensive. And British manpower too. Even more so. Especially compared to Brazil, India and Eastern Europe. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
> I just want to put this in perspective: the foundation has $200,000 in > the bank, with guaranteed income of $100,000 a year approx. One employee > costs at least $70,000 per year, and depending on the role up to > $100,000 or more. > > Manpower is expensive :) American manpower is expensive. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME dependent on Mono
> With Novell's customers getting exclusive patent protection for mono, it > seems unfair for everyone else who have a heightened risk. Thats something to take up with the FSF. The implementation of the GPLv3 is badly flawed by allowing that activity to continue. The original act was Novell's, but the ongoing problem is caused by the FSF. And the sooner the FSF realise that and issue a GPL v3.1 removing that exemption the better. The FSF not Gnome wrote Novell the get out clause. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Statement on ECMA TC45-M Participation
> Don't change the subject. The statement I quoted is trollish. There is > no need to say we are shooting at our own feet repeatedly. Especially > without any argument (I do not mean just text in an email). The > announcement was not neutral. The perception from outside is very clearly that you are active participants and its being used in that way. That would appear to be "shooting at own feet" Perhaps you'd care to critique the relevant points instead of jumping up and down like a small child going "ner ner na ner ner" Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: board [was Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]]
> I pointed out behaviour that I thought was inappropriate and unproductive. So did I ... > I suggest you take a gander at the Code of Conduct So do I ... ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: board [was Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]]
> will believe it. Not a great way to encourage respectful discussion on this > list, Nor is putting in strange references to ultimatums off private lists. That makes it very hard to follow, so thanks for explaining where it came from. As for "trashing you", it seems any comment about the boards actions or activities that is the slighest bit negative or in disagreement with yourself you take as a personal insult and follow up in flowery language attempting to supress the dissent by acting hurt. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: board [was Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]]
> So, yes, I totally understand your position, but I think that falling back > on unsympathetic, dramatic criticism of the Board and ultimatums is not a > productive way of fixing the problem. "unsympathetic, dramatic criticism" would be "telling it as it is" "of the Board" would be "blaming Jeff" "ultimatums" has me baffled given all the Luis said about getting the job done whatever it took. Can you translate that particular bit of newspeak Jeff, as I can't work out how to make sense of your comments with respect to Luis offer. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]
> Competing is a good thing, and in my opinion it's good that Microsoft > competes with us. This keeps us sharp and focused. If you were sharp and focussed nobody would have joined anything in a way Microsoft could twist. > > Competition has never been a bad thing for mankind. In fact has it been > an excellent invention of nature for all living species. That includes > the free software warriors. Competing is not the same as giving your opponent an automatic weapon and asking them to take potshots at you, which is what the current activity has become. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]
> I look forward to further aggravated public shaming of past incompetencies, > especially ones so obvious in hindsight, as it always improves motivation So you can do PR some of the time then Jeff "aggravated public shaming of past incompetencies" I have another word for that newspeak ... "Accountability" > and encourages members to run for election. I hope it does. If they believe the board isn't doing the job as well as they could... Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Suggestion for coming elections
On Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:53:28 +0200 Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi, > > Quim Gil wrote: > > What happens when you get less than 7 people with votes? > > I don't understand - you mean if there are fewer than 7 candidates? > > Constitutional crisis, I suppose... everyone's elected, and they invite > specific people to fill up the board maybe? What usually happens is someone really unwanted and undesired stands as part of the seven or less at which point lots of people sudden become willing to stand 8) Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Regarding OOXML and Microsoft patents
> Michael throughout this discussion belong anywhere. Miguel and Michael > have each done more for free software than most of us can even hope to > aspire to That doesn't mean what they are doing now is good for free software. Just ask Mr Raymond ;) ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Regarding OOXML and Microsoft patents
> > ISO has policies on standards. OOXML fails to meet them on so many > > grounds that any other vendor trying to play the games around OOXML would > > have had their document thrown out already. > > All I have seen it a lot of hot air. All you wish to see clearly. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Regarding OOXML and Microsoft patents
> As I spend a lot of time in interop work, the more information that I > have on my hands the better. > > Software Jujitsu if you will. I think you mean Aikido or Judo if you want to use your oppenents strength against them, although in your case perhaps "seppuku" was the phrase you wanted. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Regarding OOXML and Microsoft patents
> * The validity of the statement that we can be stopped from > implementing OOXML: Has a lawyer weighted into whether the > patent grants in the Microsoft OSP are not sufficient? All I > have seen so far are opinions from advocates, with no legal > background. > > Our own lawyers consider that the Microsoft OSP sufficient. Is that as a result of the patent deals between Novell and Microsoft however ? > > Thus we remain with the conclusion that it is very important to > > campaign for ODF and reject OOXML as a "standard". > > It seems to me that the we are trying to participate in the game of > "club your opponent with the standard club". ISO has policies on standards. OOXML fails to meet them on so many grounds that any other vendor trying to play the games around OOXML would have had their document thrown out already. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Regarding OOXML and Microsoft patents
> Meanwhile, if it is hard for Microsoft to fully implement a 600 page > spec, that just reinforces the point that it is hard for us to > implement a 6000 page spec. And this has been the Microsoft plan for "standards" for many years. In fact their own leaked memos say exactly this. Miguel - you might want to look harder at who you trust some day. The decommoditization of protocols and attack by complexity of standards stuff is even in the original Halloween document leaks ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Sponsorship letter
> Obviously to make it official it has to be a Board Member the one signing it.
>
> I hope someone can give me a hand!
I can't sign it but some comments from things learned in the past
> His flight to Spain and United Kingdom, his accommodation and other
{the United Kingdom}
"His flights to Spain, the United Kingdom, and back home"
(they only care that someone will ship you back usually)
> expenses during 11th-24th July 2007 are covered by the GUADEC
> committee in 1 Great Colmore Street Birmingham, B15 2AP, UK. Which is
> a $relationship with the foundation.
[Phone contact for the committee or some member] - they will sometimes
check by phone and the Web URLs also help.
Alan
___
foundation-list mailing list
foundation-list@gnome.org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for invitations to be the host of GUADEC 2008
> But one thing is for sure - the travel costs for attendees is something > which will definitely be taken into account, and in general that will > exclude anything outside North America and Europe. That depends upon the time of year and location. The bit of North America which is civilised to visitors (Canada) can be very pricy in summer but very very cheap in winter [guess why]. This is a problem with OLS. Mexico has some claim to be the original "home of Gnome"... Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Substituting "Linux" with "GNU/Linux" or "GNU"
Ar Llu, 2006-10-23 am 15:45 +1000, ysgrifennodd Jeff Waugh: > where our documentation could be easily branded and changed by distributors, > that would be the place to mention specifics -- and those specifics would be > trademarks of distributions and operating environments). Thats just a question of an entity for Docbook so you can just reference an "OS" entity. This was suggested around GNOME 1.2 or so with the idea being the help tool would know how to write in "Left mouse" "Right mouse" (for button entities), "FooLinux" for OS entity and so forth. Alas it never happened for either the more complex button entities or the simple ones like OS. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Substituting "Linux" with "GNU/Linux" or "GNU"
Ar Sad, 2006-10-21 am 18:01 +0200, ysgrifennodd Quim Gil: > compatible with several operative systems, including GNU/Linux (commonly You've mis-spelled "correctly" as commonly and ignored the view of the owners of the Linux kernel and the Linux mark. Unfortunate. Can I urge translators to translate the phrase correctly, without the GNU/ Error and people to ignore the "official" policy in favour of correctness. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Substituting "Linux" with "GNU/Linux" or "GNU"
Ar Sad, 2006-08-05 am 19:37 +0300, ysgrifennodd Yavor Doganov: > combination. We include "Linux" in the name because it is an > essential component of the system and the Linux developers deserve > credit for their work. The GNU Project's policy was always to point > out that Linux is a seperate project, developed independently. So I > doubt that any misunderstanding could arise of this. The problem with Richards argument can best be explained by turning it around. "The Linux system needed a C compiler. Thankfully an existing free software project had created the GNU C compiler. Unfortunately some users failed to realise that the output of the C compiler is useless without our operating system and we therefore ask everyone to call it the Linux/GNU C compiler to remind people that the compiler is useless without a free OS to run it upon" >From the Linux developer point of view it's really about theft of credit (and I've heard the same from X11 people). The FSF tries to steal the credit for the Linux OS despite having been actively anti-Linux in the early days. There are two reasons it does this. The first is that the FSF made some terrible design and planning decisions in the 1980s and turned down the offer of UZI to pursue an implausible dream based on Mach, blowing its own OS project out of the water. The second is the laudible aim of wanting to make sure people understand the whole freedom thing is important. There are many ways I can make you understand the value of being able to control your software and not being tied to binary code. Not all of them are ethical even if they work. GNU/Linux is such an un-ethical example. > > End users don't know what a "GNU system" is. > This is the problem, they think that it is a "Linux system". Most end users I've dealt with think its "a computer", particularly in the business world. Variants of what they think it is frequently include "that damned computer", "the stupid pile of " but very rarely "the linux system" But as you rightly say they've no idea that the box sitting in their office uses free software, or even that they could legitimately take a copy of the office suite they are using home with them and not be a pirate. In fact in many cases I suspect if they did they would get fired for 'piracy'. Calling it GNU/Linux or the GNU system won't help. As far as many users are concerned it could just as well be called Eric or Ronald. What does help is making sure that things like "This program is free software" in about boxes actually is clickable and takes the user to an explanation. > Calling the system GNU/Linux or GNU is not equal to forcing the user > to read, understand and accept the GNU Philosophy. The system is GNU, Actually mine isn't. By volume of code its an American university developed system, and I thank MIT, Berkeley and their supporters greatly for their contribution too. But its not MIT/Linux either. > You seem to assume that every user cares only about the practical > issues when using a computer. I think that in your example "This > feature is not available on the Linux system" is much more confusing. Lets just say we disagree on that point. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Substituting "Linux" with "GNU/Linux" or "GNU"
Ar Sad, 2006-08-05 am 00:00 +0300, ysgrifennodd Yavor Doganov: > However, I'm not really familiar with Trademark Law, but if this is a > really a problem, I suggest to call the system "GNU". I'm using all > GNU variants so I call the system "GNU" in 99.99% of the cases, > when I refer to something that is common, and not Linux-specific. The GNU/Linux case is particularly problematic as one of the purposes of trademark law is to prevent one mark being used confusingly to associate its values with another. That is what the GNU/Linux(tm) association specifically attempts to do. Another question you should ask is "who are you writing this for". End users don't know what a "GNU system" is. Seeing an error message about GNU systems will not explain the error to them nor will it make them understand the importance of free software. Context is important here. It is one thing to explain to users in the manual or about dialogue boxes about what software freedom is and explain the software freedoms - where clearly you want to talk about GNU and the GPL and the specific goals it has, and a second when a user wants to know why portrait mode printing isn't working. In the latter case it is very unlikely the user wishes to learn about software freedom, GNU or anything except why their printer isn't working. In that situation "This feature is not available on the GNU system" will confuse the user or maybe make them conclude its not in GNOME rather than not in the underlying environment. In fact I'd make the argument many such error messages should actually say "Portraint printing is not available on this/your system" because the user doesn't care about Linux either and may not know about that either. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Substituting "Linux" with "GNU/Linux" or "GNU"
Ar Gwe, 2006-08-04 am 23:19 +0300, ysgrifennodd Yavor Doganov: > This issue was first brought at GTP; I was substituting "Linux" with > "GNU/Linux" in my translations and our team leader asked for a general > solution on the -i18n list. Christian Rose, one of the GTP For the benefit of that meeting I'd like to note to the board that Linux is the name of the operating system kernel and is a trademark. If you wish to use the term GNU/Linux then you should seek the permission of the Linux trademark holder. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
Ar Gwe, 2006-08-04 am 00:43 +0200, ysgrifennodd Quim Gil: > - In a worst case scenario, do we expect the GNOME Foundation board to > arbitrate if someone violates the or do we > think that one thing is not related to the other and the board should > refer only to the GNOME Foundation charter and by-laws. That one is easy to answer - the answer is yes. I think you can argue its yes by imagining the worst case scenarios. Say for example a foundation member started posting racist hate speech, stolen copyright material or porn on gnome.org or from a gnome.org address ? I think your question is "when" - which is much harder and I offer no material suggestions there. I would rather hope that in most cases when people are behaving inappropriately its sufficient for someone to /msg them "#gnome asks people to follow these guidelines [URL to final Murray doc]", just like most of them time when someone in person makes a highly inappropriate remark people just tut or walk away. > I'm in favor of improving the existing tools of the GNOME Foundation to > enforce dialog, diversity and respect, and to prevent abuse and act > effectively against it. > > I'm against adopting an official netiquette-alike set of behavior > principles at a GNOME Foundation level. "Lets improve the tools but I'm against improving the tools" > I'm not against producing a list of useful recommendations like Murray > is doing, to be as accepted as the community wants to accept it. One of the things it does is help prompt people to realise there is a problem. Very large numbers of projects have community standards, many of them have since written them down in order to ensure people understand and share interpretations. There are still discussions and disagreements on interpretaton (see the Debian 'hotbabe' package example for one classic). Its really important for online projects because the usual feedback which governs such behaviour isn't all there. Thus things like awkward silences aren't visible to make the poster realise they are upsetting people or acting inappropriately. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
Ar Iau, 2006-08-03 am 03:42 +0200, ysgrifennodd Quim Gil: > The GNOME community has growth for years without a CoC and now that it > is being proposed to have one there is no consensus. This shows that > probably a CoC is not good for this community. I disagree. So there is no consensus on whether consensus is good. (Feel free to recurse infinitely) > The Ubuntu community has many aspects different to the GNOME community You mean its polite, friendly, and open (people not alas the software). Notice how well that community is thriving and compare its state to the rather different Debian community from whence it came. > Still, external references are useful. There are many communities doing > well out there without a CoC. Can you provide examples of mature > communities being benefited by the late adoption of a CoC? Most countries. Most civilisations. You are the caveman arguing that since it was ok to whack people on the head with a club during disagreements last month, its clearly a good idea to continue that way. Groups of people regularly refine their behaviour in order to become more inclusive and to deal with things that worry many if not all of them. The US even went to war with itself to remove the right to own slaves. It took away the right to treat women as objects, it took away the right to treat black people as doormats. Not unsuprisingly most people think that loss of rights was a good thing. The CoC is only a guide. Its not even saying "no clubbing people" its saying "please don't club people on #gnome or when doing gnome stuff". Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
Ar Mer, 2006-08-02 am 18:18 -0600, ysgrifennodd Andreas J. Guelzow: > On Thu, 2006-03-08 at 00:22 +0100, Bill Haneman wrote: > > I think the second term in your Princeton Wordnet citation is the one we > > are aiming for: e.g. "principles". > > > > One can have principles without rules. > > Principles are rules. Check Worldnet for "principle" if you like. My dictionary disagrees with your web site. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Required: Administrator for the Foundation
Ar Sad, 2006-06-17 am 15:55 -0400, ysgrifennodd Richard Stallman: > Unless you're looking for kernel hackers, > please make that "GNU/Linux literate". Linux is a trademark in the USA. The use of GNU/Linux without indicating the trademark is inappropriately confusing the registered mark. And last time I checked GNOME was not a GNU project. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Women in GNOME (Was: Code Of Conduct)
Ar Iau, 2006-06-01 am 17:50 -0400, ysgrifennodd Dominic Lachowicz: > This rubs me the wrong way. It's not like we're actively working to > exclude women, Asians, or Martians from GNOME. Nor are we actively > trying to make GNOME a boys-only club. Simply put, there's no > conscious, malicious intent behind the disproportionate male/female > ratio, or "Western"/Asian ratio. And I think that this matters... It shouldn't IMHO be taken that way. Most discrimination of all kinds is utterly unintentional, and that kind of discrimination is harder to tackle because there is no evil intent and no-one to directly blame. It still needs tackling, and that is in part about making people understand when their actions put off or exclude others. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Women in GNOME (Was: Code Of Conduct)
On Iau, 2006-06-01 at 14:33 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: > Hmm, how about people working together? It just seems that the person who > most most obviously wants this should be the person trying to make it > happen. I'd be wary of pursuing just the "women in GNOME" issue, because many of the same things put off far more than just women. Running around shouting "pants off" is not, for example, very compatible with the Japanese cultural expectations. Also if "Code of Conduct" is too strong then "Expected Behaviour" perhaps. Personally I don't see a problem with "Code of Conduct" in that it deals with acting for, speaking for, representing or being part of Gnome, or when using its facilities. It isn't too much to ask for people to keep other stuff elsewhere, or to engage in other incompatible activities from a non-gnome email address or on a different irc network. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: LSB summit in Boston
On Iau, 2006-05-18 at 22:04 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: > The "Linux Standards Base" is a plan to develop a specification for > the GNU system. Not, in this case, for the GNU/Linux combination, No Richard, it is not. The Linux Standards Base produces specification documents. The implementation of that document is a matter for the developer and correctly defined that may be done by GNU or non-GNU software. LSB today includes non-Linux companies implementing Linux compatibility for applications this way, and not all will use GNU code. The "Linux" in LSB is today arguably wrong, but for different reasons to those you assume. > If we want to develop specs for the GNU system, let's organize it > under the auspices of GNU. I have good relations with some KDE > developers. We can set it up. There are many things that could be done usefully this way. The LSB is oriented to vendors and business and "non-viral" licenses. It provides no mechanism to standardise interfaces built with or upon GPL libraries for example. Much could be done productively I am sure. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Boilerplate copyright agreement for commercial exploitation
On Llu, 2006-05-15 at 10:19 -0400, Dominic Lachowicz wrote: > Stick to your "open formats" argument; it serves you better. ODT makes > no guarantees that the documents will look the same across renderers > or platforms. If the apps used exactly the same layout algorithms with > the same fonts, ligature handling, etc. then sure. But they don't. Yes but the embedded macros don't do things like print $1000 one day and $10 the next ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Boilerplate copyright agreement for commercial exploitation
On Llu, 2006-05-15 at 15:25 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: > I can certainly post a copy in ODT later in the week which gets converted into > .doc every time we need to go to the lawyers... I won't always have the time > to > do it promptly, though. > > I will note that there are several high-quality free software programmes that > can read and write the bits of the .doc format which are important for > lawyers. - There are open standards, and GNOME is an open standards based body - A ".doc" file may render in many different ways, especialy if it contains macros. Which is definitive, the contract as rendered by MS Word or by Abiword or by OpenOffice ? Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Boilerplate copyright agreement for commercial exploitation
On Sul, 2006-05-14 at 19:52 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: > Since lawyers talk .doc, and use revision control to track changes to the > documents, that's what we ge too. Disappointing. I hope the foundation will reconsider that decision and post its documents in open formats as well. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: gnome-logos package
On Sad, 2005-12-17 at 11:32 -0500, Luis Villa wrote: > IANAL (yet), but... under US trademark law (and most European > trademark law, as I understand it) basically all users of the mark > must ask us for permission before use. We cannot adopt a permission > scheme which allows any use of the logo which might be confusing to > consumers without our permission. So this basically rules out any sane > community-oriented permissioning scheme. I go into that in some more > detail in the paper i linked in the blog post, if you have more time > to read it. Other people have successfully dealt with granting of blanket permissions. Fedora for example allows anyone to make 'Fedora' CDs under a blanket agreement that requires the CD be a true copy and any media be warranted. It gets truely horrible once you want flexibility because the role of a trademark is to define what something is and if it can be anything then it is meaningless. The gnome trademark policy attempts so far have been utterly farcical however. It ought to be possible to find a way to license a mark or form of the mark that can be sensibly used. Again that has been done by companies before (one 1990's example of direct relevance was the Novell 'yes it works with Netware' program). Having a logo for a program which is a "gnome program" and for "gnome developer" ought to be doable given the right definition, and "foundation member" is definitely one that can be done today as the foundation has a defined membership. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Vote NO on referendum to reduce board members
On Llu, 2005-10-24 at 20:05 +0200, Olav Vitters wrote: > I totally disagree. The referendum was created because we have board > members that do nothing at all. Why would you want members of the board > that do nothing? Some board members only wanted to be on the board So vote for members who do things. If you have less members and they then turn out not to do anything will be better or worse > The board should be smaller. With 11 people everyone expects someone > else to do the job. Thats not IMHO caused by the size of the board (well unless you reduce it to one person) but by a lack of definite responsibilities fixed with each board member. Far better to make one person charged with PR, one with infrastructure, one with corporate politics etc so that for the general case its clear who to contact and who is responsible ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: poor man's SWOT analysis of GUADEC
On Llu, 2005-09-12 at 17:28 +0200, Anne Østergaard wrote: > > Interest from others in building desktop conferences up (eg with OLS) > > Alan do you mean OttawaLinuxSymposium? The very same but with spaces between the words (TooMuchWikiIsBadForYou) > I think desktop conferences are coming up soon both locally and > globally. Yes - and desktop tracks at other conferences. That may help GNOME in that it will be less neccessary to organise entire conferences. It also helps because bored politicians and business types can visit GNOME and then go and enjoy the business track at a more general conference. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: poor man's SWOT analysis of GUADEC
> Opportunities: > * no one else is really effectively reaching out to governments in > most of the world, talking specifically about free software desktops > as either a tool for them to use, or as a means of national economic > empowerment > * continue to see large deployments and corporate interest that we > should be able to leverage- sun, real, nokia, in successive years- who > will be next year's big news? > * lots of interest outside the first world- india, indonesia, etc. > * still large bodies of potential volunteers to reach out to, ISVs to > speak to, companies to fundraise from, etc., etc. Interest from others in building desktop conferences up (eg with OLS) ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME trademark guidelines and user group agreement
On Sul, 2005-09-11 at 12:57 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: > Indeed. But the article discusses how magazines cannot > distribute RHEL. RHEL is a support and service arrangement with attached product, so no a magazine could never distribute it. Centos is just code and they do > Funnier is that you can get the source code for Fedora Core and > remove that silly End User License Agreement, and you have not > violated any laws... Untrue - if you are a US company and remove it and resell you may be breaking various US export regulations and other laws. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME trademark guidelines and user group agreement
> That's what it says. I believe that we are going to handle logo > modifications on a case-by-case basis. Please let us know if you want to > use a modified logo, and as long as it's a reasonable usage, there will > be no problem. The logo has repeatedly been supplied as part of official GNOME distribution products labelled as GPL and when this has been pointed out the board has neither replied nor taken action to correct or indicate this was a mistake. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Membership drive
On Iau, 2005-07-21 at 21:32 +0200, David Neary wrote: > That's definitely a goal, and getting a wider foundation membership > could be part of that goal (albeit an incidental part). for i in `CVS | grep contributors | sort | uniq | comm - membership.list` do mail "$i" << EOM Thank you for your contributions to GNOME. You can contribute further to the GNOME project and help us set the goals for GNOME by joining the GNOME foundation. See $URL for more information. EOM done Or is there a reason this couldn't be done automatically monthly ? ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Certification for GNOME apps
> Then I don't see how Alan's point can be applied. Someone with a > Bomb... game should be free to label "GNOME certified" if it > happens to satisfy the technical aspects. And it should be clear > that it's a self-certificate. Maybe it should not be called a > certificate after all. "GNOME Friendly" may be a better term. Providing it doesn't in any way imply a connectio then yes I agree. Its about naming. Novell used to have a "works with netware" thing along those lines in fact. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Certification for GNOME apps
On Mer, 2005-07-13 at 21:04, Jonathan Blandford wrote: > The first two seem like no-brainers, but what are you thinking of > 'harming the name of GNOME'? Is a clause requiring acceptable levels of > privacy sufficient? Do you have other, concrete concerns here? I guess the extreme example might be "What do you do if someone comes to you with a HIG compliant, gtk+ using, accessible, i18n translated 'Bomb the New York Subway' game" [hello MI5] There are things you want a reason never to be associated with. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Certification for GNOME apps
On Mer, 2005-07-13 at 16:27, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: > - A way for users to know which app is more GNOME-like; hopefully this > will give them a way to pick the better product. You also need a list of things that are not acceptable, things that regardless of how "GNOME" they are would damage the foundations 'good name'. Things like - Spyware - Applications which allow documents to spy on users without permission/by default (like possibly Adobe's javascript in pdf) - Software which is license violating - Software which otherwise harms the name of GNOME - "Software the foundation management believes would harm the reputation of GNOME" - Software where a referendum of members is called, counts achieved and the referendum is passed against certification [ie a last resort] > > You know those printers or modems that have a penguin sticker that says > "works with Linux"? Don't they give you a warm and fuzzy feeling? > GNOME certification is the same thing: it means that someone tested > your app to see that it works well with GNOME. > > I don't have names for the certification levels yet. They are something > like this: > > Level 0 - the app runs without doing idiotic things like taking over > your desktop. It appears in the panel menus, and it installs its MIME > handlers. Pretty much any X app can be made to conform to this. Should include basic accessibility at this level. If its not accessible its software that is excluding parts of the user base and potentially foundation members and thats just -wrong- for certification. > Level 1 - the app uses the standard GNOME dialogs (file, printing). > Drag-and-drop works. See OpenOffice.org a good examples. Sounds good > > Level 2 - the app is actually written with GTK+. Why does this matter ? Surely it is about degrees of integration and HIG compliance. > > Level N - etc. I trust "open source" is a level too ? > The idea is that lower levels are easier to implement, and higher levels > denote that you actually put in a good effort to make your app > GNOME-like. Should the lowest levels be GNOME or Freedesktop ? ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting 2005 June 15
On Gwe, 2005-06-24 at 15:40, Vincent Untz wrote: > I know, that's a lot of questions, but I think all the local groups > are interested in modified logos... What do they want to do with it. Is there some kind of standard modification they want that would come down to giving permission to "insert local flag at pixels foo to bar, insert name 4mm below logo ? Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Trademark license and useage guidelines
On Gwe, 2005-03-25 at 21:23, Owen Taylor wrote: > Would you be interested in being part of an effort to develop > a privacy policy for GNOME? We can obviously through a few sentences > onto the registration page for live.gnome.org, but that's just one > of many places we "collect information" about people on the GNOME > servers: bugzilla, the mailing lists, web server logs, etc. It > seems like we should spend the effort to develop a single page > that covers our policy in general. Sounds a good idea. There are several bodies with "best practice" guides and suggested privacy policies around. I'm not familiar with the US ones however. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Trademark license and useage guidelines
On Iau, 2005-03-24 at 22:50, Tim Ney, GNOME Foundation wrote: > Can you post questions to the WiKi for one-stop review? > http://live.gnome.org/Trademark "You may not edit this page" - and UserPreferences seems to be missing a privacy policy... Anyway: User group: A *lot* better than before. Still a little broken but going in the right direction. Four issues that haven't yet been raised on the wiki page: - Jurisdiction clause is invalid in some countries. Worse it may be enforcable in others. - Domain name stuff allows GNOME to hijack arbitary domains of anyone who signs it. If they register a mark in the US for a name already used outside the US then the user group must hand over the domain. - Print format includes T-Shirts (non-commercial) - is that intentional. - Requirement for statement on the usergroup case doesn't allow translations so will have comical results in some countries, and even could prevent the license being signed in others Suggest you add "and/or appropriate approved translations" - Usage Guidelines - look basically sane. Given what GNOME is about suggest adding areas in which the mark is held. Also something to make it more friendly such as "You may have other rights and restrictions in US or other national law on the use of the marks. It is not the intent of this document to claim to deny you such rights. Trademark law is a complex field and a full explanation would require a complete textbook. If in doubt consult your attorney" The paranoid part of me says it should also say "No part of these usage guidelines shall be held to form a contract between GNOME and another party" This is real progress. I'll continue to use the GNOME marks from the GPL copies I received and assert estoppel rather than sign such a license but its getting there. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Formation of Gnome-user-foundation
On Llu, 2005-03-14 at 13:11, Daniel Veillard wrote: > "If you have a high level of income, then your bugs matters" > "If you are part of our club, then your bugs matters" IMHO Its just a variant on the bounties. If Novell can do bounties why can't 50 users get together and issue a bounty on a matter that annoys them. Is it any different to a business saying to Red Hat or Novell "We need XYZ then we could do 5000 desktops." I agree it shouldn't control development or dictate to volunteers what feature to add but providing it is seperated clearly (as with any other user group) then is there a problem ? Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Distribution branding of GNOME
On Mer, 2005-03-09 at 16:19, Ghee Teo wrote: > > This is actually one issue that has come up with requests for the GPL > > revisions - to have equivalent text for the credits dialog/page as for > > the standard out console message prohibiting its removal. > Interesting suggestion. Could GPL revisions eventually evolved in > such a way > that it loses the 'Free' as in freedom :) > New revisions shall be in the spirit of the old one according to the text (plus many countries have so called 'Moral rights') which mean you can't obliterate credits anyway. The GPL has always had command line apps covered on the "dont remove the GPL/credits" it just has to evolve to graphics. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Distribution branding of GNOME
On Mer, 2005-03-09 at 15:43, Calum Benson wrote: > they're "Based on the OpenOffice.org project". No joy as yet > unfortunately, but we do at least retain the "About GNOME" dialog and > the contributor list. This is actually one issue that has come up with requests for the GPL revisions - to have equivalent text for the credits dialog/page as for the standard out console message prohibiting its removal. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Looking for women? - Something wrong with the numbers?
On Maw, 2005-03-08 at 19:09, Rob Adams wrote: > Of course, I see no reason why women can't be hackers. I don't see > anything in the culture that should keep women out. In fact, from what > I can tell, most IT organizations and schools bend over backwards to try > to get women. I see things that keep groups of people out. Not just women either. The "in your face" approach of many free software projects may well fit American males and the like but it doesn't seem to fit Asian culture or perhaps western female culture. > The reason there aren't many women appears to be simply: women, on the > whole and on the average, don't want to be hackers. As to why this is > true, we can really only speculate. Cultural stigmas, fear, No you need to go and produce data sets and do statistical analysis. Alternatively you can ask them or listen when they offer suggestions why. Alan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Current (temporary) homepage of gnome.org
On Maw, 2005-03-08 at 20:33, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > 1) Calling Europe a Banana Republic doesn't seem to be a good idea. I'm > not sure which country would be in position to do such an assumption. The quote is chosen for good reason. > 2) It is the European Council, not its Presidency, which adopted > something. The presidency overrode the rules, the council has adopted nothing > 4) The sentence is misleading and seems to mean that the adoption was > against the council's rules. The only thing that was against council's > rules was the way it was decided it would be a point A, and not a point > B. Which makes the adoption against the council rules. Hopefully JURI will have the guts to refer the whole sorry mess to the EU courts ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
