Work role change
I want to let the Foundation know that my role at Red Hat is changing. I am in the process of transitioning to CentOS community manager. I'm not a GNOME Foundation director, but I do serve as treasurer of the Foundation, appointed by the directors. My new role with CentOS will make me responsible for the majority of the CentOS budget. I don't think there's a real conflict of interest, but I do think you should know when your treasurer is responsible for another project's finances. Disclosure is important. Cheers, Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the board meeting of April 29, 2019
I've served on a few boards over the years. All of them have had either two or three year staggered terms, except GNOME. And while I consider this a good practice, I never thought it was worth the effort to change the GNOME Foundation, for a couple reasons. First, we usually happened to elect a chunk of the previous board each year. And second, Rosanna helps provide a lot of long-term continuity in how things are done. But Rob's and Carlos's comments below are compelling. We didn't have so many employees and so much donor money when I was on the board. If switching to staggered two year terms helps us better work with long term relationships, then let's do it. It's an extremely common practice in non-profit boards. Some bylaws history on term length: Section 8.3.1 allows term length to be anywhere from one to two years. It used to be just one year. We changed it in 2007 to allow us to do a one-time shift in terms to that new boards would always start around GUADEC, when they have a face to face. Previously they started with the calendar year, I think. I don't think it would be good to use that provision to switch to full two year terms, as it doesn't fit with the original intent. And I don't know that staggered terms are something you can just introduce without bylaws provisions. I think this should be a bylaws change. -- Shaun On Wed, 2019-05-22 at 14:18 +0200, Carlos Soriano wrote: > Hi Tobi, > > Just as an addition to what Rob said. As an example, I have been > working on some critical work for the foundation, for over a year > now. This work required extensive reading of legal, tax forms, > research, etc. and is yet to be finished. It's quite complex, and at > the same time it cannot wait if we want the foundation and project to > keep growing and being healthy. It's unlikely this work can continue > without someone with the expertise gained over the last year, and > it's unlikely any effective hand off can be done with a clean cut. > > As Rob mentioned, over the last year the board of directors has > changed to a more strategic oversight role, and the things we do are > quite more complex compared to what we were doing a year ago. While > this is exciting for every member and it's good for the foundation, > it adds the necessity to start doing long term planning and work in a > quite more complex environment. > > 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. > 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. > > It worth to mention that it's easier for any any person to commit to > just one year, so this is definitely not a selfish decision that we > are discussing (and I'm aware you didn't imply that), we are > volunteers after all. But this is not what we have found good for the > foundation and the directors going forward, so we believe a longer > commitment will most probably be what's needed. > > Hope that helps clarify the situation, it's definitely different than > what we were one year ago, and it's normal that these questions > arise. So don't hesitate to let us know if you or anyone else has any > more questions, just keep in mind we are figuring things out as we > move forward. > > Cheers > > On Wed, 22 May 2019 at 12:43, Robert McQueen wrote: > > On Wed, 2019-05-22 at 11:35 +0200, Tobias Mueller wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > Hi Tobi, > > > > > I guess these plans are news to most members. > > > > They were mentioned previously in the blog posts we wrote after the > > hackfest last year - see > > http://ramcq.net/2018/10/19/gnome-foundation-h > > ackfest-2018/ - although not moved much further since then as you > > see > > from these minutes, > > > > > I think that the proposed change is a strict subset of what is > > > possible > > > today and that the cost associated with that change do not > > outweigh > > > the > > > benefits. > > > > We've received several large grants over the past year or so, and a > > spokesperson for the anonymous donor spent a while with the board > > talking about a number of factors, including the requirements > > around > > setting the compensation of the Executive Director (hence our new > > compensation committee) and more generally, how to attract and > > retain > > good staff, and be able to demonstrate impact for donors. > > > > They support a number of philanthropic initiatives and they > > impressed > > on us the importance of a growing Foundation that the strategy is > > maintained over longer periods of time, so that the resources that >
Re: Code of Conduct Adoption Process
On Fri, 2016-09-16 at 07:04 +0200, Jens Georg wrote: > Can you please stop leaking half a conversation from a private > mailing > list to a public one? Thank you. In Richard's defense, I don't believe the emails he's replying to are intended to be private. In the mailing list archives, there are a number of "Message not available" entries: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2016-September/thread.h tml My guess is that Lefty is replying publicly, that his posts are not being allowed through the list for some reason, and that Richard understandably does not realize nobody else can see the posts he is replying to. > > > > > > > > My constructive criticism is that you not take your code of > > > conduct guidance from people who are unrepentant poster > > children > > > for the need for a code of conduct. > > > > He's exaggerating about me, but that's the smaller error. His > > fundamental error is in the general premise that he wants us to > > accept > > without examination: that we should judge proposals based on > > opinions > > about the people who worked on them. > > > > We should judge proposals based on what they say and their effects, > > not based on personalities. > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Send us your pants nominations
On Mon, 2016-07-18 at 13:44 -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 02:52:09PM -0400, Shaun McCance wrote: > > > > GUADEC is coming up soon, and with GUADEC comes the annual Pants > > Award. > > Every year, GNOME awards a pair of pants to somebody in recognition > > of > > their outstanding contributions. The board will make the final > > decision > > on who receives the pants, but we'd love to hear your nominations. > > > > The award can be for any kind of contribution to our software or > > our > > community. It does not have to be software development work. The > > only > > requirements are that the person is attending GUADEC to receive the > > pants, and that it's not a current or outgoing board member. Not > > sure > > if the person fits the requirements? Just nominate! We'll sort it > > out. > Is there a list somewhere of past recipients of the award? A quick > check turned up individual mentions of the award, but no > comprehensive > list. It seems like gnome.org ought to have such a list somewhere. There is not, and there should be. I was working on this a while ago, but got sidetracked. I have a partial list. Ideally, we'd have a nice page with photos and blurbs on what each of the pants winners did. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Send us your pants nominations
Correction: To keep the suspense, please send your nominations just to the board at board-l...@gnome.org, instead of to this list. Thanks, Shaun On Mon, 2016-07-18 at 14:52 -0400, Shaun McCance wrote: > Hi all, > > GUADEC is coming up soon, and with GUADEC comes the annual Pants > Award. > Every year, GNOME awards a pair of pants to somebody in recognition > of > their outstanding contributions. The board will make the final > decision > on who receives the pants, but we'd love to hear your nominations. > > The award can be for any kind of contribution to our software or our > community. It does not have to be software development work. The only > requirements are that the person is attending GUADEC to receive the > pants, and that it's not a current or outgoing board member. Not sure > if the person fits the requirements? Just nominate! We'll sort it > out. > > Please feel free to send your nominations as a reply to this email. > Or, > if you'd prefer to nominate someone anonymously, email board-list. > > Thanks, > Shaun > > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Send us your pants nominations
Hi all, GUADEC is coming up soon, and with GUADEC comes the annual Pants Award. Every year, GNOME awards a pair of pants to somebody in recognition of their outstanding contributions. The board will make the final decision on who receives the pants, but we'd love to hear your nominations. The award can be for any kind of contribution to our software or our community. It does not have to be software development work. The only requirements are that the person is attending GUADEC to receive the pants, and that it's not a current or outgoing board member. Not sure if the person fits the requirements? Just nominate! We'll sort it out. Please feel free to send your nominations as a reply to this email. Or, if you'd prefer to nominate someone anonymously, email board-list. Thanks, Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Agenda for board meting on November 17
The next board meeting is November 17. Here's our public agenda. We welcome questions or feedback on any of these items. * Filling the vice president role * Update on adboard meeting prep * West Coast Summit * Ubuntu GNOME trademark agreement * Logo copyright issues * ED search update -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board Meeting of November, 3rd, 2015
On Tue, 2015-11-10 at 19:00 +, Debarshi Ray wrote: > On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 12:03:15PM -0500, Jeff Fortin Tam wrote: > > Le mardi 10 novembre 2015 ? 09:07 +, Debarshi Ray a ?crit?: > > > On Sat, Nov 07, 2015 at 04:38:56PM +0100, Andrea Veri wrote: > > > > Deferred: > > > > ?* Instagram filters in GNOME: see email thread by the same > > > > name > > > > > > Where is this thread? > > > > > > This was referring to the one on the board's mailing list > > You mean this one: > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/board-list ? Yes. We try to modify the public minutes to not refer to threads on private mailing lists, but sometimes things like this slip through. > Am I allowed to join it? I am asking because it says: > "Private list for Foundation Board of Directors discussions" No. The only people on board-list are the Board of Directors and the employees of the Foundation. We are as public as we can be with the issues we discuss, but for legal reasons, it's important that the elected Board can have non-public conversations. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Affiliation change and stepping down
On Thu, 2015-11-05 at 19:08 +0100, Benjamin Berg wrote: > Hi, > > On Do, 2015-11-05 at 16:30 +0100, Tobias Mueller wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 03, 2015 at 12:30:24PM +0100, Andreas Nilsson wrote: > > > If I recall correctly, it's not a rule for the board to pick someone > > > based on election results. > > That's true and false. > > > > It's true in the sense that the bylaws do not govern change of affiliation > > after the election results have been obtained. > > Yup, I don't see a provision that states what happens if the > affiliation of a director changes either. The only thing handled is if > the 40% rules is broken at election time and due to a vacancy. Only in > the first case the election results are used, the normal process of > electing successor is used. > In section 8.4.1 there is a list of reasons that can cause a vacancy, > none of them appear to be relevant to section 8.2.4. > > Actually, the way I read section 8.2.4 combined with 8.4.1 right now it > seems perfectly sane to argue that Christian could have finished his > term in office despite the change of affiliation. I disagree. 8.4.1 says no organization shall *hold* more than 40% of the baord. It doesn't matter if it's by election results, new vacancy, or affiliation change. The bylaws are, however, entirely silent on how to fix the situation when it results from an affiliation change. It does specify what to do for election results and new vacancies, but not affiliation changes. As far as I can tell, any of the following would be acceptable per the bylaws: 1) The person whose affiliation changed chooses to resign. 2) The board votes to remove somebody with that affiliation, possibly not the person whose affiliation changed. The lowest vote getter with that affiliation from the previous election would not be unreasonable. 3) The board votes to increase its size and appoint new directors with different affiliations. Every time this has happened (this isn't the first time), the person whose affiliation changed voluntarily stepped down, so we've never had to test the bylaws on this matter. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Agenda for board meeting on October 13
The next board meeting is October 13. Here's our public agenda. We welcome questions or feedback on any of these items. * Review GUADEC sponsorships * Replacing Christian Hergert * Adboard member list * Instagram filters in GNOME * GIMP reimbursements * Open items: * ED search * Google Play account -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Agenda for board meeting on October 13
On Mon, 2015-10-12 at 22:27 +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote: > On 10/12/2015 10:09 PM, Shaun McCance wrote: > > The next board meeting is October 13. Here's our public agenda. We > > welcome questions or feedback on any of these items. > > > > > > * Review GUADEC sponsorships > > * Replacing Christian Hergert > > * Adboard member list > > * Instagram filters in GNOME > > I must admit I got curious about this one. > Is this something you can give a quick summary what it's about? > - Andreas It's basically a question of whether we can use the same name for filters that are reverse engineered, independently implemented imitations of those found in Instagram. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Agenda for board meeting on October 6
The next board meeting is October 6. Here's our public agenda. We welcome questions or feedback on any of these items. * Heads up about Annual Report printing+shipping * Desktop Summit taxes * Action items: * Trademark registration followup with Pam (Kat) * Ubuntu GNOME agreement followup with Pam (Allan) * GNOME logo use by podiatrist (Shaun) * Hellotux agreement (Allan) * Logo usage for tshirts (Jeff) * License agreement with ilovewhatido (Allan) * Freedesktop hackfests with Groupon money (Kat) * Privacy funds hackfest (Sri, Christian) * Open items: * GUADEC 2016 * ED search * Google Play account Thanks, Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Agenda for board meeting on September 29
The next board meeting is September 29. Here's our public agenda. We welcome questions or feedback on any of these items. * Funding Outreachy internships * COLA increase paperwork for Rosanna * Discussion of regional domain names. * Action items: * Trademark registration followup with Pam (Kat) * Ubuntu GNOME agreement follwup with Pam (Allan) * Communicating position on regional domain names (Kat, Cosimo) * GNOME logo use by podiatrist (Shaun) * Logo usage for tshirts (Jeff) * Trademark-infringing swag (Cosimo) * Freedesktop hackfests with Groupon money (Kat) * Privacy funds hackfest (Sri, Christian) * Open items: * GUADEC 2016 * Annual report * ED search * Google Play account Thanks, Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question on community to the candidates.
On Mon, 2015-05-25 at 21:16 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: It is my impression (and I state impression because I am providing no data) that GNOME has more reliance on people paid to work on GNOME than community. I do not question the passion and dedication to those who are paid on GNOME, I know that they would do it as a community even if they were not paid. I'll echo Alexandre's response. The reason we have so many paid contributors is because people get jobs as a result of their work as volunteers. This is a Good Thing(TM). I don't think we have a problem, but I do think we need to be aware of the situation to ensure we don't have a problem. We need to make sure that decisions aren't made around the water cooler, that things are communicated on mailing lists, and that we have a welcoming environment for new contributors. One of the best uses of the Foundation's funds, in my opinion, is paying for volunteer contributors to attend hackfests. Hackfests are more than just working sessions. They're where decisions are made and community is built. People should not be locked out of them just because they can't afford to attend. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability
On Mon, 2015-05-25 at 12:39 +0200, Fabiana Simões wrote: Hi everyone, I'd like to hear your thoughts on implementing transparency and accountability on the Board. How transparent the work of the Board should be to Foundation members? What should be communicated and when? Do you think we have been transparent enough in the last term? If not, how can we improve things and how high in your priorities would be to do so? In terms of accountability, it's been unclear to me since joining the Foundation how much different Board members contribute to the Board's goals and tasks. Do you think the meeting notes provide enough visibility and context to the work being done? By the end of a term, how can the Foundation have a fair understanding of one's contributions to the Board? Having served on the board, I do think the board is transparent about its activities. The meeting minutes that get published have everything that the board is able to disclose. Sometimes there are things that can't be disclosed. As for accountability, I know in the past some people have asked for a list of who voted how on issues. But the board generally works toward consensus whenever possible, so dissenting votes aren't common. When a board member wishes to have his or her objection noted for the public, that shows up in the minutes. Now, I do think we could do a better job of making this information more digestible. Keeping up with meeting minutes isn't fun. Minutes are full of mundane activities, and it's hard to get the story in your head if you don't read them all and pay close attention. A long time ago, we used to publish reports. We had an annual report and quarterly reports. The reports had synopses from various teams in GNOME, as well as from the board. They were a lot more fun to read than minutes and made it easier to see what's happening at a glance. Getting back to doing reports would be nice, but they are a lot of work. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
On Sun, 2015-05-24 at 19:23 +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote: Dear candidates. Thank you all for running! As part of the GNOME Trademark Fundraiser [1], the Foundation raised $102 608 USD. Since the trademark claims from the other part in the issue was withdrawn, it was never taken to court and the money was never spent on that. What, in your mind, is the best use of these funds now? Kept as a War Chest [2] or spent on something specific? We should allocate at least some of that money towards hiring a new Executive Director. An ED is expensive, easily the largest single line item in the budget. But a good ED will help us bring in more money, allowing us to run more campaigns and more hackfests. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to GNOME Foundation Board candidates
On Tue, 2015-05-19 at 08:41 +0800, Max wrote: Hello all, First, thanks to all candidates for volunteering to the Foundation Board. Max come from GNOME.Asia team and thanks GNOME and board support Asia. I have 2 questions to all candidates 1) How many hours per week do you expect you will be able to dedicate to working on the board on a regular basis? Honestly, I don't think board members should have to spend more than 5 hours in a typical week. They all have jobs and families and lives and all the other things they do for GNOME. Certainly there will be weeks that are more demanding. Stuff comes up. But if people have to spend 10 or more hours each week, something is broken. I say this as a former board member, and as somebody who spent the last two years doing a *lot* of time as a board member in another volunteer organization (not software-related). It's not sustainable, and you will burn people out. As it stands, though, without an Executive Director, one (or both) of two things must be happening: (1) board members are spending more time than they should doing things an ED should be doing, and/or (2) things an ED should be doing just aren't being done. 2) What's your plan and view with GNOME in Asia? How do you think about grow GNOME in Asia?( ecosystem / contribute / sponsor / volunteer ... ) Asia is certainly a growing market, and that makes it a good opportunity for GNOME and for free software. Historically, we haven't had a strong contributor base in most of Asia, aside from India. I would like that to change. But I don't have specific plans on how to make that change. The best I can do is offer to support the work of people like you who are aware of the issues and already working to address them. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: More questions for Board candidates
On Thu, 2015-05-21 at 17:25 -0400, Karen Sandler wrote: I have a few questions for the candidates too. I agree with what has been said by Jeff and Josh that it's important that people on the board have a diverse skillset, so I wouldn't expect all board members to answer yes on these, but I think it's good to know if at least a few people on the board have some background in these areas... Have you ever done any fundraising? Yes. For the last year and a half, I was involved with a group trying to open a grocery cooperative in my neighborhood. We sold over a thousand shares to neighbors and raised a million dollars, making it the fastest growing co-op startup in the country. That work is still ongoing, though I've taken a more passive role lately. I'm very proud of the work we did. I also drum up sponsorship for the Open Help Conference every year. It's not a lot of money, comparatively, but it's a lot of work to make it happen and not drain my pocketbook. Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? I'm more comfortable with it now than I was five years ago. Honestly, it's not my favorite thing to do. I'd rather do conference logistics and let somebody else track down money. But I can do it, and I do do it. Have you ever been in a manager role? I've been in a project lead role, where I've been responsible for telling people what to do. But I've never been in a role where I'm responsible for performance evaluations. Do you have any experience talking to reporters? A bit. I was interviewed a few times for the co-op, and participated in some press conferences. Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is important? I haven't done it in a formal setting, such as a presentation. But I've frequently talked to groups of friends or colleagues about why I care about free software, and why they should as well. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Board of Directors Elections 2015 - Candidacy - Shaun McCance
Name: Shaun McCance Email: sha...@gnome.org Affiliation: Red Hat Foundation Members, I'm announcing my candidacy for the board of directors. I'm a long-time GNOME developer and enthusiast, because I believe GNOME does important work in ensuring free software is usable for everybody. I spent ten years as the docs team lead. I've stepped down from that role, but I still maintain our docs tools and try to remain active. I work for Red Hat, though I do not work in the department that works on GNOME. I work on the Open Source and Standards team as the Community Documentation Liaison. Basically, my job is to build communities around documentation in various upstream open source projects. I served two terms on the board already, from 2011 to 2013. I'd like to serve again. The board does important work. It's not always glamorous, but board work is an important piece of the puzzle for maintaining a healthy ecosystem around GNOME. I think the activities of the current board have proven just how vital the board is to GNOME. It also showed just how overtaxed the board has become in the absence of an Executive Director. If elected, my first priority will be to bring a new Executive Director on board. I understand there are difficulties in hiring somebody new, as well as financial considerations. I'm willing to hunt down those yaks for a good clean shave. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror
On Thu, 2013-08-15 at 21:20 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: [ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider [ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, [ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. Is it advisable to use nonfree GitHub as a secondary mirror for GNOME's free software? When you say that GitHub is nonfree, what do you mean by that? We do not have any definition for calling a service free or nonfree. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/network-services-arent-free-or-nonfree.html. Hi Richard, GitHub provides a number of services around the Git repositories it provides. Git, of course, is free software, and you can interact with your repository as with any other Git repository. The extra services GitHub provides require quite a bit of server-side software, much of which is not released as free software. That, however, is a network service, not software running on your computer. The normal way of interacting with the extra services is using the web site, and the web site does require non-free JavaScript to work. But GitHub does provide an HTTP-based API that allows you to write entirely free software yourself to interact with these services. GitHub is clearly not as aligned with our mission as something like Gitorious, which uses 100% free software. But GitHub does not require you to run non-free software on your own computer for anything, as far as I can tell. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: jabber.gnome.org: a proposal
On Thu, 2013-03-14 at 12:34 +0100, Andrea Veri wrote: This takes in another problem, is the service supposed for Foundation members or for the big public? (where big public means all the GNOME contributors having a Git account) Out of curiosity, does anybody know how large the set of non-member contributors is? It really should tend towards 0. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: jabber.gnome.org: a proposal
On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 09:26 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote: Hey, On Mon, 2013-03-11 at 10:03 -0400, Shaun McCance wrote: Hi all, I think it's clear from the recent thread that most people had no idea we had a Jabber server, or that they could get accounts on it, or how to go about doing so. What's more, over the last week, I tried to help two people use their jabber.gnome.org accounts with no success. I think it's unfair to judge the popularity of this service when it has been so buried and so extremely difficult to use. It also seems we can't create group chats on jabber.gnome.org, which limits our ability to use it as an official channel for GNOME teams. I propose that we address these issues to give Jabber a fair shake. We can then reevaluate its popularity in six months. As I already mentioned privately, I don't think the admins want to have to maintain the OpenFire Jabber server. First, as Olav mentioned, there's no SSL support for a service where you would expect privacy. Furthermore, I would expect the security concerns of running such a big service on GNOME servers to be a burden on the admins. Is this just because we chose a particularly bad Jabber server? I have a hard time believing nobody's figured this out yet. Incidentally, SSL doesn't work on our IRC network. So I get to send my password in plain text to register with our new bot. Why not get the GNOME jabber service (co-)hosted somewhere else, where it would be possible to add the features you want? What would we have to do on the GNOME side to allow this? -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: jabber.gnome.org: a proposal
On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 17:04 +0100, Tobias Mueller wrote: Hola, On 12.03.2013 14:38, Shaun McCance wrote: So I get to send my password in plain text to register with our new bot. But your bot password isn't as valuable as *the one* GNOME password that the jabber server currently uses. Is there some reason the Jabber server has to be connected to that LDAP password? As far as I know, the only other thing that uses it is Mango, and I only use that once or twice a year. I use my ssh key for git, ssh, and scp. I have a throwaway password for mailman that gets emailed to me in plain text once a month. I have a throwaway password for our IRC bot. I have a password for Bugzilla, another for WordPress on www.gnome.org, another for WordPress on blogs.gnome.org, and yet another for MoinMoin on live.gnome.org. What's so special about *the one* GNOME password that the Jabber server uses? -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
jabber.gnome.org: a proposal
Hi all, I think it's clear from the recent thread that most people had no idea we had a Jabber server, or that they could get accounts on it, or how to go about doing so. What's more, over the last week, I tried to help two people use their jabber.gnome.org accounts with no success. I think it's unfair to judge the popularity of this service when it has been so buried and so extremely difficult to use. It also seems we can't create group chats on jabber.gnome.org, which limits our ability to use it as an official channel for GNOME teams. I propose that we address these issues to give Jabber a fair shake. We can then reevaluate its popularity in six months. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: jabber.gnome.org's future
On Mon, 2013-03-04 at 14:59 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote: Hi Shaun, It's certainly recognized that shutting down jabber.gnome.org would cause pain for people who are using it. But in the end, system administration resources are limited, and we have to balance that against the costs to us to provide an open-ended promise to continue running the service indefinitely. With email, we have to have a functioning email server for gnome.org, anyways and all we provide on top of that is automated aliases. The incremental security and maintenance burden of gnome.org email addresses is minimal. With XMPP, on the other hand, we have a complete service which is running *only* to provide XMPP service to on the order of a dozen people. I don't think this is a strategic use of our resources. The only way it would make sense to me is if we had some expectation that over time that the number of users would grow to a significant fraction of the GNOME membership. I understand the maintenance burden, and that it's not worthwhile for only a small handful of users. But it's clear from the thread that most people didn't even know we have an XMPP server. How many users would we have if we actually publicized it? I do think we should push XMPP harder and build more services on top of it, and having a server for members can help us prototype stuff like that. But I'm not writing the code or maintaining the server, so meh... -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: jabber.gnome.org's future
On Mon, 2013-03-04 at 22:11 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: I have a hard time though thinking it is a superior chat system compared to IRC. Mostly because, we have bots, we have just added some new IRC services. Plus some of us run irc under screen, giving us 24/7 access to chat so we don't miss conversations. I think XMPP has a place, but chatting isn't one of them. I wouldn't hold up IRC as a shining example of, well, anything. We use it because we've always used it, since before some smart folks came along and designed a protocol that isn't awful. And we'll keep using it as long as nobody makes an effort not to. Honestly, I think we already use less IRC. A lot of people are doing stuff over Google hangouts these days. It would be nice if we could make something like that work with open standards and free software. I don't think IRC is the right starting point. None of the IRC benefits you mentioned are exclusive to IRC. You can have Jabber bots. There are command-line Jabber clients, so you can run it under screen. Plus, Jabber MUCs can actually send history to connecting clients, so you can see what just happened even if you didn't have the foresight to geek out your chat. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: jabber.gnome.org's future
On Fri, 2013-03-01 at 13:45 +0100, Andrea Veri wrote: Howdy guys, as you may know we're currently hosting an openfire istance (jabber server) on one of our machines, I'm currently migrating a good bunch of services and reviewing all the services we host in case they need an upgrade or just a little maintenance. I have a few questions I would like to ask to our Foundation members (jabber.gnome.org is actually a service meant for @gnome.org addresses) about our jabber service: 1. have you ever used jabber.gnome.org? 2. is it a service you find useful? I use it every single day. It is my primary IM account. 3. do you think we should discontinue it? if yes, why? if not, why? No. For the same reason I don't think I should lose my @gnome.org email address. It's part of my digital identity. 4. what are the major issues you had with it and you would like to see fixed? (apart the self-signed SSL certificate, which will be fixed soon) For some reason, you can't use the default server settings. I have to put Server: jabber.gnome.org, Port: 5223, and check Use old SSL in Empathy to make it work. Also, the password is tied to the Mango password, which is some autogenerated nonsense I can never remember. Good thing we have a keyring in GNOME, but it's a hassle when setting up a new machine. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Agenda for the board meeting of November 20th, 2012
On Wed, 2012-11-21 at 08:16 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: Le mercredi 21 novembre 2012, à 02:03 +0100, Tobias Mueller a écrit : Bonjour Vincent :-) Thanks a lot for your valuable input! On 20.11.2012 15:59, Vincent Untz wrote: For the record, in the past, what we did instead of formally joining the W3C is have some people from our community be invited experts to some working groups Do you have more details on that? Like when about that was and how that happened? There was some discussion in January 2006 about the SVG working group, for instance. We got someone from Inkscape invited as an expert in this WG. That's probably the part I remember. I also know that Daniel Veillard is (or at least was, at that time) an invited expert for the XML working group. Daniel is officially Red Hat's representative on the XML Core Working Group. Of course, that doesn't mean he can't also bring GNOME's interests to the table. One option is asking advisory board members to put people on working groups who can represent our interests. And perhaps we should just try to get more of our developers on working groups as invited experts. I'm on the MultilingalWeb-LT working group because of my itstool work, for example. But there are benefits to being a member organization. Anyway, it was just a preliminary discussion. We didn't decide one way or the other, and we welcome community feedback. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!
On Thu, 2012-11-15 at 22:44 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 11:39 AM, William Jon McCann william.jon.mcc...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Karen, I think these are good suggestions. But I think it would be a mistake to leave this critical responsibility to a committee of volunteers. One of the many challenges we face is that our voice and message have been too inconsistent - too infrequently heard. Heard too late. Lacking authority. In want of good taste. And dealing with this is taking a huge toll on our ability to attract and retain contributors. Something needs to be done. I propose that we hire or appoint a full time director of marketing. Let me add one other position. We need to hire another sysadmin person. Along the same community support, we need to also be able to have the infrastructure to support coming out with daily builds for the community to test out and give feedback on the new designs that come out. Bug testing and performance testing as well so that we have a quality product. If we are serious about doing GNOME OS we are going to need to upgrade our infrastructure. We will need to do fund raising to be able get the right hardware and the right person to manage it. I do appreciate that both of these positions could be beneficial to GNOME, but please understand that employees are expensive, and the GNOME Foundation has a relatively small budget. Fundraising campaigns do not bring in the kinds of money you need to hire full-time employees. They're OK for short-term or part-time contract work. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Supporting GTK+
On Tue, 2012-07-17 at 17:33 +, Gino Aielli wrote: Hi! I am a staffing consultant and I am looking for a full-time GTK+ resource to join a client of mine in Nevada. I know that the GTK community is very small, is there any way to spread the word among you blog readers? Hi Gino, The GTK+ web site has a listing of consultancies that can help with GTK+ development here: http://www.gtk.org/support.php And according to this page: https://mail.gnome.org/ job postings are allowed on gtk-l...@gnome.org as long as they are directly related to GTK+ and the subject is clearly marked as a job posting. Hope that helps. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to Shaun McCance
On Thu, 2012-06-07 at 00:25 +0200, Reinout van Schouwen wrote: Dear Shaun, It has come to my attention that you are running for the Gnome board again this year. In the past year and a half, I have tried to contact you in your role of treasurer on multiple occasions to talk about a small leftover issue from Guadec 2010, through multiple channels (irc, email, even Google+). Not once did I get a reply from you. If you are elected, what will you do to improve communications with foundation members? I remember a G+ ping and one IRC ping, and my email archives show a short thread between you, me, and Karen late last year. I'm sure it hasn't been a year and a half, though. I've been on the board for less than a year. I should have been more proactive with the email. I apologize for that. It is almost always best to email board-list instead of individual board members. Nobody on the board is privy to any sensitive information that other board members don't know. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question for the candidates
I'm going to reply here, because I really don't know how to answer the original email. On Fri, 2012-05-25 at 18:33 +0100, Allan Day wrote: Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: ... Sometimes it can feel like the Board of Directors is a bit divorced from the rest of the GNOME project. I don't quite understand the question. The Board is not where technical decisions are made, it's not where applications or new dependencies are made. Yet it is still a governance body, and it is the only democratic one within GNOME. Only the Board can actually claim to represent the GNOME community. As the only democratic governance body in GNOME, I absolutely agree that, if push comes to shove, it's the board's responsibility to make the final decisions. But the board intentionally does not want to have to involve itself in most decisions. The board empowers other groups like the release team to work with the community and make decisions. If there is a serious dispute, then the board needs to act. But we should strive to have a working community where the board doesn't need to act. What were your expectations of the Board doing, and that they don't deliver on? My question was not guided by personal expectations. I'm interested in how the Board can enhance our community. I suppose I don't see the problem on this end, and if you don't have any personal expectations, it's hard for me to know what to address. I think the board members are largely active in the community in one way or another. I do think we could do better at being seen *outside* our community. We need to work better with partner organizations and vendors. We really ought to have good working relationships with companies that can put GNOME devices into users' hands. Why do you think the Board of Directors is divorced from the project? I personally don't hear or see very much of what the board gets up to, and I don't feel like Foundation membership provides me with much in the way of additional influence. As a member of the board, you might be in a position to change that. If membership of the GNOME Foundation starts and ends with an annual vote, then it doesn't mean very much. If it is synonymous with membership of our community, and if it enables me to have a relationship with GNOME that I couldn't otherwise have, then it means a great deal. Is that something you care about? I tried for a while to continue the regular Foundation meetings. You were one of the very few people that regularly attended. Unless we had an interesting agenda item (e.g. future of the Desktop Summit), people didn't attend. I assume it's because they didn't have anything pressing to say. That's OK. I didn't have anything pressing to say either. In terms of what membership gets you, we've been trying to tie more privileges to Foundation membership, in part because it means we have more consistent rules for who can get what. I don't like looking at Foundation membership as something distinct from community membership. The Foundation is the community. We're just required to have a formal membership process for voting to abide by the laws that let us keep our non-profit status. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to the candidates
On Sun, 2012-05-27 at 11:21 +0200, Gil Forcada wrote: Hi all, First of all thanks for running for this critical role on GNOME! My question is about hardware and contacts: The average user is not going to ever install its own operating system by itself, for them hardware and software come together and they die together, so a new version of Windows means a new laptop and so on, a new iPhone OS means a new iPhone hardware... So the crucial part here are ISV, contacting them, engaging with them and finally making them ship our great software to the end user. Is that something that you both find important and also will try to pursue if you are elected? Hi Gil, I find this extremely important. It's what I talked about when I ran for the board last year. Clearly, not much has happened since. I do want to help make this happen, but I'm not sure where to begin. And I don't want to make promises I can't keep. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
On Tue, 2012-05-22 at 09:58 +0200, Robert Nordan wrote: Hi all, I have a few questions for the candidates in the upcoming election to the board. They are obviously shaped by my interests, but I believe that other Foundation members may be interested in the answers as well. 1) Open Source or Free Software? This is about personal philosophy: Do you prefer the pragmatism of the Open Source Initiative or the political idealism of the Free Software Foundation? (Some of the candidates have already flagged a stance on this.) I agree with Dave's concerns over how this question is worded. But people do contribute for different reasons, some for moral reasons, others because they think it's just a better way to produce quality software. I think it's fair to ask candidates their motivations. I believe free software makes the world a better place, not just by making better software, but by empowering people to tinker and learn and build off the ideas of others. I believe people ought to be in control of the devices that are increasingly integral to the way we live. I view software as an applied science, and science works best when we share knowledge and ideas. That said, I often use the term open source. I pick my battles. 2) Overhaul of GNOME's git infrastructure I personally believe that the way the GNOME git system is set up is a bit antiquated and doesn't use git to its full potential. It's fine for developers with commit access, but contributors without have to create individual patches and attach them to bug trackers or convince the maintainers to look up their personal branch hosted somewhere else and merge in. In a time when GitHub is setting the standard for ease of use when it comes to forking, merging and development, GNOME is lagging behind. I have heard chatter among GNOME people about setting up a GNOME instance of Gitorious to gain that kind of functionality, but nothing has really happened. Do any of the candidates want to make a juicy campaign promise on this issue? We got Git in the first place because some hackers decided to set things up and do a trial conversion. It wasn't the board. It was people getting stuff done. If people want a Gitorious instance, it should happen the same way. But, if the board can provide any resources to help that, I'd vote in favor. 3) GNOME and Ubuntu In the recent years there has been a public perception of a schism between GNOME and Ubuntu resulting in double work and wasted resources on both sides. Do you think that perception is unfounded or not, and how do you plan to handle it? There is a schism between GNOME and Ubuntu. The GNOME community, by and large, wants to create a finished product. Ubuntu wants to do the same thing, and they want to do it differently. They are two different products made by two increasingly different groups of people. We do share technology, and I think we should work together as much as possible on that technology. I fully support things like cross-project summits and hackfests. I don't have a problem with multiple projects existing, though we ought to collaborate where possible. But at the end of the day, the GNOME Foundations exists to support GNOME, so that has to be our first priority. 4) Stance on GNOME forks Similarly, GNOME 3 has met with some opposing developments like Cinnamon and MATE. It is of course the right of dissatisfied users to do what they want and fork if they like, but should GNOME ignore them or try to find ways to work together with them? It's clear there are people who want to continue having something like GNOME 2. And it's clear there are people who are willing to step up and do the work. That's great. I fully support it. And I think we should work with them, provided they want to work with us and provided we have the resources. Honestly, I wouldn't mind at all continuing to have a GNOME 2 product line, as long as there are people willing to make it happen. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Could a few influential GNOME develoers join gnu-prog-disc...@gnu.org?
On Wed, 2012-01-18 at 19:32 +0100, Michael Hasselmann wrote: On Wed, 2012-01-18 at 18:25 +0100, Johannes Schmid wrote: Hi! A GNOME developer in the list would have seen this and could have responded, raises the issue in the appropriate GNOME list, or whatever is TRT. It isn't feasible for me, and I don't know who to ask. No, that's not how the world works! The person asking should have brought it up on a GNOME (or in this case xdg) mailing list. This is how things work - you complain to the people responsible instead of waiting for someone to magically speak up. To me it seems that we're ignoring this: GNOME is proud to be a part of the GNU Project. (from gnome.org/about). So by extension, a GNU mailing list is the perfect place to discuss matters that also affect GNOME. The rejective attitude towards joining a GNU mailing list that I see here should then result in GNOME leaving the GNU project. Then above statement can be removed from the website. I know this is an old flamebait, but if no one here who is still active (influential) in GNOME is openly pro-GNU, then it's time to openly admit that. I'm pro-GNU. I'm anti-yet-another-mailing-list. I don't mind joining a list if it is the natural place to discuss specific collaboration issues. But in the one example given, the place to discuss it is xdg-list, and possibly desktop-devel-list. Maybe there are discussions that GNOME developers ought to be a part of. But without public list archives, who knows? -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Could a few influential GNOME develoers join gnu-prog-disc...@gnu.org?
On Wed, 2012-01-18 at 17:32 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote: mention that this particular behaviour is specified: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-user-dirs They can recommend, but they cannot specify anything for us. In the GNU Project we pay attention to standards, and usually we follow them, but not automatically or necessarily. For instance, GNU df and du give sizes in k by default, not in 512-byte blocks as POSIX specifies. Likewise, GCC violates the ISO C spec if you don't use --pedantic. The standards made by POSIX, ISO and freedesktop.org are suggestions. They carry some weight because users typically appreciate compatibility with standards. But that's not the only thing users appreciate, so a standard is not a command for us to obey. I don't think Bastien was implying that we have to follow this behavior simply because it's specified somewhere. In fact, the front page of freedesktop.org is very clear that it is not a standards organization. Specification on freedesktop.org aren't things we have to follow. Rather, they are formal write-ups of things we've decided to do. The way the comment was presented (and granted, we're missing context here) was as if this behavior was a bug. Bastien was saying it's intentional behavior, and that we've even written down how it's supposed to work. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Foundation IRC meeting tomorrow 14:00 UTC
On Tue, 2011-07-12 at 14:37 -0400, Shaun McCance wrote: Hi Foundation members! Tomorrow, July 13th at 14:00 UTC is our GNOME Foundation IRC meeting in the #foundation IRC channel. Your new board will be there to take questions. Thanks to all who attended. If you weren't able to make it, minutes and a full IRC log can be found here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC20110713 -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Foundation IRC meeting tomorrow 14:00 UTC
Hi Foundation members! Tomorrow, July 13th at 14:00 UTC is our GNOME Foundation IRC meeting in the #foundation IRC channel. Your new board will be there to take questions. Details here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MeetingAgenda Add topics to discuss here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MembersAgenda Convert to local time: http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=13month=7year=2011hour=14min=0sec=0p1=0 We look forward to seeing everyone. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for candidates - board processes significance
On Mon, 2011-05-30 at 16:11 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Hi all, I was away last week travelling, so I'm coming late to the election campaign. I have almost decided who I would like to vote for, but there are still a few things which are important to me when considering a prospective board member. 1. If elected, will you seek a named position (chairman/treasurer/secretary) on the board? If so, why? I won't actively seek a position. As a new board member, I'll have plenty to learn. I think it's ideal when a board has a healthy mixture of veterans and new blood, and the veterans are probably in a better position to understand what these positions entail. That said: if asked, I'll serve. 2. Board meetings are minuted, and these minutes are published regularly. However, the board also increasingly makes decisions on board-list with the Apache +1/0/-1 convention. Would you support the minuting of these votes, including recording any -1 votes? As I mentioned in another email, I get the impression that most decisions don't even come down to a vote. Board members seem to just come to an agreement. I don't think there's any benefit to mandating more process in those cases. When things do come to a vote, yes, I believe votes should be publicly recorded (unless the entire topic has to be kept secret for some reason). Board members act on behalf of the foundation membership. Their votes should be representative of what the foundation wants, so I don't think they have a right to a secret ballot. 3. I think financial transparency is important. If you plan on applying for the treasurer position, what changes (if any) would you propose for the budgeting process? How often would you publish financial reports for the foundation? Are you happy with the level of transparency in the board's finances now? Honestly, I haven't personally had any problems with the level of transparency in our finances. If any foundation members do have a problem, I think it's important that we listen to their concerns. From what I've read, it sounds like we have a mess of too much manual labor in our finances, and that could impact how well we're able to publish finances. I hate seeing people do things by hand that could be done just as easily by a machine. I like automating things. 4. Our relationship with a number of groups has suffered this year - and one of the lesser known ones (but one I'm involvedd in) is the Libre Graphics Meeting organisers (a group of people representing a couple of dozen free art projects). Are you aware that the LGM organisers withdrew all the funds that the GNOME Foundation was managing for them this year, because they have been unhappy with the responsiveness and quality of communication with the foundation over the past 2 - 3 years? Do you have any thoughts on why this particular relationship degraded? And will you commit to handling or delegating answers to all time-critical queries which come to the board during your term? I was aware that LGM stopped using the GNOME Foundation to manage their funds. I was not aware of the reasons. It's nice that we're able to offer that kind of service to affiliated groups, but it doesn't seem like we're really set up to handle it well. Maybe we should be asking ourselves whether we want to provide those services. And if we do, perhaps we should sit down with some folks at the Conservancy and pick their brains. I'm afraid I don't really know the details on this, so I can't give very concrete answers. 5. In general, as a board member communication is vital to keep people outside the board informed whenever there is a delay or when extra input is needed on something they're working on. For incumbents, are you happy with the level of communication reactivity in the current board? For new candidates, what would you like to do to ensure that the communication reactivity of the board improves in the coming term? I haven't had any problems with reactivity. The board has always responded fairly promptly to things I've emailed about (mostly funding requests for hackfests). Ticketing systems (bugzilla, RT, whatever) can help, but in the end, it's human beings who have to devote the time to making sure communication happens. 6. Board members are ambassadors for the foundation. I think it's important that board members be social, and be nice. Are you nice? I think I am. I think others would vouch for that. I do try very hard to be friendly, even when discussions get heated. (And they do sometimes, unfortunately.) I spend the better part of my days working with GNOME people. I'd really rather like the people I work with, and have them like me. Life's just better that way. Thanks, Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 16:34 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: I'd like to ask the candidates this question: * What do you think GNOME should do to help promote the ideals of free software, beyond being composed of free programs. Hi Richard, I want to echo something from my candidacy statement: We need more web integration, but at the same time, we need to continue to protect our users' freedoms. You wrote in an earlier email that people should think carefully about using an Internet service, that some services could pose ethical problems. There are a lot of practical benefits to integrating with web services. It's clearly something users want, and we want to make software that makes our users happy. But in doing so, I think we have an obligation to make sure GNOME doesn't just become a free window to a world of proprietary software, data hording, and vendor lock-in. We should work with other organizations to pressure service providers to guarantee users full access to their data and to provide services using open formats that can be implemented by free software. Even if service providers are running entirely free software, they could still be hording users' data. I realize that this is, strictly speaking, not a free software issue. But it's a real problem that we will only see more of in the future, and I think what I've talked about is in line with the ideals behind the free software movement. Thanks, Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Candidates question: Contributor agreement
On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 12:01 +0200, Olav Vitters wrote: Given that we already have a policy on copyright assignments[1], I wondered what is your position regarding contributor agreements[2]? Should the board do something with contributor agreements and if so, what should be done? [1] https://live.gnome.org/CopyrightAssignment [2] e.g. http://lwn.net/Articles/442782/ and http://www.harmonyagreements.org/ Like copyright assignments, contributor agreements create an artificial barrier to entry for contributors. That's reason enough for me to oppose contributor agreements for any module in GNOME Core. Frankly, I find the attitude behind many contributor agreements to be disingenuous and, frankly, a bit insulting. It's like saying That's a cute patch, now let the grown-ups get back to the real work. If that's how you treat your outside contributors, then you'll only ever get small contributions. Many of our most successful projects are developed by people from different companies, and people with no affiliation. That's how we should strive to work. And that doesn't work when one company says This is *our* project, but we'll let you work on it. I've been maintaining Yelp for eight years. Some of the earliest work on Yelp was done by Red Hat employees. Would I be doing all the stuff I'm doing if I'd had to give all my work to Red Hat? Almost certainly not. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for all board candidates
On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 05:43 -0700, Jeff Schroeder wrote: 1.) For incumbents, have you missed any meetings? What is your % of missed vs attended meetings and why? For new challengers, how much time can you dedicate to working on the board each week? How do you plan on spending that time? As a freelancer, How much time I can spend depends on whether I have an active contract. I expect that I'll be able to put in a full day's work each week at a minimum, sometimes more. Of course, as with any GNOME contributor, there will be a trade-off with my regular development and writing work. I'd like to spend much of that time talking to the people who can get GNOME into the hands of users, as I talked about in my candidacy statement. Reaching out to them, pushing GNOME, listening to their concerns, and putting them in touch with developers and other community members when necessary. I've never served on the board before, so I don't know all the things that need to be done regularly. This will be a learning experience for me, as I'm sure it was for every first-time board member. 2.) Other open source / free software projects run their meetings in the open via IRC (such as Fedora's FESCO I believe). Would you consider that, and if not, what about recording how board members vote on a given topic. This includes +1 / -1 / abstains and perhaps give a small comment on any -1 or abstain. In my opinion, as an open foundation, the transparency of the board is absolutely critical _where possible_. Leaders should always set the example for members. Is there a real problem with transparency? The board does send minutes of all meetings. Reading the minutes (which I usually at least skim), I don't get the impression that the board takes official votes on everything they discuss. You can only record people's votes if they vote. Introducing more procedure could just bog everything down. I do think phone meetings are usually more productive that IRC meetings. Discussions just move faster. I certainly don't want to come in as a first-time member and tell the board it needs to change how it works. That said, if our community thinks there's transparency problem with the board, then that's a serious issue we need to address. I'm just not going to commit to a specific solution right now without a better understanding. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 11:10 -0700, Andy Tai wrote: As Fedora is the only current GNU/Linux distribution adapting GNOME 3.0 as the default desktop, how would you facilitate to make GNOME technologies to work well (meaning minimal local patching needed) on other GNU/Linux distributions like Debian, and such distributions which may work on components competing with certain parts of GNOME, such as Ubuntu? And how would you facilitate to make GNOME 3 run well on other free OS environments, especially the BSD based ones, like OpenBSD and FreeBSD? Part of the reason GNOME 3 isn't on many distros yet is just that it's new. Many of them will pick it up in time. That's fine. If there are technical issues, then I encourage the developers of those platforms to talk to our community. Or better yet, be a part of our community. I don't think this should have to involve the board. Maybe we can do something to reduce friction, but I don't know what exactly. Developers will work on what they want to work on. And how would you facilitate collaborations with Ubuntu, especially, despite the different viewpoints of developers on issues like GNOME Shell vs. Unity? I think it's important to make a distinction between the GNOME desktop environment and the GNOME developer platform. Ubuntu decided to create their own desktop environment. They built it off of the GNOME platform, and that's great. We should encourage other users of our developer platform to work with us on the bits we share. XFCE uses a lot of our platform as well. We should talk to them too. If Ubuntu wants to a support a GNOME remix (as they do for KDE, XFCE, etc), then we should support that. But we need to focus on the distribution channels that are going to get the GNOME desktop to users. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: on-line services
On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 00:27 +0200, Gil Forcada wrote: Hi members, Everyday more and more services are offered on the cloud and there's also initiatives powered by Free Software (tomboy on-line...). One of the main problems for Free Software projects providing cloud services is the hardware/administration/connection expenses which are mostly a no-go for a Free Software project without any backing from a big corporation. As a member of a the future board will you look for ways to promote and look for resources to offer these free software cloud services? Maybe part of a funding campaign (be a Friend of GNOME and have a Tomboy on-line account for free). Yes. :) I think we all recognize that we need to integrate with more online services. We don't need to provide them all, but we should provide some. For things we don't provide, I think we should do what we can to pressure service providers to respect users. At the very least, users need to own their own data, and be able to get it without restriction. We don't have to do this alone. I think Tomboy Online is awesome. I think we should provide more online services ourselves. I also think there's nothing wrong with charging money for providing a service. Maybe the foundation can't do it as a non-profit. Maybe we need to have a commercial front as well. I don't know. But it's something we should all talk about. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Website content licensing
On Fri, 2011-03-11 at 14:39 -0600, Paul Cutler wrote: I had a discussion with Bradley Kuhn at last year's Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit - it's not possible to dual license these two copylefts. The GNOME Documentation team is licensing all new documentation for applications (and on library.gnome.org) under a CC-BY 3.0 license.[1] For the record, most of the new documentation is under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. We are still using a copyleft. Also, most of the new developer documentation (such as the demos) add this boilerplate exception: As a special exception, the copyright holders give you permission to copy, modify, and distribute the example code contained in this document under the terms of your choosing, without restriction. Luis worked with the SFLC lawyers to get us that blurb. Some wiki pages have substantial code samples, so this might be relevant there. I think the real issue with dual-licensing is content reuse. If you're always the upstream original content, dual-licensing is great for people who want to reuse your content in other free content. But if all your content is dual-licensed, it really limits where you can reuse content from. For the docs, our two most active downstream were moving to CC-BY-SA, and we wanted to be able to reuse their material. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: sponsoring a GNOME developer training session at Fedora Action Day Ghana
On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 13:03 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: I also have the training material I used from the GNOME developer training at GUADEC last year, which included an overview of the GNOME platform from Fernando Herrera How is this different from the upstream Platform Overview we have in gnome-devel-docs? I'm working on revamping that for Gnome 3.0. It would be nice not to duplicate efforts. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Official announcement and invitation to GNOME 3.0 Hackfest and GNOME.Asia Summit 2011
On Sat, 2011-01-22 at 19:45 +0100, Andre Klapper wrote: On Sat, 2011-01-22 at 19:04 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: Le vendredi 21 janvier 2011, à 23:41 +0800, Frederic Muller a écrit : So Hackfest registration is happening here: http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/GNOME.Asia2011 , call for papers for the conference is here http://live.gnome.org/GnomeAsia/CallForPaper and conference registration will be opening soon. What's the plan on the marketing team side? Do we have people who can go? I didn't see any replies on marketing-list to the previous mails, unless I missed something. Same question goes for Documentation. The documentation team will have a hackfest a few weeks earlier in Toronto. There are two main reasons for having that hackfest instead of using GNOME.Asia. First, more of our team can attend. Second, any work we do in the last few days leading up to the release won't get translated. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: How about creating addons.gnome.org
On Tue, 2010-08-17 at 18:37 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: There are some licenses which are open source but not free software. Fortunately they are not used very often. You can find them, more or less, by comparing the OSI's list of approved licenses with http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html. I recall that Reciprocal Public License one of them; I found a few others but I don't recall which ones. Hi Richard, It would be very useful for discussions like these if there were a list of licenses which are open source but not free software, along with an explanation of why. Is that something that could be provided on gnu.org? (I understand it would take time to compile such a list, and that it couldn't appear tomorrow.) That way, rather than hand-wavy arguments, if somebody asks for open-source-but-not-free, we can ask Which of these licenses do you actually want, and why? -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: How about creating addons.gnome.org
On Fri, 2010-08-13 at 06:38 -0700, Sandy Armstrong wrote: On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Johannes Schmid j...@jsschmid.de wrote: Hi! As all the applications involved are GPL'd Which applications are involved? There are some desktop apps that are LGPL'd or even MIT'd, for which non-free addons could legally be developed. Could you give examples inside the GNOME Desktop release set (not libraries)? Tomboy is LGPL2. Right, so some developers may choose to license their apps or plugin frameworks liberally to allow proprietary plugins. We don't need a morality debate on the existence of those plugins on this list (please). But I think most would agree that our servers shouldn't host non-free software. It's a simple one-liner: GNOME only hosts free software on addons.gnome.org. It's worth adding. -- Shaun McCance http://syllogist.net/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Stepping down from the board
On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 15:54 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: Hi, When I decided to run for the foundation board in 2006, many of the old timers where not running again and there was the feeling that new people are needed on the board. The board work has been very educational and rewarding for me, but given other engagements and all the new, capable, people on the board this year, I think it's time for me to step down so I can focus on hacking. The board has decided to appoint Paul Culter to take the seat. Paul has been doing wonders on the marketing team, GNOME Journal, and the sysadmin team. I'm sure this opportunity gives him more ways to contribute to GNOME even more. He's also a honest-to-goodness documentation team hero. Congratulations Paul. I know you'll rock on the board. And thanks Behdad for all your hard work. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 08:08 -0600, Paul Cutler wrote: Hi, On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 04:35 -0600, Andrew Savory wrote: Hi, snip Focussing in on one area that I can talk about: Qt is perceived by some to be stronger from a business perspective due to the 'more complete' offering: extensive documentation and an SDK. Shaun McCance and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. I'm not trying to steal his thunder (and I hope he replies on list) but he has spent a significant amount of time in the last couple of weeks and has put together some thoughts around planning new Developer Docs on lgo[1]. Thanks Paul. I'm not sure what else I can add. As a developer myself, if I can't make headway with a platform in an evening, I usually look for alternatives. And there are almost always alternatives. There are many ways we can lower the barrier to entry for working with our platform. Improving and promoting easy developer tools is a huge win. Hats off to everybody working on that. Another way to level the learning curve is through better developer documentation. We can do better. A lot better. So back to the vision thing, what if we applied the old simple, usable, beautiful thing to our platform? The effects of this are huge. Along with better development tools and better documentation, this also means finding APIs that are difficult or cumbersome to use and fixing them. It means removing every roadblock we possibly can. (And don't worry about stealing my thunder. I don't care who makes it happen. I just care that it gets done.) -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Thanks, and a Brief Survey
On Sun, 2010-01-17 at 12:37 -0800, Luis Villa wrote: On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Lefty (石鏡 ) le...@shugendo.org wrote: On 1/17/10 6:52 AM, Ciaran O'Riordan cia...@member.fsf.org wrote: GNOME has a policy (written or not) that prohibits importing non-free software into its repositories. I'm not personally aware of a written policy to this effect. If there's an unwritten policy, I'd encourage the Board to write it down in clear and explicit terms and get it agreed to by the membership, since there's not necessarily any actual common understanding of what such a policy says or means, if that's the case. To the best of my knowledge, that policy has never been written down. That is because there is and always has been a very, very, very clear and common understanding that this is the policy. It takes almost willful ignorance of our history, culture and policy to suggest otherwise. Perhaps less official because it's just on the wiki, but: http://live.gnome.org/ProjectPrerequisites The project must be free/open source software. But yes, Luis, I wholly agree with you. I can't imagine why anybody would ever think it's OK to host non-free software on gnome.org. -- Shaun McCance http://syllogist.net/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: New GNOME Foundation Members
On Sun, 2009-08-23 at 19:22 -0300, Bruno Boaventura wrote: Hello everybody! The GNOME Foundation Membership Committee is proud to present the new members: - Milo Casagrande Hooray for Milo! Welcome to the Foundation. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Free Desktop Communities come together at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 15:09 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote: Of the GNOME people who collaborated with a KDE person: * 78% said it went well, 7% said it didn't * 67% said we should co-locate next year, 29% said no * 28% said we should co-locate in the future but not next year, 25% said no * 53% said we should do it even if we lose profit, 32% said no * 55% collaborated with a KDE person, 30% did not Only 55% of the people who collaborated with a KDE person collaborated with a KDE person? I'm very confused. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: gtk configuration problem
On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 12:23 -0400, john palmieri wrote: Hi Soumen, Foundation list is not a technical list. Please go here (http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo) to find a more appropriate list in the future (gtk-list might be a good starting point). I also suggest going on Freenode irc and chatting with people in #gnome or #gtk. Since you are running into a basic problem I can help you with, I'm going to e-mail you off list. This seems to happen relatively frequently, and I suspect it's because of the Support section here: http://www.gtk.org/development.html If you want to help the GTK+ project by donating money OR perhaps your company wants to pay someone to develop GTK+, you can email the GNOME foundation. Any donations to GNOME for GTK+ will ONLY be spent on GTK+. Then there's a link to email foundation-list. The paragraph is pretty clear if you read it. Unfortunately, people don't really read pages like this. They see Support and a big blue like and click. Two ideas on how to address this come to mind. We could put some sort of admonition there reiterating that the link is only for certain types of support. It would have to be big and in your face to ensure people read it. Alternatively (and I think this is better), *first* have a link for community support, then the foundation link. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Board of Directors Foundation Elections Spring 2009 - Preliminary results
On Fri, 2009-06-26 at 19:22 +0530, Arun Raghavan wrote: 2009/6/26 Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org: Hi, Dave Neary wrote: A small correction to explain exactly how random transfers work: Well, actually, I just found out from the OpenSTV guys, that how Filippo said is how they work. In count 1, Vincent has 60 votes, they're shoved into a stack. The top 33 votes from the stack get redistributed in count 2. No randomness at all, no shuffling, and we don't look at the distribution of the 2nd preferences to calculate who gets what. If I understand the system correctly, the randomness does exist - the outcome is dependent on the order in which ballots are cast (or counted), which can be thought of as a random process. Is this correct? I could easily conceive of scenarios in which the order of votes received has a non-negligible correlation to voter preference. Time zones, work schedules, ability of a candidate to galvanize his supporters to vote early, etc. I'm not saying there is a correlation. I'm just saying I'm very distrustful of mere guesses that there is not. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Fundraising Progress
Owen sent an email to the list a short while back about a FoG fundraising drive for a sysadmin: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2009-April/msg00025.html There have been occasional conversations on IRC about having a progress meter we could put on our web sites. I know some other people have been in talks about this. But I decided to JFDI. http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/fog/index.html What this needs is real data. It's being fed with dummy in an easy-to-parse format right now. I'm not afraid to extract stuff from a hard-to-parse format if I have to. Do we have any way of getting data? -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009
On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 20:34 +0200, BJörn Lindqvist wrote: Usa isn't the only country in North America. Maybe Canada or Mexico has less strict rules about visas? It is not hard to imagine that the Americans might feel that it is a little unfair that guadec always is in Europe. This American views it as a great excuse to go to Europe. I can see Chicago anytime. Istanbul is something special. And while there are differences between American cities, it's nowhere near the differences we get between different European countries. The diversity is awesome. I'm not saying this is necessarily a reason to keep it in Europe. I'm just saying it's why I, in particular, don't care if GUADEC is ever on my side of the pond. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: time to (re)consider preferential voting?
[snip plenty of good discussion] On Sun, 2008-02-24 at 10:33 +0900, James Henstridge wrote: On 17/02/2008, Shaun McCance [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Any preferential voting systems is going to make the voting process more difficult. If I had had to order my votes in previous elections, I'm sure it would have been mostly arbitrary. If it's not solving any real problems, why bother? Is it really that much more difficult to order a list of ten candidates as opposed to selecting 7 out of the 10? I don't want to drag this argument out, and I'm not going to fight against preferential voting if that's what people want. But yes, I really do think it's hard to order a list of ten candidates. I don't usually even select seven out of ten. In the last election, I selected maybe four or five. Why? Because I just don't have a strong enough opinion on the others, and I think a random vote is worse than no vote. Even if you aren't sure of a total ordering, you can probably pick a few candidates that you definitely want elected (put them at the top) and some candidates you definitely don't want elected (put them at the bottom). You might decide to order the remainder randomly if you don't care about them. If, as your argument above indicates, this ordering can have drastic impacts on the outcome of the vote, I would not want to order them randomly. Would the system still allow me to order my top five, and abstain of everybody else? A voting system that doesn't allow abstaining has problems. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: time to (re)consider preferential voting?
On Sat, 2008-02-16 at 10:53 -0500, Luis Villa wrote: [Speaking purely as a Foundation member and not as a member of the Board; I've not discussed this with the Board at all.] Some years ago the Foundation considered the use of preferential voting to select the board. At the time I opposed it, for reasons I don't fully recall but which in retrospect probably boiled down to 'I'm unfamiliar with it.' I believe that at the time we'd also have had to write the software, which would not have been fun. But I've come around to believing that this is a better way to run elections. It appears that by the time of our next election, we'll have a third-party, free software solution available for the problem, used recently and successfully by FreeCulture.org. http://blog.selectricity.org/?p=4 I'm still trying to puzzle through the bylaws (which are a bit of a mess wrt voting) as to what it would take to actually enact this change (bottom line is probably that the board can just say 'it should be this way'), but in the meantime I thought it might be good to have a bit of discussion here around whether or not this is a good idea. Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't really see the point. For the record, I strongly advocate preferential voting in situations where you are electing exactly one person. In these cases, non-preferential voting systems tend to lock out candidates. For the board elections, we are electing seven people, and we each get to cast up to seven votes. I don't think we've ever seen the list of candidates unfairly cut due to non-preferential voting. And I'm sure I've never made a strategic vote for one person instead of another I like more, simply to block another person. Any preferential voting systems is going to make the voting process more difficult. If I had had to order my votes in previous elections, I'm sure it would have been mostly arbitrary. If it's not solving any real problems, why bother? -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Ga-nome or NOME
On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 18:05 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: quote who=Ani Peter I have heard a lot of people pronouncing GNOME as Ga-nome and I feel Nome is the correct pronunciation. Appreciate if someone please advise me which is the correct pronunciation. When folks ask me about this at conferences and such, I always say, doesn't matter how you pronounce it, as long as you love using it, quickly followed up with, but GNOME developers say 'guh-nome' because the 'G' comes from the 'GNU' project. :-) I would say some GNOME developers or many GNOME developers. [1] I know that 'guh-nome' is the proper pronunciation, and I will tell people so if asked directly. But I just can't bring myself to say it that way. Maybe we should just eschew all traditional pronunciations and start pronouncing GNOME as Love. [1] Actually, I would say some Gnome developers, if my oration skills somehow allowed me to convey the capitalization. :) -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:11 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: Alan Cox wrote: I just want to put this in perspective: the foundation has $200,000 in the bank, with guaranteed income of $100,000 a year approx. One employee costs at least $70,000 per year, and depending on the role up to $100,000 or more. Manpower is expensive :) American manpower is expensive. French manpower is equally expensive. And British manpower too. American manpower on the coasts is expensive. People in the middle of the country enjoy the same quality of life for roughly half the income. It's slightly higher in the big cities, but even Chicago is still much cheaper than, say, LA. The price of non-American manpower will depend in part on the exchange rate of the dollar with the respective currency. And right now, the dollar won't get you as much in Europe as it used to. A director, perhaps, is good to have in the Boston area. But a sysadmin could be living anywhere. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME dependent on Mono
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 15:44 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote: On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 20:03 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote: I read http://boycottnovell.com/2007/11/05/gnome-mono-yelp/ with great concern. Since I am not an expert, I cannot tell on my own if that description of the situation is accurate. If part of it is not accurate, I hope someone will explain. However, if it is accurate, GNOME has a serious problem. I have always supported the development of free platforms for C#, just as I've supported the development of free platforms for any language that users use. I also wouldn't argue that people should not use C# with a free platform for secondary applications. However, making GNOME depend on Mono is running a grave risk, and a grave mistake. If the article accurately describes the situation, I think we need to launch a high-priority project to reimplement Yelp in some other language. Sorry, I wanted to be absolutely clear on something here: Yelp itself is not written in C#, and does not run on top of Mono. Yelp is written primarily in C, with some XSLT for document transformation and some C++ for Gecko stuff. There is no need to re-implement Yelp. But if anybody wants to, hey, have fun. Others have commented, but here's the detailed explanation of how things work and where we're heading from somebody who actually co-maintains Yelp: [snip other stuff I said] -- Shaun ___ 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]
On 6/10/07, Jody Goldberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As a non-profit we (GNOME) would not have voting privileges. The membership will serve as a mechanism to allow interested foundation members to join ECMA committees. I'm advocating this in relation to ECMA376/TC45 aka MS OfficeOpen XML. Committee members have the ability to request clarifications and suggest improvements in the text of the specification. For anyone implementing parts of this format this is a golden chance to get enough documentation to facilitate interoperability. (tangential) If I recall correctly, now that Gnome is a member organization of the ECMA, we can put people on committees without paying any more for each person. Jody is absolutely qualified to take part in discussions about the OOXML spreadsheet format. But what about the other formats? If it's beneficial for us to be on this committee to scrutinize the specification, then surely it would be beneficial to have somebody scrutinize the word processor bits. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal: Shift election cycle back six months
On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 22:21 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: Hi all, This is an issue various previous Boards have discussed, and it came up very briefly during GUADEC this year, but I'm going to do the bullet-taking thing I enjoy so much, and propose it here for real. :-) Currently the GNOME election process runs from November to December, and the new Board starts in January. GUADEC has traditionally been in June and July. This utterly sucks because the Board has to wait *six months* before it gets a face-to-face meeting. The f2f is always a formative and energising process for the Board, and it would really help to have one much closer to the start of the Board's term. In the past we've discussed the idea of a Board retreat early in the year... *But* that would cost Real Money to fly everyone to the same place. Considering we already have GUADEC, I think that's a huge waste. So here's the proposal: I'd like to suggest we shift the election cycle back six months, landing the process in May and June [1]. More controversially, I reckon the best way to achieve this without a lot of pain would be to extend the current Board's term by six months. While this year's and last year's GUADECs were in July, previous GUADECs have been in April (2001), May (2005), and June (2004). If we have elections in May and June, then we wouldn't want to have future GUADECs any earlier than July. I don't know if that's a problem, but it is worth mentioning. Related to this, I worry about having the elections too close to GUADEC. Many of us just can't make it to GUADEC every single year, for various reasons. Board members, of course, should make GUADEC a very high priority. But if you're only elected two weeks before GUADEC, it may be too late to make travel arrangements, particularly if you need a visa. I see the value in having a face-to-face meeting early in the board's term, but I think there should be anough post-election, pre-GUADEC time for travel arrangments to be made. On another note, if anybody actually has a problem with extending this board's term (I don't, and nobody else who's replied so far seems to), another option would be to phase the shift in over the next two or three years by extending those terms by three or two months. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of SoC meeting
On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 23:01 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: Le lundi 05 mars 2007, à 20:46, Federico Mena Quintero a écrit : El mié, 28-02-2007 a las 19:46 +0100, Vincent Untz escribió: SoC/WSOP mentors from previous years: Behdad Esfahbod, Shaun McCance, Danilo Segan, Joe Shaw, Vincent Untz Bleh. Sorry that I couldn't attend, but Oralia and I were jet-setting around Belgium ;) :-) + performance analysis projects are interesting but might not produce concrete results in the end Interesting. How did you come to this conclusion? Hrm, I don't have the logs of the meeting, so maybe someone will be able to jump in and help with the reply. I saved logs of both the meetings. http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/070227-soc.txt http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/070306-soc.txt -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Endorsement for Joachim Norieko
On Wed, 2006-11-29 at 11:27 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote: I must say, I hadn't read Joachim's other comments until after I'd sent my endorsement. I stand by my assertion that he's been a highly motivated contributor to the GDP, although it's now somewhat hard to understand why. It shouldn't be a surprise. People have lots of different motives for contributing to free software projects. This is a good thing, for the most part, since it means more progress. In a practical activity, such as writing code or manuals, there is usually no practical need to discuss anyone's motives, since in most cases a contribution only needs to be judged on its practical merits. Thus, it is easy for the difference in motives to go unnoticed. However, the fact that we don't need to discuss motives most of the time in technical work should not lead to forgetting them entirely. Since free software projects generally do include contributors that are not interested in the free software ideals, and contribute for other motives, we should take explicit steps to make sure that project continues to uphold and spread the ideas of free software. For instance, GNOME documentation provides a good opportunity to communicate the ideas of free software: freedom and social solidarity. Does it do so? It unfortunately does not at this time, and that's something I'd really like to address. But right now, the documentation isn't even doing a good job of being documentation (although it is better than it used to be, thanks in large part to Joachim), and that's a higher priority for me. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Substituting Linux with GNU/Linux or GNU
On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 18:16 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote: On Mon, 7 Aug 2006, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote: Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2006 13:31:08 +0200 From: Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Jeff Waugh [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: foundation-list@gnome.org Subject: Re: Substituting Linux with GNU/Linux or GNU Don't think I ever saw a post with viewcvs links or similar so I just want to say I hope any mention of linux or gnu/linux in our documentation is to mention it as an example of a kernel/operating system on which GNOME runs. If its ever used in our docs as a description of the system etc., it should be be considered a bug and changed as we could very well be running GNOME on Solaris or FreeBSD for example. Didn't check but I think that exact point is also mentioned in our documentation guidelines. I quoted a section earlier which implies what you are saying without saying it directly: Do not use Unix, or any other term, unless you have to directly quote the interface. http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/gnome-glossary-generic-terms.html#id3690752 Anyone got a better more direct reference to this in the documentation? We have been discussing this on gnome-doc-list, where this discussion belongs. I sent Yavor away from gnome-doc-list and to foundation-list for the discussion about an official Gnome policy on using GNU/Linux when appropriate. But the discussion of *when* it is appropriate, and how we refer to the system in general, belongs back on gnome-doc-list. (Does anybody else think it's a shame that the Style Guide has a split infinitive? I'm weird, I think.) -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Substituting Linux with GNU/Linux or GNU
On Sat, 2006-08-05 at 00:09 +0300, Yavor Doganov wrote: Jeff Waugh wrote: Could you provide references to the use of Linux and GNU/Linux in the GNOME documentation? I was not examining documentation, but the GDP folks said such examples are extremely rare, and I beleive so. I was refering to the strings in applications, and I posted an example on the documentation list. It is a simple grep run on my working copy of our _translation_ team repository, so it is not complete: The Linux version does not have this restriction. (GCompris) GPM adds mouse support to text-based Linux applications such the Midnight Commander. (system-tools-backends) The most common archive format on UNIX and Linux systems is the tar archive. (File Roller) Linux mailers cannot do this task... (Evolution) Video-Conferencing application for Linux and other Unices (Ekiga) There are many more for apps that are in GNOME CVS, but are not part of GNOME. I don't know whether any GNOME general policy is valid for them. For those curious, many of this was discussed in the thread on gnome-doc-list, starting here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2006-July/msg00200.html The thread continues into August. We found that many of the occurrences of Linux were simply trying to refer to the class of systems that we tend to run our software on. Richard proposed GNU and Unix for this purpose, which I think is reasonable. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Substituting Linux with GNU/Linux or GNU
On Fri, 2006-08-04 at 23:19 +0300, Yavor Doganov wrote: This is a request to the the GNOME Foundation Board for action/decision regarding this matter. There are some strings in some GNOME programs and very few in the GNOME documentaion that refer to the operating system as Linux. We would like the Board to vote and decide for a policy to substitute all these references to GNU/Linux or GNU, where appropriate. The reason that we insist on this is well known to you, but it is very well explained at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html and http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html. 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 spekespersons, said that it is a terminology issue that has to be solved by GDP. Shaun McCance, the Fearless GDP Leader, said that this is not a case under his jurisdiction and was unwilling to take a decision, so we're coming to the GNOME Foundation as a final resort. I just want to be clear to everybody who was not part of the discussion on gnome-doc-list. I support this, just as I support openly talking about free software. My stance was only that I will not (ab)use my power as the GDP leader to strong-arm developers on this issue. This is something for the community to decide. My stance is nicely summed up here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2006-August/msg00025.html -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Petition for referendum
On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 16:37 -0600, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote: On Wed, 2005-28-09 at 18:26 -0400, Jonathan Blandford wrote: However, the board didn't agree on even having a referendum this evening (this is the problem which reducing board size will fix). That's not a fair characterization, Dave. Perhaps Dave's statement is a very appropriate statement. Shrinking the board size to a single dictator would make sure that decisions will be made unanimously. I would also agree that shrinking the board size but retaining a few members will likely result in less dissent on the board. That of course is a reason why people should be opposed to the suggestion. And I, in turn, don't think that's a fair characterization of David's statement. Here, I'll use your trick on your statement: Having a smaller board means less dissent and the ability to make faster decisions. Since dissent is simply a natural expression of the differing viewpoints in the community, we want to maximize it whenever possible. Thus, we should grow the board size to its current limit, currently all ~365 members. Ridiculous. Nearly every argument a human could make could be taken to some absurd extreme. I'd expect a mathematician not to make such a blatant fallacy. There are clearly pros and cons on all ends. Larger groups can produce and defend a wider variety of viewpoints. Smaller groups can avoid filibustering and METOOing. My personal experience is that larger groups tend to be less efficient. Cooks, broth, etc. It's not an issue of wresting control from the community. It's an issue of finding the right balance given the trade-offs and the dynamic of the group. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
