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Electing the GNOME Foundation board
The GNOME Foundation is charged with several tasks, including serving as
the official voice of the project, coordinating releases, deciding which
projects fit under the GNOME umbrella, supporting events, and more. Once a
year, a board of directors is chosen by the Foundation's members. This
time around, there are ten
candidates running for the seven available positions. This
election may seem like another boring bureaucratic exercise, but its
results are important: GNOME is the desktop used by a great many free
software users, and it is the platform supported by the Free Software
Foundation.
In a number of ways, this seems like one of the more tense elections of its kind in our community. A number of items discussed last year (such as the hiring of a business development manager and/or executive director) remain undone. The workings of the board seem distant and obscure to some GNOME developers. There are clear tensions between some of the project's leaders. Criticism of the project's participation in the OOXML standardization process seems unlikely to let up anytime soon. And there seems to be a general sense of frustration that the board's members are too busy to get things done and too unwilling to delegate things to others. It's also worth noting that the winners will be serving a relatively long term; a change in the Foundation's bylaws means that the next election will happen sometime around June, 2009. Given that, the themes which have come out in the electoral debate should be clear. How should the whole OOXML participation process have been handled? What should be done with the Foundation's money (about $150,000 in the bank and $50,000 in receivables, according to the minutes from a recent board meeting)? How should GNOME push forward into interesting areas, such as mobile applications and web-hosted services? And how can the board become more effective than it has been in the past?
Along with deciding on these issues, the new board will have one other new
decision ahead of it. Until very recently, the Foundation has operated
under a single president: a certain Miguel de Icaza. Miguel has been
absent from the GNOME development community for some time, and many of the
developers in that community have not found themselves in agreement with
the public positions he has taken. The current board has convinced
Miguel to resign the presidency, and has changed In that context, here are a few selections from recent statements by this year's candidates.
Brian Cameron
I think it is an important part of the Foundation to encourage new
people to get involved with volunteer aspects of the community. I
would like to encourage more participation from communities that
are not so well represented today. For example, users with
accessibility needs. I think having someone on the board with
accessibility experience is important to foster these sorts of
things.
Full posting.
I think it would add value to spend more on marketing and on
evangelical community building opportunities. For example, Windows
and MacOS have flashy "Welcome to the desktop" presentations.
Perhaps it is time for the GNOME community to find ways to better
advertise itself.
Full posting.
Behdad Esfahbod
One tipping point for GNOME would be when the membership/community
stops thinking of board as visionaries who set the direction and
happenings of project and starts seeing that it's just set of
trusted people who volunteered to do the boring and frustrating
tasks (take my word for that) that are so essential to the project
but no-one else is doing. [...]
Full posting.
As for the issue of single standards, I hate it when people use standardization as a tool to take advantage over their competitors. "I got here first, so you can't" is exactly what's broken about the patent system right now. Think about it.
George Kraft
Personally, I would not mind it if GNOME were more compatible with
web services; however, I would not want a desktop which is
dependent on them. A danger of an online desktop would be the
dependency on non libre software services where we are not invited
to make changes. [...]
Full posting.
There are important topics like the Online Desktop and OOXML which many are interested in; however, I would like to bring to everyone's attention that GNOME accessibility could be positioned as a clear winner over Windows's MSAA and KDE accessibility, but instead GNOME's accessibility is on the defensive. From an accessibility perspective, GNOME could be winning the hearts and minds of corporations and government agencies; however, GNOME accessibility is being threatened by the deprecation of Orbit2 & its migration to DBus, and the migration of Microsoft's UIA to GNU/Linux. Why regress and/or re-engineer when we can beat the competition now?
Og Maciel
[T]he Online Desktop could be the one thing that will tip the scale
when users choose their desktop environment. I've had the
opportunity to see a few demos and was fairly impressed with its
potential. I believe that it is not up to the Board to decide on
the implementation or even which tools/languages to use, but serve
as a facilitator and guiding light to make sure that the project
stays on track and focused... GNOME users have become used to
expect innovation and great software in every release, so the
Online Desktop could definitely provide that extra buzz!
Full posting.
I'd like to see more support going for the guys behind Abiword,
Glom, Gnumeric, Epiphany, etc... Open Office and Firefox are GREAT
examples of good software but I happen to believe that we already
have great software in our code base that has been delegated to
second place. How about we promote a an event where people who are
involved with the software mentioned before plus anyone who can be
of help and offer insight can sit down and jot down what needs to
be done in order to bring them out of the closet?
Full posting.
John Palmieri
I see the GNOME Online push as pulling us into the Wild West of the
Web platform where everyone is staking their claims and there is
yet to be monopolies to stifle innovation. Sure Google is big but
sites like Facebook and Wikipedia were able to emerge. The only
way to defeat entrenched adversaries in business is to outflank
them with disruptive technology. Microsoft did it to IBM with the
Desktop, Google did it to Microsoft with web search and we have the
chance to bring in integrated Open Source web applications to the
mix and even define a new era of Open Services.
Full posting.
Well one weak point is the board seems almost foreign to the every
day GNOME contributor. People vote and pretty much forget about
the inner workings until Slashdot gets a hold on some
sensationalized story and a press release is put out and still to
the outside world the role of the foundation is unclear. It is
hard to figure out weak points because it is hard to see exactly
what the foundation does. I would fix this by communicating any
decision, from the mundane to the sensational, in an easy to digest
format on my blog. Meeting minutes and press releases are just not
enough. Active engagement of the community is a must.
Full posting.
Lucas Rocha
I think the Online Desktop initiative is a great opportunity for us
to enwide the scope of GNOME project from a specific desktop
environment to a broader user experiences set. This means taking
advantage of this huge amount of funny, socially powerful, useful
information and services available on the Web. Embracing Online
Desktop also means trying to bring a new set of goals to GNOME
which are related to a more social and entertaining user
experience, something that, in my opinion, has been lacking in
GNOME for a long time.
Full posting.
I think the most serious problem about GNOME Foundation
participation on ECMA TC45-M was that it wasn't properly explained
and clarified to the community at the time it started. The
statement came after a lot of noise.
Full posting.
Vincent Untz
About the GNOME Foundation being part of the OOXML ECMA committee:
I've supported this decision and I still do. If we can have someone
asking for clarifications and maybe even have the ability to
improve the format, it'd be wrong to not do it and just complain
about the format. We want our users to read their files, and some
will have OOXML files. This means I'll want our applications to be
able to read such files, and therefore that a better documentation
of the format is good.
Full posting.
We've seen this year that hiring an "executive director" is hard,
very hard. I'm hopeful that hiring a sysadmin would be
(comparatively) easier. And I'm also hopeful that we can get some
funding to hire the sysadmin. So my plan is to hire a sysadmin
using part of what we have in our back account now and using some
new funding, and keep enough cash so that we can hire an "executive
director" too. It might sound too ambitious, but I think it's
doable and that it's the best way to go.
Full posting.
Diego Escalante Urrelo
Support initiatives in Latin America for getting people involved as
users and developers. Concretely, I would like to "deploy" 2 or 3
of our rockstars next year to a LA-tour, as seen on marketing-list
and later gugmasters
the idea has had a positive response. I would like to serve as a
direct link to this initiative and hopefully other similar ones.
Full posting.
I would have included a line in all-caps saying "GNOME Foundation
doesn't like OOXML, we have someone in the committee because
standard or not Ms is gonna push it everywhere, so we are taking
the chance to ask questions and raise concern on all the problems
we can find."
Full posting.
Luis Villa
I'll be running again for the Board this year. This will be an
unusual candidacy. I will not be running to do various and sundry
board tasks; I'll be running to do exactly one thing: legal work- a
vote for me is a vote that says 'Luis should be the coordinator of
all GNOME-related legal issues.'
Full posting.
I think it is inevitable that GNOME, or GNOME partners, will be
offering web-backed services to GNOME users. My personal vision for
that is to dot the i's and cross the t's on the legal parts- to
make sure that as we sail into uncharted waters, the rights of
GNOME users and contributors are being protected.
Full posting.
I wish [the statement on OOXML] were more explicit about how the
Foundation feels that the ODF folks have been undermining the
standards process. It isn't obvious to everyone that ODF shares
much of the blame for the politicization of the process, so the
statements about that in the statement are a little vague.
Full posting.
Jeff Waugh
It is ISO's role to facilitate the development of standards in a
coherent, transparent manner, not to determine the market demand
for a given standard. I think it's extremely short-sighted to
protest OOXML on the basis of "competing standards" given that
standards exist for technologies that we are very likely to want
true Free standards for in the future - for example, video encoders
and decoders.
Full posting.
We must have a full time staff member to manage any further hires,
as there is no way our part time administrator should have to deal
with any duties related to management. So, of the two, I'd prefer a
full time, management capable hire before a sysadmin hire.
Full posting
Ballots must be returned by December 9, and the initial results from the election are due to be announced on December 11; stay tuned. (Log in to post comments)
Electing the GNOME Foundation board Posted Nov 27, 2007 18:39 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] Behdad Esfahbod: "As for the issue of single standards, I hate it when people use standardization as a tool to take advantage over their competitors. "I got here first, so you can't" is exactly what's broken about the patent system right now. Think about it." Okay, I've thought about that. I can't figure it out what he means, though. Is he talking about the way Microsoft is using OOXML to make sure that they don't lose their first-comer advantage of their binary office file formats -- or does he try to insinuate that the ODF effort somehow tells anyone "I got here first, so you can't"? If Behdad meant the latter, then that's a pretty crap position, given that Microsoft was invited to participate, and it also reads like a preample for the old "ODF is just OO's file format" crap. Everyone is free to implement ODF, everyone is free to participate in the ongoing development of ODF. The important thing is to work as hard as possible to make it clear that OOXML should never become blessed as a standard, and to never give anyone the impression that deputing someone to the OOXML process can influence what is actually produced by Microsoft software in any meaningful way. George Kraft: " I would like to bring to everyone's attention that GNOME accessibility could be positioned as a clear winner over Windows's MSAA and KDE accessibility, but instead GNOME's accessibility is on the defensive. From an accessibility perspective, GNOME could be winning the hearts and minds of corporations and government agencies; however, GNOME accessibility is being threatened by the deprecation of Orbit2 & its migration to DBus, and the migration of Microsoft's UIA to GNU/Linux. Why regress and/or re-engineer when we can beat the competition now?" That's a really bad attitude. At least since I first got interested in making KOffice accessible (not, you know, to "beat" gnome or openoffice, but because I feel that accessibility is something really important), I've met people trying to cooperate across the whole free software landscape on accessibility. And then you get this -- "we're winning, let's trample on everyone else!". How about some cooperation and making the world a better place? Especially in this area, where common protocols and infrastructure can make such a difference for the ordinary user.
I got here first, so you can't != I got here first, so you should be BETTER. Posted Nov 27, 2007 18:57 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Let's not mix "standards" and "ISO standards". Different organizations use different principles. ISO has clearly defined principle: One standard, one test - Accepted everywhere. Other organizations can be happy with 10 competing incompatible standards, ISO should not be. If second comer is better then first comer can be declared obsolete and new standard will be used instead of the old one. Think ISO/IEC 8613 vs ISO/IEC 26300. If you don't declare the standard obsolete - you must specify areas where one standard should be used and where another standard should be used. Otherwise standards are becoming just paper: anyone can invent yet-another-standard-it-likes and we'll lose the advantage of standardization totally. Situation with patents is quite different. You can not implement anything without patent license. You don't need any license to implement standard (or if you do it make it possible to have two competing standards: one great yet not available to all because of the patent licenses, another one not-so-great but free as in beer).
Electing the GNOME Foundation board Posted Nov 29, 2007 17:54 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] I took Behdad Esfahbod's comment to refer to squabbles within the Gnome community, or at worst to refer to squabbles with KDE. His comparison to patents is perfectly obvious to me.
Electing the GNOME Foundation board Posted Nov 27, 2007 19:36 UTC (Tue) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link] Hi Jon, The bylaws weren't changed to allow us to nominate a President from among the directors. That has always been available, but we haven't had the resignation from our long-term, symbolic, inactive, previous President (Miguel wouldn't disagree with this description of his "presidency"). What was described by the board as the "Chairman" (a position described in the bylaws) was for all intents and purposes operating as the President. There's a description of Miguel's participation in GNOME in my blog entry about the relationship between GNOME and Novell: http://perkypants.org/blog/2007/11/27/gnome-and-novell-th... The recent bylaws change was about allowing the board to specify the length of the next term, so that we could make sure new boards could have a GUADEC face-to-face meeting very early on in their term. I very rarely ask journalists to correct articles, particularly if there's a method of commenting, but your description of Miguel as president and the way in which the presidency was changed is somewhat sensational, suggesting that Miguel was participating or had influence over the board during his time as president. This is not the case. - Jeff
Picking the president Posted Nov 27, 2007 19:53 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Hey, Jeff:
I very rarely ask journalists to correct articles, particularly if there's a method of commenting, but your description of Miguel as president and the way in which the presidency was changed is somewhat sensational, suggesting that Miguel was participating or had influence over the board during his time as president. This is not the case. Don't be calling me a journalist, man, them's fighting words! :) Was there something wrong with my "description of Miguel as president"? He was president. I said he was inactive; I certainly never said that he had influence over the board. Where did that come from? I also tried to avoid sensationalism in an article which, with very little effort, I could have written in a very sensational manner. I really feel like I'm reading my words differently than you are. I guess I must have written something badly, somewhere. I did make a tweak to eliminate the incorrect statement that the by-laws were changed to make this happen. It makes me curious, though: how will the annual appointments work if the president refuses to resign?
Picking the president Posted Nov 27, 2007 20:00 UTC (Tue) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link] No, I was just reading your words differently to how you'd written them. It was this bit ... "Until very recently, the Foundation has operated under a single president: a certain Miguel de Icaza." ... that caught my attention (aside from the bylaws bit) because it implied that Miguel actually presided over the board, which he didn't. The combination of things sounded mildly sensational, but that's probably just because I'm trying to deal with gutter trash Linux reporting at the moment, and seeing heat where there is none. Sorry for using the 's' word. ;-) Thanks for fixing the bylaws bit. LWN is still the most informed and sensible reporting on Linux and FLOSS anywhere. :-)
One Standard Only Posted Nov 27, 2007 22:33 UTC (Tue) by rossendryv (guest, #34947) [Link] Belguim voted No for OOXML, following it their ONLY comment: 1) The Belgian mirror group finds it very unfortunate for ISO to support and develop different office document description standards (such as ISO/IEC 26300 and ECMA 376) offering a number of similar functionalities. The group furthermore has been informed that for some of these standards future extensions are being proposed, which should further increase the overlap between their functionalities. The group therefore urges the organizations promoting those separate standards to work together, to develop a common set of functionalities and to integrate them into a unique common base that every document description standard should understand. So when MS as a member of OASIS declined to partcipate in the development of ODF, even after repeated invitations, they broke the basic policy of ISO Global Relevency Policies. One can move onto interporatiblity, implementation, fair market rules and many other reasons why OOXML simply does not qualify as a ISO. OOXML does not have any specifications to ensure interoperability for ISO/IEC 26300 approved as the international standard to exchange office documents without any limitations. If DIS 29500 is approved without securing interoperability, it would give confusion to both markets and users. From the overall document contents, it is acutely clear that no effort has been made in OOXML to start from the existing ISO standard for the representation of documents in XML, that is ODF 1.0, ISO/IEC 26300:2006. We can see no reason for that deliberate departure and contend that unneeded differences are harmful. We therefore request that the OOXML proposal be rewritten starting from the existing standard. One solid reasons why OOXML does not meet ISO standards and is neglected to be mentioned is the effect on poor people with no access/limited to the internet and the abiltiy for Thirdworld countries to implement and be innovative with OOXML is "ISO Action Plan for Developing Nations" Simply put, they do not have access to convertors, it restricts their ability to communicate and forces them to upgrade. OOXML as an ISO standard will supress 10s of millions of people. The support for two standards in the case of OOXML vs ODF is in complete contradiction to every value the FOSS community stands for PERIOD. There can be cases in a new field with no competition, an even playing ground to have similar standards ISO. Please let me know if you want more reason why OOXML does not meet ISO policies and should not be? "Two Standards, One tested, Rejected by many Worldwide” makes it likely that something bad is going to happen!
Miguel de Icaza Posted Nov 29, 2007 19:19 UTC (Thu) by Gady (subscriber, #1141) [Link] It is not like lwn to post these insinuations about Miguel de Icaza and leaving the readers at that. A rift between someone as notable as Miguel de Icaza and Gnome is definitely worthy of print, even if it is on the negative side - that hasn't stopped lwn from publishing news in the past, and shouldn't now.
Miguel de Icaza Posted Nov 30, 2007 0:18 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] What "insinuations" were those? I simply said that Miguel's positions do not always align with those of many GNOME Foundation members. One need not look any farther than the Novell/Microsoft deal to see that.
Electing the GNOME Foundation board Posted Dec 6, 2007 12:05 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] I don't use Gnome so I'm not directly concerned but some declaration are worrying: <<Brian Cameron: I think it would add value to spend more on marketing and on evangelical community building opportunities. For example, Windows and MacOS have flashy "Welcome to the desktop" presentations. Perhaps it is time for the GNOME community to find ways to better advertise>> But do users like these Welcome to the desktop? Personally I hate these stupid branding: I already paid for the software, why should I be inflicted ads? - I disliked George Kraft comment about accessibility: given that Unix desktop is 50% GNOME, 50% KDE, a common solution would be very nice for users.. -About OOXML, Luis Villa remark is self-contradictory: "(A) it needs to suck as little as possible (B) it needs to not be an ISO standard.": if you help Microsoft make an OOXML suck as little as possible then you help making it an ISO standard. And standard fragmentation doesn't help users quite the contrary.
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