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Questions and answers with Stormy Peters
Those who have followed the GNOME project over the last few years have seen
the wishlist item for a "business manager" or "executive director" for the
GNOME Foundation; the subject was especially likely to come up during
Foundation board elections. This position has remained unfilled for some
time, seemingly a result of uncertain funding and the difficulty of finding
the right person. These problems would appear to be in the past now; on
July 7, the GNOME Foundation announced
that this position would be filled by Stormy Peters, formerly of OpenLogic.
Stormy now has the challenge of helping an energetic and independent-minded development community build on its success and achieve its ambitious goals for the future. We asked her a few questions about how she thought that might go; here's what we got back. LWN: This is a new position, in that the GNOME Foundation has never had an executive director before. So people may be wondering what you'll actually be doing. How do you expect to be spending your time in this position?
Actually, the GNOME Foundation has had an executive director before
but not for the past few years. I will spend my time strengthening
relationships with the existing sponsors, working on finding new
industry partners and helping the Board of Directors and the
community execute some of their great ideas for GNOME. The GNOME
community's goal is to provide an easy to use, intuitive interface
for Linux and Unix as well as a powerful development platform.
A year from now, what do you hope your biggest accomplishments will be?
The GNOME community has a tremendous amount of passion and a real
dedication to making a development platform and a desktop that is
easy to use. I think showing the world that, getting the word out
and showing how it is changing the way people are able use their
computers and mobile devices is key. So to answer your question,
I'd like to see a stronger Foundation (more sponsors and members),
increase the amount of great ideas that get executed, and make
GNOME a household name. :)
Next year, it seems reasonably likely that there will be a combined GNOME/KDE developers conference in Europe. What are your thoughts on the current state of cooperation with KDE, and how do you think it could be improved?
I hope we have a combined GUADEC/Akademy next year. KDE and GNOME
have been working more closely together during the past year or so
and they have accomplished some good things like with dbus. I think
anytime you get great developers together, good things happen.
One high-profile GNOME goal was 10x10 - 10% of the desktop market by 2010. In mid-2008, it seems fairly clear that this goal will not be achieved. Do you think that the desktop remains a suitable target for free software, or should GNOME deemphasize the traditional desktop in favor of other goals?
I do think that a free and open source desktop is still a great
goal. While the number of free and open source desktops out there
might be small, it is growing tremendously. Just look at the number
of laptops that ship with GNU/Linux (from Dell, Asus and other) as
well as the number of mobile devices that are based on free and
open source software.
Though the GNOME Foundation is not intended to control the technical direction of the project, it clearly cannot be without influence there. Are there technical directions you would like to see the development community take, directions which would help to convince manufacturers to incorporate GNOME technologies and contribute to GNOME development?
I'll be working closely with the community and the board of
advisors to figure out how I can best help with technical
directions. One thing we'd like to see from our sponsors - through
our board of advisors - is more information on what end-users would
like to see in GNOME.
In the past you have spoken about how introducing money into free software development can have a demotivating effect on developers. Do you fear that sort of problem as GNOME becomes more commercially successful? How would you hope to avoid that kind of difficulty?
I don't think it's an issue in the short term as growing the GNOME
Foundation doesn't directly correspond to hiring lots of
developers. But that said, I think the key is maintaining the
intrinsic motivations that make GNOME contributors such a
passionate group of developers.
Thanks to Stormy for being kind enough to answer our questions in the middle of what must have been a highly busy time at GUADEC in Istanbul. (Log in to post comments)
Where to head Gnome development Posted Jul 10, 2008 9:58 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link] Gnome has a _huge_ opportunity in the embedded world, where companies do not want to use Qt, now under control of Nokia, a potential competitor. That and the fact tha Qt is either GPL or commercial license, whereas GTK+ and friends are LGPL. I really think the Gnome devs should focus on making easily embeddable/reusable libs and apps (which can only help making them faster on big desktops), and I am sure they'll be running on most EEEs and Netbooks of this world by 2010. They might actually make 10x10 in the end :-)
Where to head Gnome development Posted Jul 18, 2008 9:48 UTC (Fri) by bkor (guest, #27950) [Link] Please contact Stormy with the suggestions/wishes you have. At GUADEC the asked loads of devs about their wishes to get a good idea on where improvments can be made. I presume she'd love more input.
Questions and answers with Stormy Peters Posted Jul 10, 2008 14:10 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link] Must take skill, Corbet, dancing around so large an elephant, in such a small room.
Questions and answers with Stormy Peters Posted Jul 11, 2008 21:11 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] I guess I can see a few small elephants around here but no large ones... What are you referring to?
Questions and answers with Stormy Peters Posted Jul 12, 2008 2:52 UTC (Sat) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link] Microsoft. Specifically, the GNOME foundation's support of the OOXML process and Mono. I think these would absolutely be the "must ask" questions to a new executive director of that organization.
Questions and answers with Stormy Peters Posted Jul 18, 2008 9:22 UTC (Fri) by bkor (guest, #27950) [Link] Support for the OOXML process? Could you please take your trolling elsewhere? 'Large elephant in room' without being concrete is less than useful. Especially if you make things up like the 'support for the OOXML process'. That was discussed already. Regarding Mono, state your elephant please.
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