Minutes of the GNOME Advisory Board Meeting 3 April 2002

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

     Minutes of the GNOME Advisory Board Meeting 3 April 2002
     ========================================================


Presents:
---------
    Mandrakesoft
       Yu Yu
       Frederic Crozat

    HP
       Don Wierbilis
       Jeff Stevenson

    Red Flag
       Zhao "Chris" Xiao Liang
    
    Compaq
       Jim Gettys
       Keith Packard (XFree86)

    Ximian
       Nat 
       Miguel

    Red Hat
       Havoc (chairing)
       Daniel (minutes)
       Jonathan (from 12:00)
       
    Tim Ney
    James
    George
    Telsa
    Jody  (Ximian)
    Federico (Ximian)

Presentation of Gnome: Havoc 9:30
----------------------

     Challenges for industrial-strength UNIX/Linux desktop
       - Internationalization (pango, unicode, fonts and translation)
       - Usability (simplification, consistency)
       - Accessability (hook, API and tools)
       - Manageability (centralized defaults)
       - Reliability

     Area where help would be appreciated:
       - web site and system administration
       - employing more core developers
       - usability testing
       - fonts
       - printing issues
       - developer meetings

     Getting more process in place (bug tracking, test suites, releases)

     Getting close to release GNOME2

HP-UX Desktop Requirements: Don Wierbilis 9:50
---------------------------

     Usages:
        - Graphic desktop
	- Custom desktop
	- Server desktop
     The technical staff is starting to be able to work from a linux/Unix
     workstation and integrate with the corporate environment

     Desktop requirements:
        - stable and visible roadmap
	- reliable
	- extensive localization
	- support
	- developer toolkit
	- accessibility

     CDE and Motif migration and basic compatibility like cut and paste
     are needed for deployment with legacy apps.

Mandrakesoft user base : Frederic Crozat 11:00
------------------------

     Pool: main strength
       - ease of use 47%
       - performances 22%
       - price 15%
     Gnome vs. KDE:
       - Licence differences
       - Gnome lacks coherency

Ximian and GNOME: Nat 11:30
-----------------

     Open-source based workgroup solution for corporation
     Currently user base is engineer driven and mostly decentralized
     The trend is to move toward more corporate and centalized deployment
       the main driver toward adoption is the price
     Key areas:
        - usability
	- interoperability
	- stable platform for ISV
	- accessibility
	- performances
     We know where the big issues are, the main problem is to get
     the work down, it gets down to a resource problem.

Round around the table gathering points of discussions:
-------------------------------------------------------

	- Tactical work
	- Legal:
	   + copyright assignment
	   + GPL & licence policy
	   + Trademark usage rules
	   + Written participation agreements
	   + Patent policy
	- Membership structure
	- FSF relationship
	- Software part of GNOME requirements
	- Relation to system & scope of GNOME
        - Library development process
	- Roadmap requests
	- Deployment
	- Interproject cooperation
	- GUADEC4


Tactical work:
--------------
    Getting sysadmin resources possibly on staff would help
    But only administrative staff.
    Trying to get extra funding:
       - raising fees ? what would be the selling point ? We need to
         make a business presentation with the list
       - getting individual contributions: paypal and sponsoring
       - making sure we get Tax Exemption Status
       - trying to chase Government grants and Non Profit organization and
         Universities, promoting our Public Benefit mission
       - developing countries
       - tutorial at GUADEC and other venues
       - raise money from the Trademark and make sure we can 
         define what is required to put the logo on a product

    ACTION: Tim will work on organizing the funding search

    "The penguins need to be fed too"
    Tie schedule and actual benefits and 
    
    - execution/process problems
    - web site
    - communication policy and schedule
    - in person meetings
    - sysadmin
    - money
    - marketing
    
Foundation:
-----------

Lunch: 1:30
------

Afternoon discussion: 3:30
---------------------
     Copyright assignment:
        - having a Copyright and assignment policy would make sense
	- most of our developer base does not understand the semantic
	  and effects of Copyright ownership and assignment
	- assignment cannot be done without doing the proper paper work
	  and that would be a large task
	- having Copyright actually dispersed can protect us in the
	  long term
   A sub-committee of board will discuss the issue with the attorney

     ACTION: Jim will make sure this work is started at the Board level.

   Asia:
        - Gnome needs to stabilize
	- getting local developers to learn about GNOME
	- software sold in China need to follow governement standards
	- freely redistributable chinese/asian fonts are not available
   
   Fonts:
        - out of the box having nice fonts for most languages
	- metric compatibility with Windows is not a top priority

   Roadmap requirement:
        - user preference API is now okay for client side, but the
	  server / back-end is not okay yet, this is on the roadmap for
	  post 2.0, but should not affect the ABI
	- API / ABI , 2.0.1 should have no API change, 2.2 may have 
	  API extensions. There is a clear request that a 2.0 application
	  would run unmdified on 3.0 .

   Office:
        - help the Open Office and or integrate with them:
        - not easy, we can build bridges at the component level
	- trying to reuse the same packaging format
	- we need a Gnome Office with unified release and a roadmap
	- clear release team Gnome Platform/Gnome Desktop/Gnome Office
	
Ajourned 5:00



-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/