Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting Mar 12 2002

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

	  Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting Mar 12 2002
	  ==============================================


Presents:
=========

    Nat Friedman (chair)
    Havoc Pennington
    Telsa Gwynne
    George Lebl
    Federico Mena
    Daniel Veillard (minutes)
    James Henstridge
    Miguel de Icaza
    Jonathan Blandford
    Tim Ney 
    Jim Gettys
    Jody Goldberg 

Decisions:
==========

  - 3 decision were taken on the bylaws, another one based on the revision
    process for the bylaws should still be discussed. People should comment
    on them in the foundation list.
  - an Annual Meeting of the GNOME Foundation members will be held during
    GUADEC

Actions done:
=============

  ACTION: Havoc to bounce draft by-laws to foundation-list so everyone can
          see them.
        => Done

  ACTION: Nat to talk to Havoc to get a discussion about rules
          w.r.t. backward compatibility rules in the 2.x time.
	=> discussed today

Actions
=======

  ACTION: Tim, John and Havoc to get a draft statement on the relation
          with the Free Software Foundation and license policy.
	=> Still pending.

  ACTION: Jim to restart the font discussions with various parties
	=> Jim is pursusing the issue with Keith Packard and related parties.
           Ongoing

  ACTION: Nat and Jonathan talk to gnome-sysadmin about adding ssh
          tunneling for GNOME CVS access
	=> This has been postponed until after GNOME 2.

  ACTION: Tim and Miguel check for logistic and policy of funding
          people travels and accomodations.
	=> Ongoing
	
  ACTION: Jody and Leslie to find possble presentators from KDE,
          StarOffice and CUPS.
	=> Sander proposed someone for OO, looking for KDE people and
           no answer from CUPS people
           Ongoing

New Actions:
============

  ACTION: Havoc, Jody, Nat volunteer for working on producing a first
       draft of ABI rules for GNOME-2 releases, get involvment from
       someone at Sun, and make sure the draft get some review.


Discussion:
===========

 - approve last meeting minutes:
   http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2002-March/msg00000.html

 - GNOME's ABI contract with the world. (Nat)
    Premise: With the release GNOME 2, we're going to have to take a
    different approach to the way we handle new development platform
    revisions in the future.
 
    Since this is relatively new, we should try to build a group:
      - to consider which ABI compatibility rules are required.
      - a mechanism and a body to check that those rules are enforced.

    We should have a proposal ready by GUADEC and 
    => Havoc, Jody, Nat volunteer for working on this trying to get
       someone from Sun.

    That proposal will need to be circulated possibly in other groups
    (XFree86 , KDE, ...).

 - Foundation bylaws.

    Discussion of the current bylaws.
    We got replies from the attorneys on a couple of points raised.
     - too many director working for a company
     - people working for multiple companies
     => decision: the board perfer to keep the current state of this
        part as-is.

     - Article 9 section 1:
     => decision: Committee members may include an agent of the board.
        The directors need to be able to delegate. Actually commitees
	committees could also have no board members, there is no reason
	to force that.

     - special meeting:
     => decision: change it to require 10% of members and not 10 members

     - change of bylaws:
       we discussed this a bit here are the initial state of discussion:
     => Currently the directors are the ones allowed to change the bylaws,
        after a comment period if nobody ask for a vote, otherwise if 5%
        of the membership objects, then a referendum would be needed.
      
 - Meeting of members at GUADEC.

    Our not-yet-ratified bylaws require an annual meeting of the
    members of the GNOME Foundation. Last year the "update on GNOME
    Foundation took that role".
    Typically it will be a report back from the board, around 30mn
    long during lunch.
    

Daniel

-- 
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/