Can we improve things?

[Damien Sandras <dsandras seconix com>]

Hello,

As a long time contributor to the GNOME project, I will take the freedom
to directly mail the foundation about the current problems I experience
in the GNOME community.

You probably know that I started contributing to GNOME in my spare time
back in 2000. I have dedicated countless hours to my project,
GnomeMeeting, now known as Ekiga. It means 7 years of development,
exclusively done during evenings, nights and week-ends. Ekiga was
the first videoconferencing application available for the Linux desktop,
and it is nowadays still one of the best Open Source SIP softphones.

I have always believed in GNOME and in its community, that is the only
way that can motivate you coding that much and that long.

However, I am more and more disappointed by the way some people
*control* that community, even if they never contributed anything back
to it.

When I think to Matthias, I am getting mad. 
Matthias requested an SVN account several months ago, and never got one.
When he went on IRC to ask for the account activation, people replied to
him that he had to make a new request and wait. One month later, the
account is not active yet. Matthias has been contributing thousands of
lines of code to Ekiga since several months, and I still need to commit
his patches myself. This is inadmissible.

When I think to Julien, I am also getting mad.
He has been contributing to Ekiga for 5 years. He recently created a
blog and asked to Jeff to be added on planet.gnome.org. He was first
ignored, then Jeff told him that he had to post often to be added. 
One day later, another guy was added to planet.gnome.org with 3 posts
having been done in a 6 months period. That is what I call dictatorship
and boycott of my project.

This kind of behavior makes me more and more disappointed about the way
things are being handled in GNOME and I am about to move my whole stuff
to sourceforge.net and go on my own way.

By the way, I do not want this thread to degenerate into a flamewar,
that is the reason why I will not answer any mail related to the thread
I created. I do not want either to offend the 99% of people who are
doing a great job, I sincerely thank them for their work (you know who
you are).

I just wanted to express my opinion, in the hope that something can be
done to improve the situation.
-- 
 _     Damien Sandras
(o-      
//\    Ekiga Softphone : http://www.ekiga.org/
v_/_   NOVACOM         : http://www.novacom.be/
       FOSDEM          : http://www.fosdem.org/
       SIP Phone       : sip:dsandras ekiga net