Fwd: Questions for the board election candidates

["gnomeuser gmail com" <gnomeuser gmail com>]

2012/5/22 Robert Nordan <rpvn robpvn net>:
> Hi all, I have a few questions for the candidates in the upcoming
> election to the board. They are obviously shaped by my interests, but I
> believe that other Foundation members may be interested in the answers
> as well.
>
> 1) "Open Source" or "Free Software"?
>
> This is about personal philosophy: Do you prefer the pragmatism of the
> Open Source Initiative or the political idealism of the Free Software
> Foundation? (Some of the candidates have already flagged a stance on
> this.)

I prefer Open Source, though I reject that it is a pragmatic approach,
I find that it focuses on what I care about in the context namely the
code and it's openness rather than pushing a social agenda. I greatly
dislike the FSF and their often counter productive extremist views and
actions, I do not believe it to be in GNOMEs best interest to continue
our association with them. Doing so would only serve to allow them to
further tarnish our image with little if any benefit to GNOME in
return.

> 2) Overhaul of GNOME's git infrastructure
>
> I personally believe that the way the GNOME git system is set up is a
> bit antiquated and doesn't use git to its full potential. It's fine for
> developers with commit access, but  contributors without have to create
> individual patches and attach them to bug trackers or convince the
> maintainers to look up their personal branch hosted somewhere else and
> merge in. In a time when GitHub is setting the standard for ease of use
> when it comes to forking, merging and development, GNOME is lagging
> behind.
>
> I have heard chatter among GNOME people about setting up a GNOME
> instance of Gitorious to gain that kind of functionality, but nothing
> has really happened. Do any of the candidates want to make a juicy
> campaign promise on this issue?

I don't consider myself qualified to make a promise on the future of
our git instance and I doubt the GNOME Board would even have the
authority to make a specific promise on what would be a technical
matter. However I do agree having used github that it is a fantastic
platform and I wish that GNOME was as capable. That being said one of
github's advantages is that everything is on there (much like everyone
is on twitter and facebook) and we will never be able to match that
part of the github experience but maybe we should at least consider
maintaining a mirror on github for visibility.

The developer experience is going to be vital for GNOME OS to
eventually be successful so I believe we will need to put in a lot of
work making it pleasant every step of the way from writing and
maintaining an application to deploying it on GNOME's everywhere.

> 3) GNOME and Ubuntu
>
> In the recent years there has been a public perception of a schism
> between GNOME and Ubuntu resulting in double work and wasted resources
> on both sides. Do you think that perception is unfounded or not, and how
> do you plan to handle it?

There absolutely is a schism, to deny that would be folly. I do hope
we can find common ground and I am currently talking to a few people
to see what we can do to bring the parties closer together. I suspect
Ubuntu in shipping a default desktop that isn't GNOME3 but is based on
common foundations will always have to carry a delta or have some
elements forked. Currently that delta is fairly large and some of
Ubuntu's technology bets have not been adopted (such as utouch),
getting that addressed to me is the highest priority. I am currently
investigating how far down we can get that delta for them without
having to compromise GNOME or Ubuntu's desktops.

Initially I hope we can get a few stakeholders from each camp together
at a hackfest to explore how much of Unity one could implement within
gnome-shell via extensions, the hope being that Ubuntu could
eventually move to either a fully on extension based Unity (seems
unlikely) or having only something akin to Linux Mint's Cinnamon fork
in terms of a delta to maintain from GNOME. That to me would be a big
step in the direction of reintegrating Ubuntu into the GNOME ecosystem
and I hope there is willingness to at least explore such a long term
solution. I believe it would be worthwhile for GNOME to fund such a
task fully or in part and I will happily commit to raising funds for
the initial hackfest as my number one priority after being elected.

> 4) Stance on GNOME forks
>
> Similarly, GNOME 3 has met with some opposing developments like Cinnamon
> and MATE. It is of course the right of dissatisfied users to do what
> they want and fork if they like, but should GNOME ignore them or try to
> find ways to work together with them?

I think GNOME is right to insist on strong design driven development,
I think GNOME3 is fantastic as a result of electing to have such
strong opinions. As not everyone agrees with the decisions that has
let to, I think it is only natural for others to explore other
options, our liberal open source licensing gives them the right and
the opportunity to do so. However I see the space to cooperate in the
two known cases as being very small, both Cinnamon and Mate are
attempts to recreate or slightly improve the desktop metaphor as we
knew it in GNOME2 whereas GNOME3 is a completely new approach. I would
think that the cases where cooperation makes sense it will happen
naturally, no schism seems to exist currently and I doubt one will
emerge any time soon.

- David Nielsen