Minutes of the GNOME Advisory Board Meeting April 5 2001



	       Minutes of the GNOME Advisory Board Meeting
	       ===========================================
		      5 April 2001 Copenhagen

10 Am: start
------------

  Attendance:
  -----------
    Havoc Pennington (chairing) BOD Red Hat
    Daniel Veillard (minutes) BOD Red Hat
    Dan Mueth BOD Eazel
    Rob Gingell Sun
    Andrew Watson OMG
    Owen Taylor BOD Red Hat
    Dave Mason RH
    Jim Gettys BOD Compaq
    Stormy Peters HP
    Maciej Stachowiak BOD Eazel
    Bart Decrem BOD Eazel
    Yu Yu Mandrake
    Chuck Emprise (on the phone for the first half)
    Timothy Ney FSF (joined at the end of the afternoon) 

10:10 Am:
---------

   Havoc starts his presentation:
   
   GNOME 1.4 and 2.0:
   ------------------
         1.4                              2.0
    compatible platform           Coexistence with 1.4 libs
    Nautilus replacing gmc        I18N, switching to Unicode
    general UI                    Accessibility API (similar to Java)
    GNOME VFS                     Usability testing
    Bonobo                        Platform revision
    GNOME conf                    Interoperability

    Main problem in 1.4 is I18N support, and cannot be done in a binary
    compatible fashion.
    Having an 1.4.1 release is planned but not firmly, and a-priori only
    a bug fix.
    GTK-2.0 is nearly complete, the accessiility API is the last thing
    which need a lot of work.
    
    GNOME-2.0 main issue is planning and splitting the job, making sure
    nothing will be forgotten. The board was 

    Participants:
    -------------
      - Volunteers: 350 members on the foundation list
      - Companies: a number of the core developpers have been hired
        + Eazel: Nautilus + services
	+ Red Hat: Gtk, Orbit, XML, (Mozilla)
	+ Sun: Accessibility, UI testing, Translations, QA
	+ Ximian: Evolution, Bonobo, (Ximian Setup tools ?)
	+ others smaller ones

    Userbase:
    ---------
      - estimate 1.5 million over a 5 million exiting Unix users
      - most of them are technical users still
        => growing will requires breaking on other market, basically
	   - technical users (NT, CDE)
	   - office market
	   - desktop appliance

     Developer & platform:
     ---------------------
      - GNOME platform
      - Thousand open source applications
      - In-house/kiosk/point of sale

      Developers ratios:
        - 7 M VB 
	- 3 M Java
	- Perl/Python
	- 300 K Unix

     Governance:
     -----------
       - we are incorporated
       - press policy
       - trademarks

Getting feedback:
=================

   DV: change in enterprize computing, we have to look at new service
       mechanism and how they integrate with the desktop

   Dan:
   - organizational structure, maintenance

   Rob Sun:
     - web services
     - integrattion
     - appliance scope of GNOME ? Desktop computer or further ?
     - office and component model

   Andrew :
     - slightly different view point
     - looking at way to contribute
     - standardize on the components (ISO ?) or define services

   Owen:
     - How GNOME uses Corba, cleaning up the component model

   Dave Mason:
     - definition of communication, how contribution become part
       of GNOME, companies practice
     - how do we make the leadership of the foundation more effective
   
   Jim Getty:
     - interoperability at all levels
     - computing will shift over more distributed and less desktop model
     - don't fight the battle of the past, rebuilding W95 is not the way
       to succeed

   Stormy:
     - what GNOME is ? What's the roadmap and target.

   Maciej:
     - maintainership of different modules, problems
       the associate power of maintainership make people reticent to
       share it.
   
   Mandrake:
     - how can we help more ?
     - Interop between KDE and GNOME ?
     - recruit more GNOME hackers.

   Havoc:
     - core GNOME leadership communicate better, core questions need answers

   Bart:
     - same problem we need a 

Lunch:

1:15 pm What is GNOME:
----------------------
   Havoc: we need to do a good job on our existing customer i.e. the desktop
          this involves fixing 
	  future: we should try to be one element of an overall strategy
	          we need to be good at interoperability with other
		  (open sources) technologies (Java/python/...)
          short term expand user base, look at appliances
   DV: need to integrate with Windows services being deployed through SOAP/.NET
   JG: we nee to following to grow
   Sperry: we need to interoperate to not regress
   Rob: keep making desktop
        isolated with CDE
	gNOMe  the network is not really there (need to change JG)
	getting further than the standard Unix desktop
   Yu Yu: user point of view, usability, help them get their work done
   Maciej: user testing on technical users too
   Sperry: we will have non programmer users transitionning from CDE to GNOME
   JG: the existing user base is already less technical person
   Sperry: -> HP existing usability data can possibly be reused for GNOME
   Dave: RH is more server market now, focus is probably moving forward
         exposing services to the users.
   Havoc: Free software avoids putting extra obstacles in the use of software


    1/ Do a good job of a Unix stable usable desktop
    2/ Pervasive computing, i.e. extend to other appliances
    3/ frontal opposition to Windows won't work

2:00 Extensibility of GNOME Platform:
-------------------------------------

    - application framework
      Havoc show Gtk/Qt/Python/Perl/Java devel box, adding one more
      sounds not really interesting with yet another:
      + Object
      + IDE
      + Lang binding
      + String implementation
      + XML parsers
    - Protocol are ways to glue and stop duplicating
    - Need a common library
    - Rob: suggest to stay open w.r.t. the access protocols
    - interoperability
      + KDE
      + Kylix
      + Java
    - trying to get standards for the desktop
      + share documentation standards and tools
      + common settings, and key binding
      + integrating the event loops
      + application embedding
      => users don't care if it is a GNOME or KDE app they want it to behave
         in predictable ways
    - enforcing the standards
      + need a GNOME UI guideline

    We believe that for GNOME to be successful, it needs to interoperate
  with other computing environments and services platforms. Thus we are
  in favor of increased collabration with KDE to insure end users will be
  able to seamlesly mix KDE and GNOME applications.

3:15 The GNOME Brand:
---------------------

   - getting different vendors to ship the same thing
   - getting logo on press, books, etc ...
   - trademark enforcement could be a burden
   - Reference API or ABI
   - publish as the fundation a set of APIs, protocols and say
     "that's GNOME compatibility is"
   
3:30 Practicalities:
--------------------

   - Fonts:
     We must solve this problem, JG has a partial solution there is 
     multiple possibilities.

     ACTION: JG take the action of sending a mail to the Board 

   - CDE Transition:
     need tool to transition user configuration

     ACTION: Rob send Stormy 

Timothy Ney from the FSF joins at this point.

   - Europe/Asia:
     Starting local Foundations
     Collabrate with Linux User Groups
     Followup with companies for the area, for example asking them to
       propagate back feedback and patches
     
     GNOME 2 will help, it will be possible to support the charsets
             without horrible hacks

   - Developer outreach:
     Should we put a part of our comm team to reach new developpers
     Seems we need to provide better services to existing developpers
     Mostly a organization effort:
     - have beautiful documentation
       => need better gtk-doc docs
     - prepared standard talks
     - directory of people willing to speak and preferred opportunities
     - a bit more proactive
     - need to fix the web site

   - Office suite:
     Expose of the problems in the original announcement
     Rob: we don't plan to push UNO as the replacement for the
          document object model
     We need one as part of the application pool.
     Yu: changing suite is a burden for the users
     We probably don't need to bless any suite, and what will take
     the more momentum (integration) will be the defacto
     
   - Bug report
     Companies's customer support will forward bugs and associated
     information but will probably be anonymized
     Provide a forwarder within the companies in case of need of further
     information
     Bugzilla is a very valuable tool from current experience
     Tinderbox are really useful too

4:30 Break:
-----------

4:45 Advisory Board Logistic:
-----------------------------

   Role is obviously to advise the Director Board, but defining more
   practically the logistic.

   - at least twice a year in person
   - an agenda with the points where advices are needed
   - once a month raise questions to forward
   - forward Board minutes to advisory-board list

     ACTION: DV will forward the Board minutes 

   - getting dedicated liaison and liaison reports @ board management
   - a more up-to-date web page
   - make sure all companies have an alternate

   ACTION: Bart own the batch of issues and will have to check they are
           raised during the Board meeting

   Mandrake have few people dedicated to Gnome, they will look at helping
   maintaining gnome.org web site

   ACTION: DV to act as liaison with Mandrake

   OMG, will check that ORBit implementors didn't found bugs in their
   specification, will pass the information on how to report bugs. 

   ACTION: Owen will act as liaison with OMG

   HP main concern is to make sure people within HP have the informations
   and the right contacts.

   ACTION: Maciej will act as liaison with HP


   The foundation list is a forum where the various companies can
   talk, also can be used to solve the conflict of interest between
   the board members and the companies they work for if this occurs.

   Next meeting will be Oakland CA early November 2001 next to the OLS.

   ACTION: Havoc to put this in the next Board agenda.

5:15 Governance Issues:
-----------------------

   - How do we attend to deal with hard issues like package maintenance or
     web site
     + avoid getting those done by email
   - Make sure there is an appeal process, people need to be able to be
     heard if they disagree and possibly appeal formally.
   
   ACTION: Bart to check with Andrew on voting procedures

   - How to deal with disfunctionnalities ? Miguel missing is such
     a problem. We believe it's due to being excessively busy but
     we are afraid it could be due to other reasons.

   ACTION: Havoc organizing a Board meeting during Guadec2

  Timothy Ney: Copyright FSF on code need a actual Copyright assignment.
  Jim Gettys: Copyright on a file should be accurate, splitting the
              Copyright assigments is also a good idea


5:50 Done:
----------

     
ISSUES Collected in the morning and discussed in the afternoon:
===============================================================
  1/ getting developpers and communicate in non ISO-Latin countries
  2/ Regionnal Foundations
  3/ GNOME 2.0 webring : many different proposals
  4/ Interop with KDE
  5/ transition, should we backport some of the nice looking stuff
     like antialiasing
  6/ Hinted true type fonts, generic X11 problem, JG 150,000$ 
  7/ what is the scope, JG raised timezone support, to what extend should
     we extend the portability layer ?
  8/ How do we integrate services, should this be part of GNOME
  9/ Browser integration, more generally how we integrate other projects.
  10/ Office suite issue, 'official' one ?
  11/ how far closed development can end-up within the GNOME, development
      practices, communication. CVS.
  12/ how do we keep control over what is GNOME, continuity over
      particular people or companies.
  13/ problem integrating other platform or programming models like
      Java, Python (Kylix), component integration, sharing settings.
  14/ uniformity accross vendors, consistency of the platform.
  15/ standardization and certification
  16/ CDE to GNOME transition tools
  17/ Advisory board operation


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




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