Minutes of the GNOME Advisory Board Meeting April 5 2001
- From: Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>
- To: foundation-announce gnome org
- Cc: foundation-list gnome org
- Subject: Minutes of the GNOME Advisory Board Meeting April 5 2001
- Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 11:51:23 -0400
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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