Running for the Gnome Foundation Board.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello everyone,

    I would like to run for the Gnome Foundation Board of Directors.
I submit my application for the consideration of the elections
committee and the Foundations' membership:

Name: 			Miguel de Icaza
E-Mail: 		miguel ximian com
Corporate Affiliation: 	Ximian, Inc.

* Summary of my application for 

	Have been an active contributor to the free software movement
	since 1992.

	Started the GNOME project when various freedom issues arised
	that would threaten the future of a fully free system.  

	I am one of the founders of Ximian, one of the GNOME
	companies, where we employ around 40 GNOME hackers that
	develop free software. 

	Have been actively involved for the past year in the
	development of Mono and the Gtk bindings for C# to simplify
	the development of applications for Gnome, as well as enabling
	developers from Windows to migrate to free systems more
	easily.

	I would like to continue serving on the Board of the GNOME
	Foundation to promote the development, deployment and
	expansion of the project to suit the needs of Unix users
	today.

* My involvement with GNOME and Free Software

	I started the GNOME project in 1997, you can read a detailed
	account of the story of the project from my perspective in
	this web page:

	http://primates.helixcode.com/~miguel/gnome-history.html

	This history is now outdated.

	I have worked in many areas in GNOME: from the foundation
	libraries, to the applications to the early consistency work,
	to the early documentation infrastructure.  I am one of the
	main contributors to the gnome-libs, the bonobo component
	architecture, and the Gnumeric spreadsheet;  And I have
	contributed code in pretty much every one of the core modules
	that make up GNOME. 
	
	When the project was started I did it all on my spare time,
	two years ago me and Nat (another GNOME hacker) started a
	company that would build services around the GNOME platform
	and would improve the GNOME platform.

	I am glad to report that Ximian has succeeded in making
	GNOME easier to install and more wildely available than it was
	before.

	Currently I serve on the board of directors of the Free
	Software Foundation.

	Before being involved with GNOME, I was a contributor to GNU
	and the Linux kernel.

* Mono

	Although I am not active in the day to day development of
	GNOME software per se, I have been working with a small team
	at Ximian and various external contributors on an
	implementation of a C# compiler, a runtime, and a set of
	class libraries including the bindings to Gtk and Gnome
	(called Gtk#).  This project is called Mono.

	Mono is enabling developers to write desktop applications
	faster and leverage the existing GNOME platform as well as
	bringing a new set of development tools to our community.

	Mono not only takes advantage of the Gnome platform, but I see
	it as a mechanism for lowering the barrier of adoption of
	free software for solving vertical markets problems.  We hope
	to win the enterprise markets, and use that to spearhead the
	consumer market in the longer term. 

* My work as a mediator

	A lot of my time has gone into negotiating various interests
	between the various contributors and people who have raised
	issues regarding GNOME, or that are interested in developing
	applications with GNOME.

	I was the first one to suggest Qt to GPL their library back in
	1997 as a solution for their business and the KDE libraries.

	I was among the first ones (or the first one?) to suggest
	Netscape to dual license Mozilla, and spent countless hours
	writing mail to various people to get Mozilla dual licensed
	under the NPL/GPL over time.

	I have spent a lot of time talking to lawyers for various
	companies to get them to license their software under sensible
	terms and hopefully under the LGPL/GPL (OpenOffice being one
	of them). 

	I have tried to find a common ground for contributors that
	have expressed their interested in donating code to GNOME and
	keep their copyrights to allow them to make a profit out of
	their work using dual licensing (libart and xpdf). 

	Together with Nat Friedman, we made the call for the creation
	of the Steering Committe for driving the direction of GNOME
	2.0

	Together with Bart and John, pushed for the creation of the
	GNOME Foundation that will provide a ground for GNOME to
	administer its resources, and a good ground for companies to
	approach the free software movement and contribute to GNOME
	and GNOME related techologies.

* Promotion of GNOME and Free Software.

	Since the early days of the project I have spent a lot of my
	time promoting GNOME in both conferences and magazines.  I
	have delivered about seventy (90) conferences and talks on
	GNOME, GNOME technologies and GNOME related topics.

	I have written a variety of articles on GNOME and its
	foundation for different magazines and reports.

	I have got hardware for GNOME developers when they were in
	need of it; I have negotiated conferences to pay for people to
	attend their conferences; I have tried to get resources and
	sometimes jobs to GNOME hackers that needed them.  I have paid
	out of my own pocket for hardware and travel expenses for
	hackers. 

	I raised most of the funds that were used to bring people to
	the GUADEC conference in Paris.   I was involved in helping
	organize the thirs GUADEC conference in Sevilla, and I
	marginally helped Nat with his Gnome Boston Summit this year. 

	I have tried to get various representatives in various
	countries to adopt free software technologies.  This past year
	in particular has been a very busy year: educating government
	officials in various countries as well as users in communities
	which have historically being segregated from the more
	cohesive North American/European free software communities. 

	In particular I did a Gnome 2.x promotional tour in South
	America, you can read my online report (and witness that I am
	a better at generating C/C# output than HTML) here:

		http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/sur.html

	Pretty much every one of my talks stresses out the importance
	of free software.

* My role in the foundation

	Have a representative role of the GNOME foundation to other
	organizations to work together with them.  Arranging to work
	together towards implementing standards, components, and
	trying to assemble in-house GNOME teams at software and
	hardware companies. 

	Being a GNOME old timer and one of its founder, I still am
	very passionate about the project as I was when we first
	started.  When we started we were hoping to have a quick
	victory over the proprietary desktop, but it has been more
	difficult than expected, the work must continue. 

	The GNOME project has scaled very well, and many teams have
	been created to handle the various tasks of managing the
	project, so my day-to-day help is not as useful in the
	particular teams, but I want to see GNOME succeed. 

	I would continue to do various things to push GNOME forward
	and to make it the standard user environment for free systems
	and for Unix systems. 

	I would continue to try to find the best fit for the various
	interests of the GNOME contributors, both the individual
	hackers which are the core and the spirit of GNOME, and the
	contributions made by companies. 

	Getting and helping organizations, governments and companies
	to adopt GNOME and free software.

	Help in the process of establishing good partnerships and
	alliances with companies to improve GNOME, and help them
	to become free software companies in the long term.

	To promote the creation of GNOME training and teaching tracks
	at the various conferences.

	And all in all, to continue doing the same work I have been
	doing for free software and GNOME in the future, with the
	backup of the Foundation.

Best wishes,
Miguel