Minutes of the Advisory Board meeting June 19 2003

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

     Minutes of the Advisory Board meeting June 19 2003
     ==================================================

  Full day face to face advisory board meeting held in Dublin after
the GUADEC conference.

Presents:
=========

   Nat Friedman (chair) (Ximian)
   Daniel Veillard (minutes)
   Jeff Waugh
   James Henstridge
   Glynn Foster
   Luis Villa
   Tim Ney (director)
   Jody Goldberg
   Jim Gettys
   Jonathan Blandford
   Bill Haneman (arrived 9:55)

   Havoc Pennigton (Red Hat)
   Bradley Kuhn (FSF)
   Stormy Peters (HP)
   Hans Muller (Sun)
   Frederic Crozat (MandrakeSoft)
   Danese Cooper (Sun)
   Bharat Tewari (Wipro)

Regrets:
========
   Miguel de Icaza
   Leslie Proctors

Meeting:
========

  Starting at 9:30, Nat exposes briefly the goals and structure of the
foundation and of the advisory board. He gives a description of the 5
comitees created by the board and an overview of the progress since
the last advisory board last year in Spain. 

  Round of presentations of the people present.

Jeff presents "Gnome Technology and community Update", the slides are
available online at:
    http://nat.org/gu4dec-ab-jeff-slides
    - Gnome 2.0 release: stable release, especially 2.0.3, this
      is the software platform.
    - Human Interface Guidelines 1.0: provides all the user
      interfaces guidelines for all developers
    - Development cultural changes: a lot of review before changes
      are commited to the code, switched to time based release,
      API/ABI guarantees for the 2.x series.
    - Gnome 2.2: Feb 2003, better UI guideline, better font
      infrastructure, better look and more localization.
    - Gnome 2.4: is about to hit feature feeze
    - Future challenges: how to manage evolution when the core is
      stable, what to focus on once the core is stable and complete

=> discussion
Printing is one of the areas which need work.
Another area of concern is to make sure we can integrate work done
from development groups which may work on large deployment. How to
catch up with all the various developments happening independently ?

Stormy Peters did a presentation about her work on the Open Source
Program Office at HP, policy, review for releases, and the OSS portal.
The Foundation provides:
   - a bridge between community and the users
   - credibility
   - product management
   - communication, especially roadmap
which are the main values from a corporate perspective.
Stormy devoted a significant portion of her presentation to the role
of the advisory board. She says that the advisory board could contribute
more to the GNOME project and could be more helpful to the foundation.
She urged us to make better use of the advisory board, and of her
resources in particular.

=> discussion
Articulating the value resulting from conference like GUADEC helps
getting support from corporations. The point is to show the companies
what is at stake, and the scope of the meetings.

Bradley Kuhn presented the FSF point of view, they want GNOME to be
as successful as possible, and that good communication helped improving
the relationship. FSF would like to offer resources especially on the
legal area where the foundation can offer key expertise. He explained
how they build their fundraising program at the FSF. He also suggested
that the FSF may be able to provide resources to help get the new web
site done. The talk was very well received.

=> discussion
The following discussion focused on fundraising, especially finding
the right point of contact within the organisations, and understanding
the limitation and restriction of some potential funders.

Havoc Pennington presented quickly Red Hat desktop history and involvement
in the GNOME development and gave hints about Red Hat strategy for 
future desktop work.

=> discussion
Discussion focused on exchange and synergy between various large projects.

Hans Muller started by emphasizing that GUADEC technical and personal
face to face focus was really important. He has replaced Rob Gingell
on the advisory board. He explained the various projects where Sun
contribute to the work at the desktop level including making sure Java
is part of the Desktop and integrate properly with GNOME desktop and 
applications. Then he listed a number of issues he worried about, including
compatibilities, stabilities of APIs, UI consistency (especially
for printing and file system accesses) and long term roadmap visibility.

=> discussion
Jim Gettys suggested that companies could help to write good technical
documentation for our APIs, which would help us to provide a stable,
viable platform for ISVs.

Lunch break from 1p.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Bharat Tewari presented Wipro and Open Source movement in India.
More than 400 bugs fixes were produced when porting 2.0 on Solaris
and are integrated back. Provided and fixed IPv6. They have developers
now co-maintainers of a few modules.

=> discussion
Seems the main point missing at the moment is localization, Indi is 
supported but it's only one of the many indian languages.

Bill Haneman asked about level of interest in accessibility, HP has
an accessibility group and one person working on accessibility work
at the LSB. This becomes a requirement to sell to governments and as
a result this drives the interest of the industry.

Nat Friedman presented Linux adoption evolution, both on the server and 
on the desktop. On the desktop Linux is mostly replacing expensive
technical and development workstations at the moment but deployment on
other desktop situation is growing. Barriers to deployment are application
availability, interoperability, or support cost (due to usability
and inconsistency issues). He did a quick overview of Ximian contributions
to Open Source (evolution, ximian desktop, open office, Mono, printing).
We need to better promote of GNOME, then transplant the project strength
to other OSS projects, and provide better documentation.

Collecting issues:
==================

We then collected issues, most of them were raised during the previous
discussions:
- Printing is an issue which spans a lot of projects
- Software freedom issue taken as fundamental in the decision process
- Backward compatibility and stability
- Long-term roadmap for the GNOME project
- UI consistency
- Driving general linux client community Mozilla/X11
- Value proposition
- Marketing/brand awareness
   + geographically
   + new markets (APAC, ...)
- Finances
- New roadmap needs
- Increase the number of contributors
- Contributors
- Resources for non-contributors
   + non-$ contributions
- Events
- Advisory Board interaction
   + mailing list
   + summit
   + quaterly call
   + early date-setting
   + piggy-backing on events

  There were clearly too much to discuss for the time left so we
selected the main topic:

Advisory Board interaction:
===========================
   The current exchanges are so far limited to:
     - yearly face to face meetings
     - the minutes of the Board meetings being posted on the advisory
       mailing-list
It was generally admitted it was not sufficient especially considering the
amount of issues we had to discuss. So we decided to increase the face-to-face
meetings and schedule advisory board conferences every two months. The
first item which need to be addressed is a roadmap for the GNOME project,
past 2.4 and for the foreseeable future. 

The next meeting will a phone teleconference expected within 2 months. A
subgroup will work on making a first draft of the roadmap to discuss then.

The meeting was adjourned 4:00 p.m.

Actions:
========

  ACTION: Tim to check with Bradley Kuhn on the mechanism they use for
          credit card donation processing.
  ACTION: Daniel to update Sun's membership for the Advisory Board list.
  ACTION: Nat to schedule a AB phone call targeting the roadmap issue.
  ACTION: Jeff, Havoc and Bradley to work on a preliminary roadmap

Daniel

-- 
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