advisory board & announcement update

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Hi everyone,

I'm going to try and get out an updated charter over the next day or
so.  Obviously, none of the items discussed below are relevant if we're
not able to approach consensus on the charter of the foundation.

In the mean time, I wanted to give up an update on the advisory board.

As we have discussed at some length now, the purpose of the foundation's
advisory board is to provide a forum for companies and other
organizations to communicate with the Gnome community and among
themselves.  If we want to achieve Miguel's dream for GNOME of making it
the desktop of choice for the billions of people who have yet to touch a
computer, and reaching a user base in the tens of millions, we're going
to need to work closely with PC OEMs, platform providers, major ISVs and
others whose support will be critical in this effort.  The advisory
board provides a forum to do so without taking control of GNOME away
from the hackers who have made GNOME what it is today, since it will
have no decision-making authority whatsoever.

We had a discussion here several weeks ago about whether we were going
to limit involvement on the advisory board to companies who have already
made contributions to GNOME, or whether we were going to open it up to
all interested comers (subject to board approval, in order to avoid
abuses).  The result of that discussion is that we agreed to open the
advisory board up.

I wanted to share with you the list of companies and organizations who
have signed up to join the advisory board so far:
- The FSF (Nat is still working on that)
- The Debian Project (Nat's working on that one as well)
- Red Hat
- Helix Code
- Eazel
- Sun
- IBM
- Compaq
- VA Linux
- Henzai, an open source startup in France working on mobile
technologies
- Gnumatic, an open source startup working on a GPL'd personal finance
app
- one other major PC OEM who is requested anonimity until the
announcement

One of the reasons why I think it's so important to have some of these
companies on board is because we want to aggressively start promoting
GNOME as the open source desktop, not just for Linux but for a variety
of Unix and Unix-like operating systems.  We are now in a position where
we will be able to start doing so.  We are working with each of these
companies to help them get involved with GNOME, so that their
participation in this advisory board will be more than just symbolic.

We are also working on a press release.  Assuming that all goes well
this week and we are able to proceed as planned, we're going to announce
the creation of the GNOME Foundation next Tuesday at a press conference
at LWE.  We are planning on posting a draft of the press release on this
list later this week, but I did want to let you know that one of the
main 'messaging' points for the press conference and the press release
will be that leading technology companies are joining the GNOME movement
and that GNOME is poised to be the leading desktop environment for Linux
and other Unix-like operating systems.  So, for example, we are planning
to have representatives from each of the corporate advisory board
members on stage at the press conference, along with GNOME hackers (it's
going to be a crowded stage:).  Do let me know if you'll be at LWE and
would like to be part of this announcement.

We are trying to keep this information somewhat confidential until the
press release next Tuesday, so please do not disseminate this
information.

Bart