Re: Technical decisions?

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

I agree.

Another thing we need to figure out is how to structure corporate
involvement.  Say we want Oracle and Informix to be involved with the
Gnome foundation because we want to get major industry players 'on
board', but we don't want our board taken over by their reps, but we do
want some money from them, then how do we structure that?

Would we set aside some seats on the board of directors for reps from
those types of big companies, or would we have an industry advisory
board, or what?

Bart

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The X Consortium, and IETF, are both organizations that make technical
> decisions.
>
> I think GNOME _already_ makes technical decisions by the "rough
> consensus and working code" technique, right? And so far, I don't
> think the steering committee has even discussed any technical issues,
> except when they relate to something else, like the release schedule.
> I'm not sure technical decisions are a big problem that needs solving,
> we seem to be OK at it as is.
>
> I'm pretty sure the GNOME Foundation isn't supposed to be a technical
> decision-making body. The project maintainers are supposed to do that.
>
> So what we're really talking about is having an effective organization
> to:
>
>  - take donations, and use them for buying disk space and such
>  - give the community (or some representative persons from it, by
>    necessity) a place to talk to companies that aren't ready to go
>    public
>  - give companies a forum to talk to each other, free from antitrust
>    regulations
>  - encourage communication within the community, by having
>    conference calls, open meetings at shows, and that type of thing
>  - do some promotion/marketing/advocacy
>
> Probably this makes a big difference in what kind of organization is
> appropriate. Maybe some of these goals should remain in the scope of
> the informal "rough consensus" mechanisms we already have. Others
> certainly _require_ a closed group of individuals (the group that
> talks to companies, in particular).
>
> In any case, most decisions the organization will make are likely to
> be of the "should we buy a hard disk" variety, not the "is gnome-core
> an important package" variety.
>
> Just a thought. We can certainly separate these two realms of
> decision-making in our organization.
>
> Havoc
>
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