Re: Questions To Answer

[jg pa dec com (Jim Gettys)]

I think there are two thingsbeing confused here: we touched on this at
Usenix...

There is:
	1) technical governance of the gnome project... Releases, standardization
of key API's, what gnome is/isn't, all that stuff...
	2) What various companies may want/need to be able to cooperate
in furthering Gnome (e.g. joint marketing arrangements, etc.).

I think it very advisable to keep these two problems very separated.

1) is the harder problem: here we have ducks to heard, but we don't have
large amounts of funds needed.... I personally think there is alot that
can be learned by how the IETF gets run here.  Any organization should
by its nature be international in scope (as the IETF is).

2) is something the vendors can/should do among themselves: to avoid U.S. 
anti-trust law, there are consortia arrangements possible of various sorts 
possible, and I expect the big companies know alot more about how this 
gets put together than the hacker community concerned with problem 1). 
Potentially large amounts of money gets involved here, and there gets 
to be lots of heat involved due to the money involved

I think it a mistake to mix the two: the two were mixed in the X consortium, 
are mixed to some degree in the Web consortium; some of the reasons, (quite good
at the time) for this in the X consortium case DO NOT apply anymore, as
the Internet has allowed a fundamentally new style of software development
to take place; the unintended consequences of this were very bad to X in
the long run...

There is the question of how these two organizations should interact, and
how funds may flow (in that 1) needs some amount of money).

But we're making a mistake here if we don't keep these two issues pretty
separate in our discussions.

					- Jim




> Sender: foundation-list-admin@gnome.org
> From: Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>
> Date: 09 Jul 2000 16:25:03 -0400
> To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
> Cc: foundation-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: Questions To Answer
> -----
> Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:
> > > Red Cross that the UN has specifically written a treaty for or
> > > something. So, if you have a better idea, then give it - but there's
> > > really no alternative here. Foundations have to be in some nation.
> >
> > So why pick the USA with its infamously hazardous legal situation ?
> >
> 
> Bart can maybe explain. I imagine it's because the
> board-as-legal-entity is for the benefit of companies, and all the
> interested companies so far are in the US.
> 
> Havoc
> 
> 
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--
Jim Gettys
Technology and Corporate Development
Compaq Computer Corporation
jg@pa.dec.com