Re: The role of LWE San Jose

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:

> > > With Linux International that tends to be what happens. Actually its an
> > > ideal example of the 'and nobody listens' case ;)
> > 
> > I've never heard of LI do anything but issue press releases about
> > itself, so I don't think that is a good model to follow.
> 
> This is all the gnome foundation will ultimately appear to do.  And its a model
> used by many organisations

Maybe I'm deluded, but I thought at least some of us wanted the GNOME
Foundation to actually do useful stuff. I'd rather see the GNOME
Foundation be more like the Apache Software Foundation (actually
brokering useful deals, etc) than like LI.

One key difference here may be that the ultimate governance stucture
of Linux is Linus, who claims not to care about marketing, so there
needs to be some separate, widely ignored, body to pretend to do
that. In GNOME, many people care about both the technology and the
marketing, including many of the people currently nominally in charge.

> Given the date looming for announcing the foundation (and Im very sad this
> is being done at a trade show not a free software show) how about putting it
> together as the US gnome foundation and figuring the international relationship
> out after we have that and we have the first non US gnome foundation in place
> so we know what the world really looks like ?

That makes sense to some degree, unless we foresee ways this may
affect the bylaws for the US foundation.

 - Maciej