Re: Fwd: Draft of Proposal for the GNOME Foundation.

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Nat, 

The foundation-list was carefully chosen to be semi-public - open
subscription but not announced to the world. That setup was meant
to provide a maximum balance betweeen noise and the abilility
for a large number of people to join.

Because you posted a message strongly implying its existence
to gnome-list@gnome.org, we've had change it to hold subscriptions
for approval. Which, if nothing else, is going to slow down
the speed at which people can join, and create tons of work
for Havoc, who is going to have to go through the list.

Nat Friedman <nat@helixcode.com> writes:

> [ Owen, excuse me for Cc'ing this to foundation-list, but I have a
>   feeling I'm going to be answering this question a lot today. ]
> 
> Owen,
> 
> I have not made this into a public discussion.  The foundation-list
> still exists, the steering committee is still solely vested with the
> authorization to form and transition to the new foundation, and all of
> the meaty discussions can still be as private as you want.
> 
> What I have done is written a document and asked for public comment.
> I don't see what's wrong with this.  You are free to ignore what I
> wrote and the way people respond to it.  You're free to continue the
> private discussion.

There is nothing wrong about public discussion, but keeping
things reasonably quiet until the gnome-hackers membership
can come to some rough conclusion about how things will
work would be the action of any reasonable person who wanted
to minimize confusion and possible adverse publicity.
 
> And what, exactly, is wrong with soliciting public comment?  This
> foundation is going to govern a lot of these people, or their work at
> least.  Why is it wrong to let them know what's going on, and ask them
> for their opinion?
> 
> I think what is a little bit sinister is closed-door discussions
> without any potential for participation -- or even observation! --
> from the project at large.

foundation-list was announced on gnome-hackers. gnome-hackers
is a very good representation of the project at large.

Regards,
                                        Owen

> Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > What?
> > 
> > Even if you think this should be public you simply cannot
> > unilateraly make this a public discussion.
> > 
> > I am highly upset by this,